Author: admin

I do worry that I am not doing more with my life.

Not more in the way the world usually means it.

Not more money.

Not more achievements.

Not more status.

There is something in me that keeps pushing toward expression, toward risk, toward the uncomfortable places where growth lives.

The challenge is that we live in a world obsessed with more.

More information.

More productivity.

More optimisation.

So it can be difficult to tell the difference between the more that belongs to us and the more that belongs to everyone else.

How do we know when life is genuinely asking something of us?

And how do we know when we’re simply responding to pressure?

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Many years ago I started doing vision quests in Brazil. I was twenty-nine, and the more inside me was calling me out of my comfort zone and into something that felt like an initiation.

I knew this more was right for me.

I needed something that would move me into manhood, into adulthood.

I may have looked and spoken like a man, but on the inside, parts of me had not yet made that crossing.

I wanted certainty.

I wanted confidence.

I wanted to know that I had what it takes.

Looking back, I thought the mountain was going to give me something.

I didn’t yet understand that it was also going to take something away.

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We weren’t allowed plastic—only skins and natural materials. I had made a kind of makeshift tarp with beeswax, which, looking back, was already showing its fault lines.

At the time I thought it was a problem with the tarp.

Years later, I realised it was showing me something about myself.

I had grown up with an absent father and a mother who carried more than she should have had to carry.

And somewhere in that arrangement, I had learned two things at the same time.

How to lean.

And how not to trust that I would be held.

Those lessons sat quietly beneath the surface of my life for years.

The mountain was about to bring them into the open.

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On that mountain, the conditions were just right to expose all of this.

I was the only non-Brazilian. The others seemed completely at home in the ritual, in their bodies, in the land itself.

From where I stood, they looked like men who belonged there.

And those old feelings came up again.

That I didn’t have what they had.

That I wasn’t ready.

That somehow everyone else had received a handbook for life that had passed me by.

And the truth is, I wasn’t ready.

Which is what made the quest right for me in all the wrong ways.

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There is a community at the base of the mountain. Each person is taken to their own place and surrounded by 365 tobacco prayer ties.

Once you enter that circle, you don’t leave until the quest is over—unless you choose to come down.

Morning and night, the community sings for you from below.

I loved that part.

Somewhere beyond the trees, people were holding you in their prayers. You couldn’t see them, but you knew they were there.

And yet, in the end, none of them could do the quest for you.

It was just you and you.

---

I settled in. The first day and night passed.

The fasting.

The discomfort.

The waiting.

Then the rain came.

And it didn’t stop.

Through the second day.

Into the third night.

Everything I had brought with me slowly stopped working.

The tarp leaked.

The ground turned to mud.

My clothes stayed wet.

By then I had dug myself into the earth and covered myself with leaves, trying to hold onto whatever warmth I could find.

The mountain seemed indifferent to all of it.

That night was one of the hardest nights of my life.

Not because I was in danger.

Because I had run out of ways to convince myself I was in control.

---

The next morning wasn’t really a waking. It was just a continuation.

I was cold. Wet. And done.

So I went down—one day short.

I felt like I had failed.

Not because of the weather.

Because I had come all this way looking for something, and I hadn’t completed what I set out to do.

The story I carried about myself felt confirmed.

Maybe I didn’t have what it takes after all.

A few days later, I sat with a Brazilian elder.

She asked me why I had come down.

I remember feeling almost offended by the question. Had she not seen the weather?

The rain had been relentless. Everything I brought had failed. I was cold, exhausted and miserable.

The answer seemed obvious.

But she looked at me and said:

Abandonment.

You felt abandoned.

---

It took me years to understand what she meant.

At the time I thought she was talking about the rain.

She wasn’t.

Underneath the cold, the discomfort and the struggle was a feeling I had known for much longer.

That I was on my own.

That nobody was coming.

That if I couldn’t carry myself, I would not be carried.

The mountain hadn’t created that feeling.

It had revealed it.

I was still, in some way, looking for my mother.

Only now there was no shelter.

No rescue.

No one to make it easier.

Just me.

And something in me had to cross.

That, I came to see, was more.

Not finishing the quest.

Not proving anything.

Not becoming stronger.

But moving.

Moving from dependence to responsibility.

Moving from waiting to choosing.

Moving from being carried by life to carrying myself.

The crossing had already begun long before I came down the mountain.

---

That, I came to see, was more.

Not finishing the quest.

Not proving anything.

But moving.

You can’t do a vision quest every day.

But the movement doesn’t stop.

We are always crossing something.

A fear.

A loss.

An old story about ourselves.

Life keeps asking us to leave one shore and step onto another.

The difficulty is that we live in a culture obsessed with a different kind of more.

More achievement.

More optimisation.

More productivity.

More certainty.

I saw a headline recently: you have two years to upskill yourself or else.

The “else” carries a threat.

Fall behind.

Become irrelevant.

Get left behind.

But that is not the more I’m speaking about.

The more that is ours arrives differently.

Sometimes it asks something big of us.

A mountain.

A relationship.

A career change.

More often it asks something smaller.

A difficult conversation.

A risk.

A truth we have been avoiding.

A single step across an invisible threshold.

In a world that moves this fast, perhaps the real challenge is slowing down enough to notice what life is asking of us.

To listen.

To feel where movement wants to happen.

And then to take the next step.

Not because it is clear.

Not because success is guaranteed.

But because something in us knows the crossing is ours.

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” — Montaigne

Belonging is not just a nice-to-have. It’s a fundamental human need. Without it, we wither. At times, it can feel easier to starve than to live without a place where we are truly received.

And yet, so many of us carry the wound of not belonging. There is hardly anyone on this planet who hasn’t, at some point, felt the sting of exclusion—being pushed out, turned away, or conditionally welcomed. You can stay, but it’s going to cost you, goes the unspoken contract.

Witnessing the Wound

I once participated in a training where we each took turns standing outside a circle while the rest of the group turned inward. It was only an exercise, but the feelings were achingly real. On the outside, pacing, the body remembers: I’ll do anything to be part of this. And beneath that, the grief of all the times the circle never opened—no matter what we tried.

This is an experience so deeply human that we will do almost anything to avoid it. Sometimes we give up our principles just to stay in the circle. Perhaps this explains some of what we see in the world today.

These experiences don’t vanish with time. They shape how we show up, what we allow ourselves to do—or not do. And because they cut so deep, the wounds of belonging are heavily protected.

A Dream of Belonging

On the very first night of my 21-day writing journey, I had a dream. In it, all the wounds I carried around belonging were suddenly gone.

I knew, without question, that I belonged. That belonging could never be taken away. Wherever I went, this knowing accompanied me. It was like the innocence of a child who has never been excluded—now present in the adult who has lived and seen the world.

The change was remarkable. Without fear, I could bring myself to anything. Life became more like a dance—fluid, responsive, impossible to be apart from. There was no loss to fear, because the movement never stops.

What Participants Discovered

I wasn’t alone in these discoveries. Others in the Parts on Paper: Belonging & Roots group shared profound insights:

“I’ve been searching for belonging most of my life and realized I was unconsciously resisting it. When I discovered why, it felt like the floodgates opened. This has been a small but deeply significant pause on my journey.”

“I realized that more often than not, people accept me. There are many places I belong. The rejection I felt was rooted in my own shame, not reality. People accept and love me just as I am.”

“The group was transformational. Ryan’s guidance, the group insights, and daily writing allowed rigid parts of me to shift. This led directly to improved relationships and a deeper sense of acceptance.”

An Invitation

Belonging begins with ourselves, but it flourishes in community. Writing together opens doors that are difficult to find alone.

The next Parts on Paper group begins in September. If this resonates with you, you’re warmly invited to join us.

Spaces are limited. Subscribe to our list for updates.

Aren’t these early moments of the year a little hard? I’ve lived through 46 of them so far, and to me, they feel like when you were a kid, running alongside a roundabout to build speed before jumping on to glide. I don’t know how much gliding there will be this year, but I know I need to get on the wheel.

Yet, in these early moments, parts of me feel like they just don’t want to go. They resist what’s here and what needs to be done, offering an assortment of reasons for their reluctance. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned so far is not to fight the resistance. That doesn’t mean going along with it either. It’s about being curious about these parts that may not feel ready yet.

Take this story from my beginning: I was born early, and back then, it was fine for doctors to schedule deliveries. My mother’s doctor was also an avid golfer, and, as ridiculous as it sounds, the story I was told is that my arrival had to work around his golf schedule. For the longest time—and still, to some extent—I’ve carried this feeling of not being ready, like I’m being rushed out the door without everything I need. You know that sense, like you’ve forgotten something important? Granted, there were likely other experiences that contributed to that feeling, but nonetheless, it was there—something my rational mind could not explain.

The only way I’ve come to understand my resistance is by listening to those parts, making space for their fears, and, most importantly, finding the “hell no, I won’t go” energy in my body. The body carries that resistance, and trusting it is what has helped me move forward.

So here we are at the beginning of a new year. The first step, if there’s resistance, is to honour it. Once its grip loosens a little, there’s space for dreaming.

If this year could be more, what would I want that more to look like? Will I dare to dream, even when so much of the world feels torn apart? Even wealth doesn’t insulate like it once did. Look at the tragic fires in LA. The wealthiest among us aren’t immune to natural forces. Sure, it’s always been that way, but doesn’t the world feel more uncertain than usual?

So, with all the uncertainty, what is worth dreaming of?

I don’t have a clear answer to that, but I love the question. I think life is meant to be an art form, even when times are shaky. What’s the point of slogging through this thing without feeling some choice in how we respond to the conditions of our lives?

This brings me to my second point: don’t take it too seriously. After reflecting on last year, my slogan for this year is to be more playful in the serious business of life. For me, that means taking life seriously enough but also recognising its dream-like quality. The stakes aren’t always as high as I think, and there’s plenty of reason not to treat it as life or death.

One of my heroines is Suleika Jaouad. What I love about her is how she took an impossible situation—cancer—and turned it on its head. Enduring countless hospital stints that left her isolated for long periods, she responded in the one way she could: creatively.

She started The Isolation Journals, bringing people together through writing and art. Her story reminds me how to dream in a grounded way. It’s not about ignoring life’s constraints or pretending we’re limitless. She lives with uncertainty, not knowing how long she has, yet she finds a creative response to what life brings.

In Suleika’s case, she lives with the knowledge of her mortality as an absolute truth. That should not be different for any of us, and yet we are experts at pretending otherwise. For Suleika, the knowledge clearly propels her into her deepest place of creativity. She’s not writing like there will be a string of next days or years, but at the same time, she’s not giving up hope for a long and fruitful life. My favourite words from her are utterly simple: she invites us to “let our survival be a creative act.”

On the face of it, maybe that doesn’t look like much, but when you really consider what she is saying, it challenges us right to the core. We have hundreds of millions of years behind us of being conditioned for safety. Not much in us wants to risk all that in the name of Art. And it’s certainly not to say don’t take material reality seriously. But is there a way you could loosen up a little more and make more space for what really matters to you?

No challenge comes risk-free. Failure and loss are inevitable—no one in history has been an all-time winner. More to the point, are you in the game?

I used to think being in the game meant being entrepreneurial or avoiding corporate life. Not anymore. I’ve realised that you can summon creative energy in any situation. Take Viktor Frankl, for instance, who found meaning even in the most horrific conditions. He showed us that, even there, we have a choice in how to respond.

Because we are storytellers, whether we like it or not, we’re hardwired to make meaning from experience. So the question is, will we wrestle enough with experience to find a way of telling our story that supports the direction we want to take our life in?

If point two was to dream, then three is to find the story you want to tell that supports the dream. Not the story on the outside, but to grapple with the stories on the inside. If I’m telling myself a story of not being worth anything and that I have nothing of value to give, no matter how hard I dream, my thoughts and beliefs will keep holding me back from stepping more fully into life.

That’s part of what allows this creative energy to take hold. When we are telling a story that resists reality, there is no movement. We don’t feel that creative possibility. It’s only when we accept the conditions as they are. And if I imagine that I am living in a universe that wants us to dream, then I naturally open to that “more” I otherwise might not see.

And finally, point four: energise the dream by remembering that we each will have a dying moment. Memento mori, as the Stoics say.

Sam Harris offers a great proposal for the year: live it as if it’s your last. It’s a familiar idea, but what if we really brought it closer? None of us knows how long we have. Even as I write this, a part of me thinks death is far away.

Isn’t that crazy, that we can feel like it’s something abstract, when the reality is that it is very tangible and physical? One moment you’re in a body, and the next moment, you’re not. In my bones, I just don’t see how that’s possible. That you or I could just end in entirety. Surely not. Life can’t die, but it can change, and the end of your body-mind is as significant as it gets.

We should surely use this knowledge for good—not to take for granted what’s in front of us. To remember that something in us wants to live beyond the confines of our patterns. I call that Dreaming.

And I wish you a good dream for 2025!