Category: Behaviour

  • What I Learned from 21 Days of Morning Pages on Belonging

    What I Learned from 21 Days of Morning Pages on Belonging

    “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.

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  • The Trap You Don’t Have to Escape From

    The Trap You Don’t Have to Escape From

    I felt that same old familiar feeling — rock and a hard place, as the saying goes. I’ve been there many, many times before. That place where there really doesn’t seem to be any movement either way. You’re damned.

    If you’re quiet enough, the answer will come. The movement will come.
    And it’s not a movement that comes from your mind.
    Hell, you can’t even take credit for it — because there’s nothing you did for it, except one big thing:

    Give up the struggle.

    Instead of trying to find your way out of the hard place, forcing solutions, trying to figure it all out, or arguing with life about why you’re in there in the first place, you do something so counterintuitive, so revolutionary, that your mind nearly jumps out of its own head.

    You simply stop the struggle.

    Imagine being tied up in one of those knots that only tightens the more you pull. That’s not far from the truth of the hard place. It’s as if the more we try to wrestle our way out, the deeper we dig the hole.

    But still — no one likes being stuck. And rightly so.

    Maybe I shouldn’t speak for everyone. I’ve met a few who seem to prefer stuckness because the idea of freedom is just too overwhelming.
    But most of us, I imagine, would much rather be free.
    And there’s nothing worse than the feeling of no movement.

    What I’m getting at is this: stuckness — the not-knowing, the confusion, the fog, the feeling lost — these are all forms of the hard place.
    And I don’t think any of that is actually the problem.

    In fact, I think we’d be wise to expect them.
    Being lost and confused is just part of being human.

    I watched this series recently — Somebody Somewhere — and I highly recommend it for the realness of its characters and the vulnerability of its story. There’s a line that changes the course of the main character Sam’s life. Her friend says to her:

    “No one knows what they’re doing.”

    Never has a truer word been spoken.
    None of us really know.
    We’re just making it up as we go, and stumbling as we go.

    But somehow, we’ve picked up this bad habit of expecting more from ourselves, like we ought to know better.
    Well, how on earth ought we to know more than we do?

    It’s a total delusion. We can only know what we know.
    And we’re going to get it wrong — again and again — and that does not need to be a problem.

    In fact, in my experience, the less I make it a problem, the more I learn.

    So back to that damned ditch I was in — that old familiar feeling. Can’t say yes, can’t say no. No obvious way to go.

    But something strange happened.

    I noticed I wasn’t so afraid of the feeling anymore.
    And a little voice inside reminded me:
    I am completely free to make my best move.

    I think of a tennis court — the best rallies, the impossible shots that come out of impossible angles.
    Even if the player loses the point, we love watching that kind of play — the creativity, the comeback, the refusal to give in.

    Something in us lights up when we see someone come back from a hard place.
    People rising out of difficulty, big or small — it’s an endless fascination.

    So maybe the point isn’t to wish for the rock and the hard place.

    But what if we could be just a little more grateful for those moments?
    Because they’re asking something of us — something more than we think we have.

    And the only way out… is in.
    To trust that it’s in you, in me, in everyone — and to learn to follow it.

  • Choosing the Hard Thing

    Choosing the Hard Thing

    If you are not prepared for the hard thing, given the opportunity, you’ll go for the easy option. Case in point: me.

    I intend to do this writing—the hard thing—and then I click on my browser and YouTube wants to tell me about F1, the easy thing. No disrespect towards the easy action. For some reason, I love to watch cars speed around a race track at ridiculous speeds. But it’s a very easy action to take. It takes much more to stay with the hard thing.

    Here are some thoughts about why that is so, and what we can do to make the harder thing easier. Which sounds like a kind of oxymoron, but what if the hard thing is what you really want? The choice that’s most likely to fill you up.

    Life is full of these hard actions we avoid doing. Once I’ve set my mind on something, guaranteed something else will come and pull me in a different direction. And let’s say I click on that seductive video, what’s the true cost, aside from the time lost? I’d argue it’s usually more than we think.

    What I forget is that it’s my life I’m giving—these small moments that make up the bigger arcs of time. That become the patterns that shape my future self.

    These small choices matter. At the same time, I can also err in the other direction, putting pressure on every moment to make it count. That’s its own form of insanity. So what does the middle ground look like? How do I do more of the hard things, without making life impossibly hard overall?

    One way is to give yourself permission to do nothing at all which, it turns out, is a lot harder than it seems. And possibly a step up from the F1 video that calls to the distractor parts of me. These moments of pause and non-doing are sometimes themselves expressions of the hard thing. Especially in modern society, where we have to contend with all the voices calling us lazy or unproductive. But what if the pause gives you the space to find the right action?

    Epictetus, in his way, warned against wishing life away. Even the waiting is part of it. You remember wanting to get there, on the way to the beach. But you wouldn’t actually want to fast-track it so that you didn’t have the experience of not being there yet. That part is just as valid as arriving—an expression of life.

    There are all kinds of moments, and we can’t hope to be doing the most productive thing in every one. But we can aim for the hard part: to stay with experience, especially when it isn’t the way we want it to be.

    “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.” —Epictetus

    Back to my F1 example: does doing the hard thing mean I should never exchange ten minutes of my life for the experience of seeing cars go fast around a track? To my mind, not at all. We have a very real need for non-directional time, especially in a modern context. If it’s always about doing and achieving, we’re sure to run into crisis at some point.

    Time that’s playful in nature, or relaxing, or that disconnects us from the directional drive of our lives—that time is essential.

    There’s also no way to avoid getting distracted. I don’t imagine there’s anyone on this planet who’s 100% focused all the time. It’s more realistic to see distraction as a normal, even useful part of the day. You can wake up inside the distraction, and see what it’s trying to do for you.

    Most of the time, it’s just trying to take us away from discomfort or pain. But what if we stayed with the uncomfortable experience, even if that’s just our old friend boredom? It could be anything. What happens when you don’t resist it, but let it in for a moment—get to know it, even if just for 30 seconds? Doing nothing more than not trying to change your experience.

    As Gary Keller likes to say:
    “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

  • The Myth of Not Enough Time

    The Myth of Not Enough Time

    It’s been an unusually busy year for me—taking on a full year of both study and work. Feels like I’ve been mastering the art of juggling tasks and life. But even though, objectively, there are more things to get done, it’s not like I don’t have the time to do them. It’s my relationship with time that counts—the story I’m telling myself about how much of it I actually have.

    The story often goes something like: “I don’t have enough time.” or “there is too much to do”. But stories like these carries weight. It blinds me to the fact that I can often get done in ten minutes what, on another day, might take me an hour. What is that? It’s not hyper-productivity. It’s just… doing the thing in front of me, without resistance. Just doing it—without obsessing over how it turns out.

    It’s exactly like this writing. I could easily say, “I have no time for it,” with all the deadlines stacked up around me—but that’s not really true. When I’m just in it, it gets done in its own way. Not because I forced it, not because I nailed it, but because I didn’t get in the way of it. What I think I’m starting to learn is not to worry so much about the outcomes. There will be failures and shortcomings. Doing the thing that’s yours to do doesn’t insulate you from imperfection. But maybe those imperfections are something to celebrate. They’re proof we’re alive. That we’re actually in the business of living.

    And that’s not so much about getting somewhere—though sure, there are many places to get to. It’s more about being here. Its receptive, its listening, receiving and allowing that to move something in us. What wants to move beyond our thinking of things .. what if we did more of that ?

    But some parts of us just don’t know how to not be in fast gear. Those parts are carrying beliefs that might not even be ours. We inherit them—from ancestry, from culture, from the world. The idea that we need to keep doing, being busy to prove our worth. We often carry these beliefs without even knowing it. And for those parts of us that are trying to hold it all together, slowing down can feel like dying.

    “Busyness is not a proxy for productivity. It’s a sign that your time is being used carelessly.”
    — Cal Newport, Slow Productivity

    The big misconception is that slowing down means moving slower. Not true. You might even find yourself moving faster. It’s a state of mind.

  • The Art of Beginnings

    The Art of Beginnings

    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!