Putting a ribbon on 2024
And chomping at the bit to tear into 2025
2024 is over. Almost. Maybe I’ll publish this before it’s really over, but let’s be real, nobody counts the 31st of December as part of 2024. It’s more like a no man’s land designed to transition us from one year to another, and it lives in a separate bucket of time known as New Years Eve. They’re all kind of lumped together in a blur of memory. Whatever. That’s not the point.
The point is that as a year ends, it seems fitting to conduct a retrospective and look back at the highs and lows of it all. What worked well, what tanked, what faded into obscurity by being perfectly adequate and therefore not at all worth of memory. And I guess that’s what this post is shaping up to be. A retrospective on a pretty fucking wild year, in amongst a decade of pretty fucking wild years.
But rather than do it how my structural, logical brain whispered to me from the get go (‘January, February, March. Follow the calendar. Time is linear and stories are too’) I’m going to touch on the big moments instead. It feels more impactful that way.
Self-employment
After many years of dicking around with this approach to life, this year I really sunk my teeth into it and lived from it full time. Writing is something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, so it only made sense to live from it. Combined with my talent for finding opportunities at the right time, in the right place, self-employment has been a heavensend.
It’s stressful in all the ways I’m happy to carry stress, without being arduous in any of the ways I find untenable. No dickhead boss, no dress code, no meetings unless they’re genuinely relevant, and no travel to the office only to sit around and watch people get paid to do nothing.
In the place of that stress is finding people with interesting projects, paying what I’m willing to work for, in the time that I need to find the work. It’s been working itself out but 2025 looks like I’m going to breathe a little more life into it. It’s beginning to look less like work and more like fun, and y’all know I like to build my life around having fun and doing what I want!
Permanent relocation
Since 2017, Germany has been my base of operation, but around mid-2022 the seeds of discontent were planted. My relationship kept me there for as long as I could handle, but as time went on the discontent grew more and more, until the only thing left was to pull up stumps and skiddadle. Losing the relationship is still a sore point, but I’ve seen time and time again that my environment influences me more than anything. It’s not a life well lived if I spend all my time fighting hard to maintain a baseline just to negate the environment I’m in.
So, without a better plan in mind, I pulled back to Melbourne, Australia thinking I might be able to find a sense of home and community there, but instead confirmed what I’d felt for a long time: it just ain’t Melbourne no more. I’ve spoken at length about why, but it’s all about me. I want to be elsewhere, doing other things. So that’s what’s next.
Moving into long-term traveller mode
In less than four weeks I will fly into Chiang Mai, Thailand, and start the game again. But this time, rather than walking into it with the expectation that I’m setting up a home base, I am going into it with the intention of staying in movement. I don’t know where I want to stop, and I don’t know precisely what the future home base looks like, so I am just going to move until something that looks and feels right shows up.
The self-employment assists this massively, but most importantly it is forcing me to ponder deeply what I want to do with not only my days, but my life. The days I figured out long ago, but there is a thread connecting days into weeks, months, and years, that over a longer time-line form a thing we call life. And the traveller feels as though that’s been the constant thread through my life, so rather than seeing it as a means to an end, I’ve started to see it as an end in itself.
The people I meet have stories to tell, and they are fucking fascinating. I want to tell more of those stories, and this Substack may well be where a lot of that gets done.
A break-up with fixed practice
Since 2017, I’ve also been in a very fixed relationship with my meditation practice. This has resulted in thousands of hours of seated practice, every day without fail. I might have missed one day here or there, but I never missed two in a row.
Around that, I’ve done four 10-day vipassana retreats, a Zen masterclass, and countless hours of yoga, qi-qong, Wim Hof breathing practices, Shaolin kung-fu exercises, and anything else I could get my hands on. But the meditation practice was the bedrock.
However, after my most recent vipassana in October, I came out of it feeling that I needed to stop. It wasn’t coming from a place of laziness, lack of motivation, or having found something else. It was coming from a place of ‘this is right, now’. The practice was becoming stagnant and heavy rather than dynamic and light.
One of the key things I’d come to learn through the practice is that it’s constantly changing, and it’s very rarely the same. But it was becoming the same. I realised that I wasn’t practicing properly. Then, after continuing to practice past this point, I made my foot go numb for a couple of days from sitting incorrectly. I took a break, and when I came back to it, the same thing occurred again.
So I stopped practicing daily, and am now two months into a hiatus. It feels very strange, and I see the fundamental difference in daily life with it versus without it, but I also see how much more of a dynamic life I am able to live when I don’t anchor myself religiously to this single point in time and space.
My body needs movement to match the movement in my life, and the stillness I am searching for is being discovered in deepening my relationship with sleep, that most beautiful and occasionally elusive of beasts.
Falling in love with intense fitness
The absence of spiritual practice necessarily left a space in time, and rather than fill it with something that is of no benefit to me and those around me, I did what I always do: filled it with hardcore training. (You might ask how this is of benefit to those around me? Well, to put it simply, if I don’t get all the junk out of the system through meditative practice or heavy sweating, it finds a way out in human interactions. And you guys don’t deserve that!)
I’m just coming off the back of a 30 day kung-fu challenge, and in the final week we were all putting in 200 pushups, 200 squats, and 1,000 kicks per day. I had no idea I had it in me, because the first week had me nearly broken aiming for 100 pushups! But slow and steady wins the race, and now the baseline is established so much higher than I expected I could get it.
The spiritual is no different to the physical. When you practice long enough, you realise that the spirit is in everything and there is no separation between life and practice. It finally feels as though this lesson is being integrated into my life. I don’t miss the seated practice, because I’m finding the opportunity to practice in every moment.
Sometimes the practice is easy, sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s enjoyable, sometimes it’s dogshit. But no matter the case, doing the work is always the practice. And the practice is always worth doing :)
Finishing with a bang
To put a ribbon on the year, I got my motorbike licence. I’d never ridden a motorbike before, and I understand clearly why people love it, and how people kill themselves regularly on them. In preparing to go to Asia, I wanted to get a few notches on the belt for motorbike experience, and now I have.
And I got it done one day before the year ended. If that’s not a powerful way to wrap it all up I don’t know what is!
Well…. OK, maybe I could think of one more way to wrap it up nicely. In a fit of passion, I took a razor to my head and removed four years of endurance and entertainment, and look forward to bringing in 2025 with a naked head!
