Life leans forward.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

I know this one from the inside. For a decent chunk of my working life I was an academic. I had the PhD and the papers, and when someone asked what I did, that was the answer, often before they’d finished asking. Over time it stopped being a description of my work and became a description of me, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to notice it no longer fitted. When I left in 2020, it felt like finally correcting a sentence I’d been repeating for years. I’m still revising it now.

A daft punky thrash

Before they were Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo played in a band called Darlin’. In 1993 the Melody Maker critic Dave Jennings described one of their tracks as “a daft punky thrash.”

Melody Maker · 1 May 1993

“a daft punky thrash”

Take two words

The pair took two words from the review and named their new project after them. The put-down became raw material, and the music they went on to make gave those words a completely different meaning.

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

The allotment taught me more about this than any book. For years I’ve seen some people treat it as one more thing to fit in, nipping up for half an hour between other jobs, and it showed. Things bolted, the slugs had a field day, and the weeds broke their spirit. The ones who see it start to come good give it whole mornings and begin to notice things, like which corner stays wet after rain and when the frogs move in.

It can go wrong, too. An obsession holds a life together by shutting nearly everything else out. Every so often a walk with no destination, or a conversation you hadn’t planned, will show you what all that concentration was missing.

Iain McGilchrist offers a useful way of thinking about why. He describes two kinds of attention, which he links to the two hemispheres of the brain. One is narrow and focused, good for grabbing hold of a thing and using it. The other is broad and open, taking in the whole scene and how everything in it relates. We need both. The trouble starts when the narrow kind takes over and forgets it was ever part of something bigger. Gathering well means letting the wide view decide what deserves the narrow one.

A heap of flints

Soon after moving to Down House in 1842, Charles Darwin made a sandy path around a small wood in the far corner of his grounds, and he walked it most days for the rest of his life. At one turn he kept a heap of flints. Each time he came round he kicked one out onto the path, so the flints kept count and he didn’t have to.

Walk a lap

No laps yet

The path went nowhere. It just brought him back, lap after lap, to whatever he was turning over, whether that was barnacles, orchids, earthworms, or the origin of species. Some of those questions stayed with him for decades.

Going round in circles is underrated.

A bit of scruff

In 1967 Jocelyn Bell, a research student at Cambridge, was checking a new radio telescope’s output by hand, which meant reading about 120 metres of paper chart every four days. Among the markings she noticed what she called “scruff,” a signal that didn’t look like interference or anything else known.

She kept going back to it, and it turned out to be the first known pulsar, a collapsed star sending regular pulses across space.

Before there was a discovery, there was something awkward on the chart.

“From different tones comes the fairest tune.”

I’ve been that person at the centre. When I was running programmes at the university, I liked being the one everyone came to, and I told myself it was because I cared about getting things right. Some of it was. A fair bit of it was that being needed felt good. It took me being off for a fortnight, and the whole thing carrying on perfectly well without me, to see how much I’d been holding on to.

The queue outside her door

A founder prided herself on being available. Every decision found its way to her desk, and she answered them all, quickly and well. Then she tried an experiment. For a month, whenever someone brought her a decision, she asked what they would do and let them do it.

The first fortnight was uncomfortable, and two calls went badly. By the third week the queue outside her door had shortened, and people had started talking to each other first. At the end of the month she said the company felt bigger, even though nobody new had been hired.

Names and identifying details have been changed.

The wrong chord

During a concert in the 1960s, Herbie Hancock played a chord so wrong he thought he’d wrecked the performance. Miles Davis took a breath, then played a line that made the chord sound right.

Play the wrong chordPlay what came next

The chord had already sounded and nobody could take it back, but what Davis played next changed what it meant. Hancock said later that Miles hadn’t heard it as a mistake. He heard it as something that had happened, and answered it.

“Energy is Eternal Delight.”

Ray Peat’s way of putting this was that energy and structure go together. A well-energised cell can repair itself and adapt, and when energy runs low it loses some of that capacity and falls back on defending itself. Stress, as he saw it, is largely what happens when demand outruns the energy available to meet it. That’s why glorified depletion costs more than tiredness. Run low for long enough and what you’re able to become starts to narrow.

Most of us also spend an enormous amount of energy bracing ourselves, whether that’s anticipating trouble or just holding it together through another hard week. Sometimes that’s necessary, and getting through a day can be an achievement in itself. But brace for long enough and there’s nothing left for anything else, until even the things you love start to feel like demands. When that happens, look at the conditions before you reach for more discipline.

I see this a lot in people I know, and I’ve been there myself. The ones who are struggling rarely lack commitment. If anything they’ve got too much of it, and they’re running a team and a family on reserves that ran out some time ago. What helps tends to be duller than any productivity system, like a proper lunch, or a calendar with some gaps left in it.

Just for the fun of it

At Cornell after the war, Richard Feynman found physics had gone stale on him. He decided to stop worrying about whether his work mattered and play with it instead. Soon afterwards someone in the cafeteria tossed a plate into the air, and Feynman watched it wobble and spin and worked out the equations for fun.

Toss the plate

When Hans Bethe asked what the point was, Feynman said: “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” He later traced the work that won him a Nobel Prize back to that wobbling plate.

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”

Owen Barfield thought the spectator’s seat was somewhere modern people had drifted into over centuries. In Saving the Appearances he argued that earlier peoples experienced themselves as participants in the world around them, and that we’ve gradually withdrawn to the edge of the picture, looking in. That withdrawal gave us a great deal, science included. It also left many of us feeling like visitors in our own lives, and Barfield thought the task now was to find our way back in, with our eyes open this time.

One crop a year

From 1941, Barbara McClintock grew maize at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, following each plant from seedling to harvest. “I know every plant in the field,” she told her biographer. Maize only gives two crops a year, and she found even that too fast: to see everything there was to see, one crop was all she could handle. Watching that closely, she saw genes do something almost nobody thought possible. They moved.

When she presented the work in 1951, it met more puzzlement than understanding. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983, after moving genes had turned up in bacteria and beyond.

Leave the square alone

In 1996, Bordeaux asked the architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal to improve Place Léon Aucoc, a small square with trees, benches, and a pétanque pitch. They spent time there first, watching and talking to the people who used it, and concluded that the square already had what a redesign struggles to create: people were at home in it.

So they proposed almost nothing. Renew the gravel, care for the trees, and clean it more often.

Paying attention had changed the brief.

“Play is a strange oasis, a dreamy resting point for restless wandering and continual flight. Play gives us the present.”

Freedom is capacity, the moves actually open to you, and capacity has to be built.

That’s the part we’d rather leave out. I learned this behind a pair of decks. When I started, mixing two tunes felt like trying to pat my head and rub my belly while someone shouted at me. Every option was technically open and almost none of them was available. It took hours of practice, most of it sounding terrible, before I could hear when two tracks were drifting apart and nudge them back together. That’s when it started being fun, because I finally had something to choose with.

The German philosopher Eugen Fink, who worked alongside Husserl and Heidegger, thought play showed this better than anything. A game is full of rules.

The rules are accepted freely, and they’re what make the game possible in the first place, opening up a space where skill and imagination have room to work. Fink called his 1957 essay on play Oasis of Happiness, and part of the happiness, I think, is that for once the limits and the freedom are pulling in the same direction.

Rudolf Steiner wrote a whole book about this, The Philosophy of Freedom, before he became better known for other things. For Steiner you’re free when you act out of your own understanding of what a situation needs, instead of out of habit or whatever impulse happens to be loudest. Freedom in that sense takes work. You have to see clearly enough to know what the moment asks of you, and care enough about the act itself to want to do it.

Steiner didn’t stop at the individual, though. His summary of the free life has two halves: act out of love for what you’re doing, and let other people act out of their own understanding of what they want. The room you make for yourself can’t be your only concern. Other people need room to decide what their lives are for, too, especially when it inconveniences you.

Two fingers

In 1928 the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was badly burned in a caravan fire. The two smallest fingers of his left hand, the hand that presses the strings, were left curled and barely usable, and it wasn’t clear he’d ever play again. His brother Joseph brought him a guitar anyway, and over the months that followed Reinhardt rebuilt his technique around what he had left.

He played his solos with two fingers, running his lines up and down the neck where they could manage, and pressed the damaged fingers into service for chords. By 1934 he was co-leading the Quintette du Hot Club de France with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli.

A garden on the wall

In his last years, the French visual artist Henri Matisse was often too ill to go out, so he made a garden indoors. His assistants painted sheets of paper, Matisse cut leaves, birds, and fronds from them, and the assistants pinned the shapes to his walls, moving them about until he was satisfied.

Move them about

The result, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, spreads across two walls. He described it as a garden he could walk in.

“Thinking means venturing beyond.”

We’re more complicated than acorns. We can question our purposes and change some of what shapes us, but we still start somewhere, with the abilities, people, and limits we’ve got.

Writing The Syntropist was like that for me. For years it was an idea I kept coming back to on walks through the cemetery with Dudley, a Not-Yet with a foothold. It turned into a book once I started treating it as something that could actually happen, and then did the unglamorous work of writing most mornings until it had.

Uncertainty just leaves work to do, whether that’s supporting something that’s already beginning or starting something that changes what can happen next. You don’t need the whole future worked out before you take part. What you do is part of what shapes it.

The forest underground

In the early 1980s the agriculturalist Tony Rinaudo was working in Niger, where tree planting kept failing. One day he looked properly at something he’d walked past many times.

Look properly

What seemed to be a small bush was a tree growing back from a stump, and under the bare land the roots were still alive. Working with farmers, he spread a simple practice of choosing the strongest shoots, pruning them, and protecting them. It has since spread far beyond Niger.

“True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, which says: ‘I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.’”

Nietzsche had a test for this kind of thing. Of any value or habit, he wanted to know whether it says yes to life or quietly turns against it, and he was suspicious of anything that dressed up tiredness or fear as virtue. Wellness theatre would have given him plenty to work with. The question he’d put to a practice is whether it helps you live more fully, or mostly helps you look as though you are.

Your own life belongs among those other lives too. Look after it, just without treating everyone else as fuel for keeping yourself going.

A window in your home

In 1947 Cicely Saunders was working as a hospital almoner in London when she met David Tasma. He was forty, a Polish Jew from Warsaw, and dying of cancer. She recited psalms she knew by heart and offered to read to him, and he told her he only wanted what was in her mind and in her heart. When he died in February 1948, he left her £500 and a sentence: “I’ll be a window in your home.”

She later said it took her nineteen years to build the home around the window. St Christopher’s Hospice opened in south London in 1967, with a window dedicated to him.

The last weeks of a life are still life.