Here is the news: everything is awful, and you can’t even trust that. Nope. You can’t trust the news, don’t be silly. That’s not where we are anymore. You can’t trust history either. Or the future - nobody has predicted anything correctly since, what, the war? 

There is, in fiction, a concept known as “the unreliable narrator”. We are at the mercy of an unreliable narrator, drunk on power, spewing out overblown characters and unlikely plots, lurching from dystopian horror to biting satire so rapidly that some of us are feeling a little unwell.

And at the hands of such a tyrannical narrator, what are to do? How to stay alert, and kind, and engaged, and forgiving, and empathetic and brave against the pull of this narrative tyranny? 

The answer? Rebel. Quietly if you want to. In your own way. Resist the pull. This is a Public Service Announcement: break the rules. 

Kids are rebelling all the time. They’re upside down, they’re pushing buttons labeled DO NOT PUSH, they’re asking far too many questions. I went into the city a few years back and there was a year seven kid who had literally hand-cuffed himself to a pole in the middle of a school excursion. Up to you how far you want to take your rebellion, I’m not going to judge. You do it your way. A friend of mine told me she did a series of cartwheels alone in the local park a few weekends back and - at the age of forty - she had people coming up to her to talk about it for the next twenty minutes. She found it hard to leave. Rebellion is bold and exciting and interesting and people find it freeing to have permission, so go: do a cartwheel on your own as a grown human adult. 

Not up for cartwheels? A fake hip and arthritis in your left wrist? Fine. Sing. There’s a bloke near where I live who has perfected the arms-crossed while cycling with a straight back move, which he deploys while singing opera at the top of his lungs. “Piccalo, Piccalo, Picaaaaalooooo” he booms, and again, everybody looks up, and nearly everybody smiles, and all he did was sing a little song on his bicycle like we all did when we were seven.   

Talk to the person on public transport who nobody wants to talk to.

Spend time in nature. Disconnect from the shouty monologue and hear the insects. It’s always a good thing when the loudest things in your day are insects you can’t see, in a place that smells of the earth.

Sometimes it’s good when there’s a little thing happening that’s quietly lovely, to concentrate your whole mind on it and think: this little thing right here is just absolutely splendid. The other day, I was at a public park that had a lake in it, and I was talking to someone - a friend, about a work-related problem - we were right into the nitty-gritty of it, she said this, he said that - and as we were talking, a waterbird took off from the water’s edge. The lake was muddy and reedy and messy and the waterbird was scrappy and unexceptional but it flew quite low and, followed by its mate, did that great thing waterbirds do where they putt-putt along the surface of the water with their feet as they fly, splitting the lake in half with a great line that gets wider the further they are from it, and my friend stopped - mid-word - and said “hang on”, her hand on my arm, and we watched the birds until they were up in the sky and off, the lake dividing behind them like two cells quietly splitting. My friend looked at me, smiling. “Absolutely splendid”, she said.

Some of the best rebels are the quiet helpers. The volunteers. The tree planters. People who are nice to old people and quietly resistant to nastiness. 

Or you could handcuff yourself to a pole in the middle of the city when your class is on the way to an excursion at the library and really mix things up for everybody. Totally up to you. 

This has been a Public Service Announcement. Rebel against the dominant paradigm. Promote the tiny moments of excellence and take from the stream of unhinged horror only the impetus for quiet rebellion against it. Be your own reliable narrator, and try, wherever possible, to notice the birds.

I was walking down the street the other day and I met a very small child. I was chatting with the child’s parent - a friend of mine - who had stopped me as I dashed past, and we were doing the thing where we had to move our conversation off the footpath so other people could pass. I realised, after a while, that I had not yet engaged with the little girl properly at all, so I asked her a question, which she answered in that way children have sometimes of speaking to adults as if to say: I will indulge your frankly dull question with an answer but mostly I shall watch your face with a look of mild disdain. I thought perhaps this would be the end of it but then she asked me something. “Pardon?” I asked her and watched a slight look of irritation cross her face. “I said”, she shouted up at me, “Are you on the way to somewhere?” 

It seemed like an innocent enough question. It could have meant “were you just dashing past until my mother yanked you by the arm out of your trajectory into that shop over there to buy a lettuce and some milk?” Or it could even have meant, “Hey! Lady! Please be on your way!” The intensity on the child’s face, though, and the slight formality of the shouting, made the question seem somehow profound. Am I on my way to somewhere? And of course the answer can only be: always. But also: not really.

This is a Public Service Announcement: we are always but not really on our way to somewhere. Look back at any letter, email or message thread from a friend when you were updating them on your life and you will discover: you were on your way somewhere but you were also exactly where you are now. Perhaps, then, the secret is to be watching, always, the things that you’re seeing at the moment, enjoying them for what they are, rather than second-guessing what they might become. Small people (even the intense wizard I met in the street) are very good at this. They run into a field and find hiding places, cubbies, swords and forts.They forget about time and place and social mores. So look around. 

Find the best thing and the worst thing and the thing you would find the hardest to explain to an alien. 

Find the most beautiful colour.

Find the best view. 

Can’t find a view? Tidy a desk. Wash a window. Rearrange a cutlery drawer. Transform the present in a small but important way and see how we’re hardwired to respond to things like this - we can’t help it. We really are that simple.

Test your brain. Read a book. Do a sudoku. Tip a 500 piece puzzle out on a table and start from the start. Focus your brain into a whole new dimension.

Watch the world around you. Watch the people. Watch how people communicate without using words. See how an eyeroll makes a friend throw their whole body back and laugh and laugh. See how a friendly touch can undo a sentence completely. “Dianne, don’t you dare. I’ve got this I’ve got this NO PUT IT AWAY!” isn’t quite the act of aggression it seems when accompanied by an affectionate sideways hug and a slight wink at the barista from someone called Beryl. 

Look up. People who look up are ninety percent happier. Not an actual statistic, but very hard to deny I think you’ll find. Up is where you see the sky, and trees, and birds, and people on their balconies playing guitars, and sometimes hot air balloons and sky writing that says stuff like KAREN WILL U BE MINE. And also aeroplanes full of people who are not you, who are on their way to somewhere, but who are also just having another day in their lives.

Sometimes, where you are right now isn’t very nice at all. Sometimes it’s hard and sad and confusing and frustrating. On those days: find a thing. Doesn’t have to be a big thing. Doesn’t even have to be a thing you care about, but there is always something. A person being nice to someone in a supermarket. A song that takes you somewhere else. A donut. A bath. Toast.

This is a Public Service Announcement: doesn’t matter where you’re going, or what happens next. There’s always toast, and Beryl, and a nice tidy desk.

All these columns first appeared in The Big Issue.

You know sometimes you do that thing when you’re typing something into a search engine and it autocompletes the phrase for you and you think “Huh? People search for that?” Well here’s a thing that people have typed enough times that my search engine thought it might be what I was wanting to say: is walking worth it? Now, when I read that, I felt the breath in my lungs become sentient and leave my body in a disgusted sigh. I felt my hope for humanity seeping from the pores of my skin. I felt the kinship between myself and my fellow humans fizzle away to a crust. Is walking worth it?

This is a Public Service Announcement: walking is worth it. 

Imagine inventing a living thing. Imagine the design phase. “Okay guys, so we need to get it moving - any thoughts?” Wheels? Bit limited. Can’t really climb stairs or relax with wheels. Hovering? Could be fun? Flight? Bit messy. “Hey, here’s an idea: what if we gave it two stick things and - get this - every time it uses them, it’s making itself healthier and happier?” 

I mean, it’s almost too good to be true. 

Even a walk through an open plan office takes you out of yourself a little bit. Oh look, there’s Simon having a pretendy-fun but actually deadly serious argument with Dierdre in the office kitchen about how to stock the dishwasher. Oh there’s that dude in finance who looks like my uncle Pete. Oooh got to remember to call Mum. Oh yay someone left cake in the kitchen! Once you’ve got yourself a cup of tea or a stapler or a slice of something, you’ve had a bit of a mental stretch and you’ve not even noticed. Walking: good for your body and your uncle Pete.

Ever noticed how, if you have a problem to think through, or a speech you need to practice, and you try and think it through on a walk, you can’t? That’s because a walk is like that magical friend who distracts you from obsessing about something and focuses all your attention on something else until the problem doesn’t seem important. If a walk can’t divert you from your troubles, the minimum result is that you probably brought your blood pressure down.     

When you go on walks you get to meet a lot of dogs. Just saying. Try and have a bad time when a dog is pleased to see you.

You’ve probably read all those stats about how many megatons of pollution would be saved if everybody walked small distances instead of driving a car. Walking is a positively heroic mode of transport.

There’s a lot written about the demise of the quiet walk, and the fact that walks used to be our down time. Time to feel our noisy thoughts fall away. Yes! True, so true. So wise and so true. Also though: podcasts! Music! We listen and we learn, and we imprint our ideas and thoughts on the world we’re walking through, and by the time we get home we know about nanoparticles, the history of goat herding, and Mozart. Plus we went to the shops!

Going for walks, you get to see things, and hear things in such a serendipitous way that sometimes you can’t believe your luck. Personally, on walks, I often find myself turning to see if anyone else is bearing witness to whatever is going on, but the beauty of it is: it’s in the wild. You’re capturing the moment in its natural habitat. You’re its only audience. I once overheard two women talking in a park while walking briskly together in fitness gear. One was explaining to the other that her husband was “making a conceited effort to do the dishes”. I thought she misspoke, but then I overheard a few more things and when I imagined her husband at home I suddenly wasn’t so sure.

Recently, I passed a priest in the carpark of a local church. He was wearing a huge cross around his neck and was dressed for Sunday with the exception of his footwear - worn, grey sneakers. He was pointing a loud leaf blower into the corner of an autumn-leafed car park. Doing God’s work, presumably. I looked at him and went to smile but he gave me a tiny eye-roll, and so I laughed. Never would have happened if walks weren’t worth it.

This is a Public Service Announcement: for heaven’s sake, go for a walk. Walks are always worth it.

This was first published in The Big Issue.

Feeling stuck? In a rut? Sick of yourself? Discombobulated? Going through the motions? This is a Public Service Announcement: setting yourself free is not as hard as you think. Try our free and easy rut ejection regime and you’ll be rutless in no time.

Remember: wherever you are, you are traveling the world. Look around you. Walk a different way from usual. Imagine you’re seeing it all for the first time. 

Notice the people who take care to dress just so. A brooch on the collar of a blazer. A suggestion of light-heartedness in the sock area. There’s a woman near my house who always, without fail, wears absolutely, one hundred percent, green. Head to toe. These people take the time to present themselves to the world as an aesthetic performance of themselves, an expression of who they are.

People’s gardens are often an expression of the same thing. And their homes. A little “welcome to me” flourish, without saying a word. That we work so hard for each other, and to become ourselves, that’s something worth remembering, sometimes, when you’re in need of rut ejection: you could change all of that. Present yourself to the world entirely differently. All you need is a blazer and brooch. 

Here’s a thing that children do all the time and almost no adults do: learn a new thing entirely from scratch merely to satisfy a curiosity. It’s all children do, when left to their own devices. They spend all morning trying to build a tower that doesn’t fall over or persisting with the monkey bars or figuring out the best way to redirect a trail of ants. So if it’s a rut you’re stuck in: be curious. Teach yourself how to knit, or ride a skateboard, or bake, or play an instrument. The best bit is the bit where your brain hurts from doing the new thing for so long that you have to stop and have a cup of tea.

Simple rut-removal tip: get a haircut. Little ones are good, but big ones are better. Go the full change. Cut it off. Dye it another colour. Go asymmetrical. Feeling different in the follicles is enough to lift you into a whole new realm. 

Go to a festival. A music festival. A writers’ festival. A film festival. Festivals are a way of marinating in an art form, experiencing it with an engaged audience of curious people. 

Don’t have the budget? Read a book. Better still, ask someone you admire to recommend a book to you. Could be anything. Fiction. Self help. Poetry. A play. Books recommended by other people contain two texts; the one written by the author and the one written from the recommender to you. 

Also: you know what people are in a rut are never doing? Cartwheels. When was the last time you tried a cartwheel? Or rolling down a hill? Or skipping? Reorient yourself in the universe. Release some endorphins. Be a kid again.

Lastly, if life’s a bit tough, go to your local library and sit near the front desk where people go to ask questions. Listen to five questions. What do you know now that you didn’t know before? If the answer is nothing, then you haven’t been listening. At risk of demolishing the fourth wall, I will confess that I write these very words right now in a library, and I have so far learned the following: some people are such big fans of authors that they borrow new editions of books they have already read just in case the introduction has been updated. When a book is hard to find in a library, you are most likely to find it in a section ambiguously called People And Places. I know this because I have borne witness to an increasingly hilarious series of joke between the librarians on the subject. “Here’s a book about the production of handmade glassware in the Weimar Republic”, “Oh thank you so much. Pop it in People And Places will you Susan“ etc. I have learned that one woman couldn’t return her library book because her cat was so sick she couldn’t leave the house but that she won’t be fined because “we don’t fine people with sick cats”. And I learned that librarians do a lot more than put books back on shelves. 

This is a Public Service Announcement: leave the rut at home and go for a walk. You never know what you might find.

This originally appeared in The Big Issue.

A friend told me recently, as the two of us in the front of my car waiting for a shower to pass, that at her primary school there was a thing called the Wet Weather Box. The wet weather box was so fun that she now realises even the sight of it must have caused serotonin to shoot through her bloodstream. The release of the box from the teacher’s cupboard was a theatrical summoning of the weather Gods triggered when the teacher ting-tinged a triangle. By way of answer, the pitter patter of rain was replicated by small fingers on desks, which in turn crescendoed into the thundering downpour of palms on wood and feet stomping. The teacher, muttering something about the turn in the weather, would go to the cupboard but change her mind at the last second. Only when the thundering rain was at an absolute peak would she get the box and then: revered silence. Discussing it with me, decades later, as rain hurled itself at the windscreen and a slow fog spread across it like a map, her face lit up. There were games in the Wet Weather Box that you’d forgotten existed, and costumes, and craft activities that involved twinkly things and fluffy things, and the rain would belt down and the kids would play with a kind of mad intensity never replicated at any other times.

Her story reminded me of my own experience of wet weather in primary school. During electrical storms, our class used to eat lunch inside. On those days, our lunches spread out before us, our teacher would read us poetry, and stories, and we would (remarkably, in retrospect) listen in rapt attention as the rain drummed down on the flat tin roof. To this day, when I’m eating a salad sandwich, if it smells just right, it’s rain and poetry that comes to mind. T. S. Eliot. Roger McGeogh. Edgar Allan Poe. Once, during an electrical storm (probably it was more than once because I remember the poem almost word for word) our teacher read us The Highwayman, the rain roaring, the sky flashing shocking sheets of light. I was riveted, horrified, sandwich mid-air, tingling in anticipation as Bess, the landlord’s daughter, met her inevitable fate. I learned, when I studied poetry as an undergrad, about rhyme and meter and how how it mimicked the sound of the horse hooves approaching the inn door, but I didn’t really. I learned it on a wet weather day in primary school.

But usually, when it rains now, I calculate how not to let it ruin my plans. A woman walked past my three-year-old the other day, who was demonstrating the joys of enthusiastic puddle-leaping, squealing with joy. “Oh to be a kid again”, she said to me, grinnning as she hurried off.

This is a Public Service Announcement: you’re a kid again. Enjoy the wet weather. You don’t have to slow down completely. Just pause for a moment. Sink yourself into the drama of it.

Enjoy the way rivers form. Tiny rivers, filing the leaves into organised piles, washing the world anew.

Enjoy the drama of the sky. How sometimes one side of the sky looks blue and picturesque and the other side looks like it’s been punched in the face.

Enjoy that strange mathematics we all half remember about the timing of lightening and thunder as a means of measuring how the storm is traveling.

Enjoy how the clouds that look like they’re wafting gently are hurtling along at an incredible speed, and the rain that thunders down on the roof is actually nothing much.

Enjoy dragon breath.

Enjoy warm socks.

Enjoy the mist coming off the earth in the morning in the country and off the asphalt in the city after it rains.

Enjoy people and their idiotic wet weather responses - as if trotting while holding a napkin over your head is going to result in significant levels of dryness.

Or the tragic inadequacy of the umbrella. How can we claim to be a developed species when our response to a downpour is to hold a small damp flag of material up over our head on a bunch of wires?

Enjoy the sound of it.

Enjoy the way it brings out the birds.

Enjoy the smell of the earth and the feeling of being warm and dry inside when you’ve escaped it.

Wet weather. Not just an inconvenience. Jump in a puddle.

This has been a Public Service Announcement.

I don’t mean to boast, but one of the things I am best at in the whole world is eavesdropping. You might not think that’s a skill, but I will have you know, it’s finely honed. I can now conduct an entire conversation in a cafe while listening to another one taking place at the table just behind me. Now, sometimes my grip on the finer details of the conversation I am having might be less than forensic, and my friends have been known to slap me on the arm mid-sentence, but mostly I get away with it, and the other day was a perfect example. I was in a hotel foyer. There were two bored staff members at the reception desk, a man and a woman. I had been sitting at a couch just out of their view for long enough that they had forgotten about me, so their conversation continued freely for far longer than it would have had they remembered. 

“Jake back yet?” the man asked the woman. 

“Jake? Where’d Jake go?” she asked.

“Room 809. Guests refusing to leave, apparently”, he said. “Two hours until tonight’s guests arrive”.

“Sheesh. How long’s he been gone?”

“Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Should I give him a buzz do you reckon?”

“He’ll be right. It’s Jake.”

“Heh. Totally.”

“How’s Bianca about the mayonaise jacket situation by the way, did you get an update?”

“Mate”, said the man. “She made her take it to the dry cleaners!”

There was a shocked pause.

“No!”

”Yep. I told her, Bianca. Mate. You need to let it go. You just need to let it go. It’s mayonnaise. It was an accident. It’s eating you up mate. Don’t let it eat you up.”

“Don’t get eaten by mayonnaise”, said the woman, and they laughed together a little bit more than perhaps Bianca would have liked. 

“Seriously though”, he said after a while. “Let. It. Go.”

I thought about Bianca. I thought: silly Bianca. But then I thought: I’ve been Bianca. We’ve all been Bianca. Maybe not caring too much about mayonnaise, maybe not forcing someone to get something laundered, but we’ve all cared too much about tiny things. We’ve all needed to let it go.

This is a Public Service Announcement. Don’t be Bianca. Have empathy for Bianca, but don’t be Bianca. Sometimes it’s good to zoom out. 

Zoom so far out that you can remember the feeling of being a kid, but with a sense of yourself that you still recognise. Maybe it’s a moment perched up a tree or balancing on a skateboard at the top of a hill, or playing a game out the back of the neighbour’s house and hearing an adult call your name but waiting just that little bit longer because the game was good. Feel in yourself that version of you.

Zoom out and look at your life now from the perspective of the you that will look back in ten years. You won’t be wishing you focused more on mayonnaise. You’ll be doing the same thing we all do when we look back at ourselves: wishing you could tell yourself how lovely you look when you’re smiling. How you’re not too fat, or too thin (or even if you are, who cares!?). How your friends are lovely and you’re lovely and you have no idea what’s coming so just enjoy this bit for heaven’s sake.      

You’ll think: don’t worry all the time. Don’t regret things - apologise, sure, try and change your behaviour for next time, but don’t allow regret to twist up inside you like an emotional hernia. Or guilt. Or grudges.

Let go.

Let go of parking ticket fury. 

Let go of bad drivers and talkback callers and people who pronounce things problematically.

Let go of how you used to be perceived. 

Let go of those little habits that curtail your enjoyment of something. Let go of the apology as a conversational tic. Resist ludicrous levels of self-censorship like that thing some people do where they park their hand up in front of their mouths like a little gate hovering in the air while they chew, lest anybody see them eating, which is a thing we do in order to survive. Let go of staying at work just to make other people think you’re working. Let go of your phone. 

I am sure Bianca had her reasons. Maybe the mayonnaise debacle is life-shattering in a way I haven’t anticipated. But probably the take-home lesson is: don’t get eaten by mayonnaise. This has been a Public Service Announcement.  

Congratulations. Well done. You did it. You got this far. No don’t look back! Don’t swivel and crane your neck to rework the bits you’ve already done. Plenty of time for all that. Now, right this minute: be here, in this bit, and look at the sky, and be you for a minute. 

Oh for heaven’s sake, don’t look forward. Don’t second-guess the possibilities. Don’t try to peek at the answers. There’s time for that. But not now. Now: be here. In this moment. Don’t worry. You don’t have to do yoga or listen to your breath or imagine the sea or think of three things you are thankful for. Just think for a second about this moment.

Recently, I was flying (in an aeroplane, you understand). I had an incredible view out the window, on a clear day, and I saw beaches and fields and forests and mountains and cars driving from here to there and animals in fields and, below us in the sea, creatures flipping and drifting in the ocean. Boats zipping about. The shadow of the plane passing over the people fishing off the rocks. So many things happening in each moment that passed that it was hard to know where to look. Not only that, but I was sitting next to someone, and behind someone who was talking to someone else, and there were announcements and children squealing and parents shooshing and people asking me if I wanted a cup of tea, and I wasn’t doing anything at all but I realised I felt slightly busy trying to focus on all the things that were happening at once. And I realised: all moments are like this. Full of millions of things. It’s just that we’re always concentrating on our own. This is a Public Service Announcement: examine the moment.

At this moment, right now, there is a squid — a giant mass of muscle and flesh that can change colour whenever it wants to — wafting though the ocean. That’s all that’s happening in that squid’s life. It’s using this moment, right now, to slowly waft. Eating and surviving and, when approached by a predator, changing colour like it’s blushing at a school dance only instead of turning red it looks like the seabed, and the predator feels like a fool. That astonishing, boring, slow, amazing thing is happening right now.  

Somewhere, probably in the dark, two people who like each other are, right now, suddenly holding hands. They weren’t holding hands a second ago. Now they’re holding hands. Both of them are thinking we’re holding hands.  

Somewhere, someone is pouring half a cup of milk into a bowl with some raw eggs. The milk is doing that thing that milk does in eggs where those white clouds form and balloon and spread and this person who is about to bake something is smiling slightly while listening to a piece of music you’ve never heard of. Maybe you’d like it.

Right now is the worst moment of someone’s life.

This second right now, a grandparent is balancing a grandchild’s feet on their own, walking them around like a marionette puppet and feeling a kind of love that takes them by surprise.

Right now, someone is noticing the back of a woman’s head. She’s done that brilliant thing some women with ponytails do where they curl a bit of their own hair around the bit where the hair-tie is and it looks like the whole ponytail is held up by a sprig of hair. The person noticing this is thinking huh, aren’t people clever. The woman with the ponytail will never know.  

Right now, someone is driving in a car talking hands-free to someone on the other side of the world and the car is coming around a mountain next to rolling sea but the person on the phone doesn’t notice, for they are thousands of miles away, deep in conversation.

Right now, thousands of people are flying through the air in the seated position inside metal boxes for hours on end. Most of them will never know each other. Some of them are looking out the window. Maybe one of them looks down at a car driving around a mountain, the edge of the sea a fingernail’s width from the road, and maybe then someone offers them a cup of tea, and the moment has passed.

Moments pass, but sometimes they’re full of everything. Enjoy the moment. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

You know the deal. This was in The Big Issue. The Big Issue is excellent. Buy The Big Issue.

There’s something about autumn. It’s nostalgic and the shadows are long and things are already almost winter which is almost summer which is almost the end of the year and what even is life? Well, we can’t tell you that but we can tell you that autumn involves some lovely things worth marking the time with. So take a look around this autumn. Use it to mark your place in the year. This is a Public Service Announcement: look around. This bit can be lovely. 

Cool evenings are gorgeous. Couches are cosier and sleep is deeper and if you go for a walk in a cool evening you come back with a slightly shiny, slightly rosy face.

Treetops are nice. You don’t see a lot of graphs about the percentage of time human adults spend looking at tree tops but my guess is that that particular section of the pie graph would be a tiny sliver. Look at treetops more. They’re quiet and ancient and they have an excellent view of the tiny people walking past beneath them looking at their phones.

Warm socks are nice.

The word hedgehog exists.

Conversations between people from other generations are a great way of remind yourself that language is incredible. Tune in to one. Listen to the way people outside your cohort use language to do things it doesn’t usually do. Do they say seriously though, oh my God shut up when they mean “goodness, how exciting”? Do they say she wasn’t trained as such per se when they mean “she wasn’t trained at all but I couldn’t have cared less”? Language is a way of sharing, and we have languages even inside our own languages. Listen to someone else’s for a bit.

An open fire is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold and I don’t care who knows it. Even the smell of someone else’s fire does about twenty percent of the job. 

Reading a book when it’s raining has got to be one of the greatest pastimes available to human kind. Rain, of course, is rare at the moment, but as soon as you hear it on the roof, grab a book and go hard, because there’s nothing quite like it. 

Hot drinks. Steam coming off them, twirling and backflipping up into the universe. It’s not winter yet so you don’t need hot drinks, they just make things better.

This isn’t particular to autumn but the other day I remembered that the expression “change your mind” is one of those expressions Shakespeare came up with. Before that, the concept of changing one’s mind wasn’t a thing. It’s such a beautiful expression, when you think about it, because it’s about a magical/chemical transformation of ideas that is so all-encompassing as to change the very brain itself, and by extension the identity of the person thinking. The act of having one’s mind changed is a concept that sustains a bit of heavy artillery these days. We know what we think. Sometimes we get more information and we develop our thinking, but rarely do we revise our thinking on something so completely that our mind is changed. It doesn’t sound like fun, to be honest, to have your mind changed. It can be, though, a powerful thing. Think back on the last few times it happened. Most people have a friend who’s really good at mind-changing — someone’s whose perspective is well-considered or well argued or hilariously on point. Asking people who know more than you about something  a bunch of questions can change your mind. Reading an article - a really good article - can change your mind. A good documentary will change your mind. Amazing that you can sit there for 90 minutes and at the end of those 90 minutes you feel like a slightly different person because suddenly you know about how Russian dance changed subtly but importantly between the wars. So do it: change your mind. It’s good for you.

 Secret paths are lovely. Down the side of a building. Off the main walkway. Hooray for secret paths. 

Haircuts are the business. Sick of yourself? Get a haircut. 

Eat some cake.

Stand in a garden. Stand in a flower shop. Surround yourself in green. 

Autumn is sweet and lovely and full of possibility and so are lots of the things you’re not concentrating on. Concentrate, for heaven’s sake. The treetops are watching you. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This originally appeared in The Big Issue.

Science was never my thing, at school. Loathed it, completely. Seemed to be about neatly recording the right answers rather than anything real. Now, I can’t get enough of it. Still misunderstand it completely but that doesn’t stop me constantly clicking on stories about scientific advancements to feed my late blooming fascination with the power of science to change the world. 

Probably the key moment when this turned around for me was at a party about ten years back, when a party guest was taking me through her philosophical approach to life. She was a scientist and had so far provided fascinating insight into a number of subjects. 

“The way I see it”, she said to a bunch of us, “is that we’re all really just a collection of shells”. I thought to myself, “I like this woman”. I pictured the shells as she spoke, a delicate collection in the palm of a hand, and I waited for her to expand the metaphor. It took me a full three to six minutes to realise that of course she had actually said, “we are all really just a collection of cells”. 

We are, of course, a collection of cells. According to the interesting scientist, those cells shift and move and become other things and once were other things and everything is kind of part of everything else or something, and not a great deal of it makes heaps more sense than if we were a handful of shells frankly. What it does do, though, this thought, is take the pressure off us all a bit. Leaves are made of cells too. So are shells, incidentally. 

Here’s the thing. We are a collection of cells, or shells, or whatever, for a limited time only. The cells could have been organised differently. They weren’t. They’re the ones that make you. You’re the only combination exactly like you. If some of your cells had instead bound together with some different ones, you could be a tree or the minute hand on the clock in someone’s break room, or the Finance Minister or the bendy part of a vacuum.

So. Public Service Announcement: it’s not all about you. It’s all a bit of an accident really. You could be anything. How lucky are you!

You get pancakes and music and the sun on your back and velcro.

You get the smell of books.

You get incredible cloud formations and tissue paper and pineapple.

You get theatre and bicycles and the feeling of having just had a shower.

You get to stand in a crowd at a sports ground and care about a made-up thing with its own logic and music and community and humour and you get to eat hot chips while you do it.

You get the perfectly symmetrical, delicate beauty of the humble leaf.

You get donuts.

You get in-jokes and birthday wishes and sunsets and animals and stories about small people getting the better of nasty people. 

You get water views. There’s a reason they’re coveted, but the rich people don’t get all of them. There’s something about a water view, even at the local creek, that brings down the blood pressure immediately. 

Same with fire. Stare into a fire and try not to be slightly entranced. 

You get your favourite TV show, and the people you talk about it with.

You get the occasional nice person behind you saying “take your time” when you’re flustered.

You get the feeling of your feet in the sand or your hand in someone else’s or your head in a book. 

You get snow and kites and card games and that thing you can do where you put your hand out the car window and make wave shapes in the breeze.

You have heard the humans around you counting down from ten in a drunken bellow and you have looked at the fireworks exploding spectacularly overhead and you have thought to yourself, a year huh. I wonder what the next one will be like. If you’d been a tree, or the hand on a clock, or the bendy bit on a vacuum, or even, arguably, a finance minister, you would not have had the intellectual capacity to take in all that data. To be curious. To wonder. To quietly hope.

Public Service Announcement. You’re just a collection of shells. Delicate, individual, miraculous shells, the combination of which allows you to exist in the world. Congratulations. You get to be you.

Hi there! This is a Public Service Announcement. You are doing a great job. No! Shoosh! Stop it. You are. In fact, even if you are a terrible person - a narcissistic politician, say, or a boss who gaslights everyone in the office into needlessly fretting about spreadsheets and nobody meets your eyes in staff meetings  - you are still doing a good job. You are! If you recognise yourself in either of these descriptions, chances are you should quit your actual job, but if you look closely, there will be, somewhere in your life, significant areas in which you excel. 

The idea that we must all strive together, and that in striving there is virtue and, eventually, reward, is the lie of capitalism come to taunt us all. And nay, we shall not succumb to this fantastical fiction. For some of us enjoy not striving. Some of us have had a rather nice time failing too. Some of us enjoy the small moments in the middle of meaningful moments even more than we enjoy the meaningful moments, for life is made up of lots of things and some of them are the way a trail of ants carries a butterfly or the sound of a dog barking two streets away while the kettle boils in the kitchen. 

So: you know when you’re watching a movie and there’s a character who you don’t know if you’re supposed to like and then the character casually connects with the dark, brooding kid who nobody else can talk to and then the kid totally opens up and when one of the other characters comes back into the room they discover them laughing together? You know that character is a hero. Are you the kind of person who makes an effort with the weird kid? Well done. Congratulations. You’re the good guy.

Same if you can talk to animals. It’s a real pleasure, and a lot of people don’t have it. If you can do that, you’re doing a great job.

Here’s to the calmer-downers. If you’re stressed, they make you laugh at yourself. If you’re anxious, they talk you down. They grin at you when you thought nobody was looking backstage before your big performance. Can you think of a better skill? Capitalism doesn’t pay the calmer-downer-ers by the hour, but hooboy are you people worth your weight in gold. Send a message to your calmer-downerers. Tell them they’re doing a great job.

The joiner-uppers are great too. You’ll be relating a story to a joiner-upper and they’ll say, oh that’s like this other thing and you’ll think GOOD GRIEF! HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT THOSE TWO COMPLETELY SEPARATE THINGS WENT TOGETHER? WHO IS THIS TRUTH WIZARD? This also works with quotes. Some people are geniuses at quoting something at just the right moment. This is a rarified skill and one that, in the right moment, can be truly astonishing to witness. Great job.

If you are a good host - if you guide people through space like an angel and remember people’s names and make them feel like the most fascinating person on the planet while you prepare tea using fresh leaves you grew in the garden like it’s a choreographed dance you’re doing with all the guests and the cups and the tea paraphernalia and the hot water dancing with the leaves in a perfect glass teapot while you tell an amusing story that is also humble and charming and astute and amusing, you’re doing a great job and also when can I come over and do you bake?

Maybe you’re good at diving under water. Not the flashy outside diving that gets to go to the olympics but the diving where you feel like a dolphin and your mind goes kind of quiet and your breath feels surprised.

Perhaps you’re the sort of person who knows when to be silent. When to sit with a person and hold their hand. When to look into a person’s eyes and not make a face or say anything weird or try to make a joke. Seriously good skill. Well done.

Maybe you are a master at plaiting hair or folding sheets or packing car boots or putting people at ease at parties or finding lost earrings. 

You are not a list of achievements measured against other people’s. You are you, and nobody else is as good as you are being you. Fight the power and own it: you’re doing a great job. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This was originally published in The Big Issue, which is an excellent publication and a social justice organisation all in one. Support in when you can.

When you think of being sick in bed, there’s something quietly delightful about the idea. ”Sniff!“ you imagine yourself saying adorably as you snuggle under the covers and watch endless episodes of something utterly wonderful and somebody brings you soup. Being sick, though (and this is something only sick people understand) really does suck. 

The other day, quite by accident, I was still. My body hurt when I moved it due to a pinched nerve situation known in medical circles as middle age, and so I was forced to be still. Couldn’t even hold up a book without making the kinds of noises I imagine a donkey might make while giving birth in an electrical storm. All I could really do was listen, and be still, and it was dreadful and also quite lovely. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not believe in everybody always slowing down and taking their time. I do not believe that people are terrible these days because they’re over-scheduled and use their phones too much and nobody talks to anybody and they should all stop to smell the roses and salute to the sun at dawn. Some of those things are partly true, sometimes, but the pressure on people to live the dream and have a family and parent well and eat clean and live right and slow down and make time for yourself completely fails to take into account the stark realities of, well, being a human person. 

But sometimes, you have a change of pace thrust upon you. You’re stuck in traffic. You’re in the line for something in a shop. You’re forced to lie down and not move because you broke your own body by pinching a stupid nerve. Whatever the case may be. This is a Public Service Announcement: enjoy the slow bits.

Enjoy waiting in queues. Not all queues, obviously. Not anxious ones. Boring queues. There aren’t enough boring queues these days. If you find yourself in one, though, think of the five top friends you’ve ever had and why. Think of the fact that there are people whose job it is to be queue scientists. They study and curate queues. They play tricks on people like turning the queues into s-shapes so humans feel like they’re progressing further than they are. Queue scientists: are they evil geniuses? You decide! Listen in to a conversation happening somewhere in that queue. What is that woman on the phone talking about? Who is Steven and why is he on thin ice and what did Ingrid do in the staff meeting that upset Sonia?  Let your mind go to other places, even if you weren’t invited.

Enjoy other people’s friendships. You don’t have to know them, but when time slows down sometimes you can see them a little more clearly. At the end of my street there’s a school. In that school there’s a gardener. The other day he was sitting on the school fence rather adorably having a sandwich out of a little lunchbox. His legs were even dangling. The comparison between the gardener and the children was not difficult to draw. As I was approaching, a boy half way up a tree near the gardener broadcast to everybody from his birds-eye-view, “Hey you guys, look! Roger has the same cheese sticks as Annabelle!” and the schoolyard exploded into a thousand urgent conversations. The kid up the tree lowered himself onto the fence and sat next to the gardener as I passed, peering into the lunchbox for a closer look. “Thanks for that Oscar”, said Roger, quietly. “No worries”, said Oscar.  “You do, you know. Same exact ones!” and they smiled at each other, for different reasons. There was something about this little celebration of cross-generational cheese enjoyment that made me grateful that I had taken the time, by accident, to forget my wallet and thus to be walking back to the house to get it. 

Enjoy staring out windows. Not enough psychological research has gone into the benefits to one’s mental health of staring out a window and thinking of nothing. 

Compose a message for someone who deserves it. Someone who won’t expect it. Someone who will be glad you took the time. 

Be in a hurry. Get things done. But when things slow down, take the time. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This was originally printed in The Big Issue. You know. The good guys.

What are eight eights? Sixty-four! Hi. Welcome to maths class. Take a seat between the tedium and the building anxiety. Prepare yourself for rows of numbers, alarming test questions, and an unnecessary degree of hectoring regarding the exact moment at which Billy and Betty pass each other on separate trains heading in opposite directions.

There. That’s it. That’s maths, right? 

But of course… they teach maths differently these days. Not so concerned with reciting your times-tables, maths is more holistic, now. Maths, they tell you, is all around us. 

Psht! What a joke! What a namby pamby approach to the straightforward business of dealing with two numbers and getting the same answer every time! I mean, there is a right answer for heaven’s sake! That’s the point! Why tell stories about the numbers? Why get to know how they feel? Just get the answer right and go home! Honestly. It’s a symptom, I’m sure you’ll agree, of a world that mollycoddles children into believing the universe should bend to their whims. They don’t have to merely do a simple maths test. Oh no! They must be entertained and made to feel included as well! 

But here’s the thing. Maths is all around us. It’s beautiful and mysterious and surprising and it took me decades to figure out that in fact this is why people who are interested in maths are interested in maths in the first place. Also nobody cares about Billy or Betty or where they’re going on a train or where the fulcrum is on a see saw or what eight eights are. I certainly don’t, because when I was a kid learning maths, maths wasn’t all around me. It was only in two places: (1) in a hot classroom and (2) in the milk bar when I only had two dollars and the bloke behind the counter was waiting for me to decide what to do with it (raspberry icy pole thanks for playing). Maths was literally nowhere else. If it had been, I would have avoided it, or set fire to it, or run away. 

So hoorah for the brave new world of namby pamby maths pedagogy. This is a Public Service Announcement. Maths is all around us. 

Maths is in the complex fingerprint of every leaf. The symmetry and repetition of its motion. The way it flutters and sails and flutters and sails and dovetails and backflips to earth like an accident and a design all at once.

Maths is in the tides that sweep the beaches according to, guess what, the maths of the moon.

Maths is in the chaos and wildness. It’s wild, maths, and its rules and variations and patterns are in the wildest things. The big bang. The clouds swept across the sky in a certain way reflecting the patterns of the sand on the beach. The way the veins in your grandmother’s hand look like squiggling rivers from the air. I don’t care for Billy or for Betty and I certainly never liked maths, but looking for meaning in the freewheeling strangeness of reality is quite a project, you have to admit. It’s a brave and bold one, too. Good on us.

There’s maths in poetry and music and art and comedy. Musical rhythm, speech rhythms, the power of the pause. If you’ve ever stood in a gig and felt the power of a pause surge through a thousand warm bodies in the dark, you’ve had a mathematical moment, Billy and Betty be damned.

I watched a little girl swinging a lanyard at a train station the other day. Around her, adults rushed, or stood, staring, or talked into phones, and this kid watched this lanyard swinging from her finger. Back, and forward. Back, and forward. Like a see saw. Like a swing. Like the tide. She was mesmerised. She broke the pattern sometimes, flicking the lanyard into a wild circle. I realised, eventually, that the whole time she had been doing it, I had been watching, and so had others, and I found myself wondering if they, too, had been watching with a noise in their heads to go with the motion of the lanyard. My brain had been, I realised, providing a little noise for the motion. A tiny moment on a train platform where my brain made music out of motion. When humans have no phone reception, sometimes it’s okay because what they do have is a fulcrum. Maths is all around you. Sometimes, it can be pretty lovely. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

This was originally in The Big Issue, which is sold in the street by vendors. Please buy a copy when you can. It makes a big difference and it’s full of interesting stuff.  

You know that thing where you’re going about your business and then, suddenly, completely unbidden, totally uninvited, apropos of nothing, a crippling memory of your own social dorkishness injects itself into your thoughts so violently that it eclipses your ability to walk/talk/think/exist as a human in the universe? Hopefully that’s not just me. Whenever this happens, usually in public like when I’m walking down the street or something, I find myself involuntarily folding in on myself like an origami transformer and muttering half-sentences aloud to myself in a kind of sustained groan. It’s as though I have been possessed, which, in a way, I have. Possessed by unpleasant memories, my mind wiped of all other contexts. This is me now. 

I have wished, I must admit, that I could wipe these memories from my mind. Start over. Leave the dork behind. But here’s the thing. We’re all dorks. We all have memories we’d rather park. Thing is though, all life is, really, is memories. Love is memory. Pain is memory. The fact that you still know your childhood phone number is memory but it’s also a lot of other things. Memories are everywhere. Sometimes you just have to focus on the good ones. This is a Public Service Announcement: remember the good stuff.   

Remember sparklers on the beach.

Remember lemon icing.

Remember a tree you liked climbing as a kid.

Remember backflips.

Remember Medicare.

Remember that bit where you get into bed and the sheets are clean but they’re a bit stiff and a bit cold and you’re just getting used to bed life before the day falls away and all you have to do now is purposefully snuggle.

Remember dogs chasing waves in their sleep.

Remember random talented people who do things like beautiful sketches in notebooks on public transport and whose names you will never know and whose stories you will never hear but whose grey sketched faces slowly take shape as you edge closer to your station, wanting to stay until the end.

Remember sunlight belting through a glass of something cold that you can write in the condensation of with your finger.

Remember your favourite person who wore a watch well.

Remember cheese on toast.

Remember the feeling of realising someone you like also likes you. Noticing someone try out your nickname for the first time. Feeling someone hang back in a group to wait for you to catch up.

Remember handstands.

Remember the word ostrich, and the concept of the ostrich, and the fact that ostriches are a real thing and not just a child’s drawing weirdly come to life. Seriously. Google “ostrich running”. Utterly ridiculous. 

Remember the sound of a teaspoon tingling in a saucer. If it doesn’t make you hanker a little bit for morning tea, check again.

Remember real mail. Your name on a parcel. Something lovely inside.

Remember that someone once invented the crossword. His name was Arthur by the way, and he was a violinist who worked for a newspaper and he made a grid where the words crossed over. He called it a word cross puzzle but the typesetter that day made a mistake printing the paper, so… crossword it is. I kind of thought crosswords had always been around. Imagine the things that don’t exist yet!  

Remember suppressed giggles. You’re supposed to be quiet in maths class. You’re in a staff meeting and someone just did a hilarious mime out the window. Remember the giggle bubbling up. Remember the nose flare. Remember noticing someone else’s shoulders shaking with quiet laughter and trying desperately not to crack. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ve been doing staff meetings all wrong.

Remember all those medical things that people do that are amazing but happen all the time. People use skin from here to patch up skin over there. People trick cancer cells into killing each other. They unloop umbilical cords from around babies’ necks and lift them out into their lives, no worries little mate there you go. We also trick each other, by the way. We go to plays that trick us, and films that trick us, and we read books that remove us from the couch we’re sitting in and take us wherever a made-up story takes us.  So: remember the capacity for human imagination. 

And remember the word dingbat and the last time you felt quietly proud and iced water with a slice of something in it and donuts.

This has been a Public Service Announcement. Remember the good stuff.

This article first appeared in The Big Issue. Please buy the magazine from your local vendor.

Well, we’re nearly there. We’re nearly at the point in the year where summer is well and truly behind us. Here comes autumn, tricking us into believing it’s just a fuzzier summer only with socks and the occasional cardigan. And maybe none of this matters, because no matter what season it is, life just happens. The good bits and the bad bits all happen in whatever order they happen in, and it doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in the sand on a 30 degree day or hunched into the corner of a bus stop waiting for the rain to stop drilling you into the ground, the universe doesn’t discriminate. Lovely sunny days can be catastrophic. Tempests can be lovely. There is something about summer though, isn’t there. A mood brought on by the season that is so strong we like to think it defines who we are as Australians. Be nice, wouldn’t it, to take some of the summer with you, into the next bit? This is a Public Service Announcement. Put some summer in your pocket. Take it with you wherever you’re going next. 

Take the concept of boxing day. Time stretching out like the waistband of your pants. Accidentally reading a book someone else got for Christmas and left on the couch. Eating cold left-overs. The sound of cricket coming from somewhere. No idea what day it is. An uncle, somewhere, almost out of earshot, delivering a lecture on the 1986 grand final/the problem with the health system/architecture during the Weimar Republic, the details of which may or may not be accurate. Nobody needs you to be anywhere.

Take the sound of backyard cricket with you. Someone yelling YES! Dad you’re out! A communal roar. The sound of someone clapping. An impassioned appeal. The occasional roar calling everyone to their positions: car!

Take the next bit too. The apologetic pleasure of driving through the reluctant street parade that is a neighbourhood cricket match disturbed by your approaching car. The speed and choreography of the disassembled game. A lanky kid leaning on the rescued recycling bin wicket. Someone with the bat pillowed up behind their head, hands curled over each end, gaze steady. The friendly but impatient waiting-faces as you slink through. A hand waved in thanks.

Take skinks. Perfectly named, darty little lizard wizards who, when caught by the tail, buck and bite and then, to hell with it, leave their wiggling tails behind completely.

Take animal footprints in the sand. Seagulls. Hysterical dogs. A beetle’s careful tracks from one side of a beach track to the other. 

Take that period between Christmas and New Year. Even if you don’t do Christmas: nobody knows what day it is and time slows down so that by the time you do know the date again you feel like you’ve lived on an island for years and then it turns out it’s only been three days.

In that bit, you might find yourself standing somewhere, staring at something, like a tiny leaf dangling and twisting, suspended by a spider web, and this goes on for so long, this twisting leaf dance, that you realise this sort of thing happens all the time, this leaf-twisting, and that time is, in fact, often slow and quiet and happening where you are not. Keep that bit too.

Take summer fruits. Colourful, enticing, sweet, lazy-making, really good with ice cream.

Take the smell of sunscreen. God it’s awful stuff but the smell will take you instantly to somewhere. Childhood? A suburban swimming pool? Every summer of your entire life?

Take bare feet.

Take new beginnings. An unsullied diary. No unread emails. The untouched sand on the first beach of the year.   

Take the summer certainties. Young shirtless blokes in board shorts riding shopping trolleys through the supermarkets. Skidding to a stop in their bare feet. Thumping each other on the arm. In the trolley, no matter what else: gallons of soft drink, a chicken, and an unfeasible quantity of salt and vinegar chips. Mothers saying things into phones like ask her if she wants it in a size ten. Someone with sunburn in the pattern of something they were wearing yesterday. A dog taking a teenager for a walk.

Take all of that and keep it in your pocket until June. Take it out when you get the flu and it’s freezing and you don’t remember what summer even is. Taste the fruit and the smell the sunscreen. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This was written for The Big Issue. Please buy The Big Issue. It’s excellent.

When you were a baby, you looked at the sky and it swallowed you up. You did. It’s true. When you were sobbing and bellowing and waking the neighbours, someone took you out to look at the stars and your wailing became a small echo in a large universe and you stared at the bigness of things and your brain ate up the distance between you and everything else until you were calm and tired from it and you slept. 

When you were a kid, squabbling and whining and itchy and cross, someone snapped at you to “go for a run around outside” and you did, and when dinner came you could barely hear them call from the tree you were sitting up, the world at your feet, the story in your head. 

When you were an adult, you arrived in a strange city and walked through unfamiliar streets, both more aware of yourself and also of your anonymity, and you learned the rules of how to be a human in this strange new place, like a baby looking at the sky.

Changing the scenery reorients the coordinates. Shifts the focus. Lends perspective. Shame we can’t all hop on a plane and take a dip in the sea off the coast of the Maldives by way of remembering not to stress about the things we haven’t done and the bills we need to pay, but there are other ways of changing the scenery. Look around you. Make small changes. Take a trip without leaving. This is a Public Service Announcement. 

The sky still does it. I don’ know care how old you are. Find the sky at night and look up from the planet your feet are balanced on. Humans have tried to make sense of that mass of gas for billions of years. Stare at it until you see a shooting star and then try and remember what a shooting star is and then go and make a cup of tea. So much better than television. 

Look for a river on a map and go there. Imagine the history the river has seen. Watch how the water hurtles from up to down like it couldn’t care less about your half-yearly performance review or the fact that the neighbour seems to have stolen your recycling bin and your overdue reminder notice is in ALL CAPS.

Read a book. Books take you places for free. 

Do a crazy thing. Sit up the top of a giant tube of PVC in your bathers, your childish heart pumping in your adult chest, the water tumbling violently away before you, and throw yourself full pelt down a waterslide. Go on. I dare you. Little known fact about water slides: they’re time machines. The settings are set to seven-year-old-you. 

Converse with an animal. A dopey dog or a smoodgie cat. A bit of under-the-chin work should do it. No words required.

Turn up to the movies alone. Buy a choc top if you want to. Sit in the cinema by yourself and let someone tell you a story that has nothing to do with you.

Go to a library. You don’t need to read. You don’t need to talk to anybody. Wander around. Ask if you can listen to an audiobook. Look at newspaper from 1816. Watch the people studying and writing their family histories and falling asleep by the heating vents and performing that ducked and hurried walk of shame as they answer a phone call and say things like Hello yes I’m in the - sorry Mum I’m in the - yes, hang on, what do you mean Samantha’s wearing Auntie Mavis’s dress to the wedding? I thought Susan had an objection?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you’re looking at the sea and your feet are in the sand, those are two very big parts of your life that are not problems. Two very big parts of the wall in relation to which you are small.

The other thing you can do to change your scenery is, of course, to travel. You don’t have to go to the Bahamas. Find the cheapest ticket you can to get the furthest on the train. Somewhere you’ve never been before. A strange place, with walking tracks that lead who-knows-where and new parks with park benches in them that glow in the sun, and houses with windows of warm light that contain people living lives that aren’t yours. 

Sometimes you need someone to take you outside. 

Take yourself outside. 

This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This first appeared in The Big Issue. Buy it from your vendor when you next see one. It makes a difference, and it’s a bloody good read.

Look at everybody! Just look at them! Doing things. Saying things. Living their lives. Who are they all? What are they thinking? Don’t they realise you’re here? Right in front of them? Living your life, full of all the you things? Don’t they realise they’re background noise to all the things you’re dealing with? Can’t they see you dealing? 

And sure, they’re dealing, too, and until there’s a scene in the movie where the you things intersect with the them things, we’re all just living adjacently. But, when you think about it, it’s just a matter of emphasis. So here’s a little experiment. Take the emphasis off the you things for a bit. Refocus it on them. See what happens. This is a Public Service Announcement.

Focus on the laughter. How it changes a person’s whole face. Is a laughing face the truest version of a face? Open and generous and responsive, it’s hard to watch without feeling your own face changing, a kind of built-in laughter empathy passing through you like a fog. 

Watch the teachers. A person in a cafe teaching a trainee how to use the machine. A parent teaching a kid to ride a bike. Good teachers are patient and kind and careful. Often, that moment where a person teaches another person a thing will never be forgotten. Sometimes, the lesson will outlive both the person doing the teaching and the person being taught.

 Overhearing people’s conversations is a great way to take the emphasis off your own life. Listen. Lives are happening all around you. It’s a fact you know, but sometimes it’s nice to be reminded. In the library I’m writing this in, a bloke walked past on a phone just before, saying “That’s not actually what I said Angela”. He  sounded quite cross and I was bit worried about Angela to be honest, but now he’s taken the call outside and I can see him laughing along with her as he balances along a row of bricks as though it’s a tightrope. He and Angela are going to be okay. For now anyway.  

How great is it on summer nights when people leave their front doors open and you’re out walking to dog or whatever but for three precious seconds you accidentally see down their hall, the light belting off the floorboards, a mess of toys in a lounge room, a child riding a trike from one side of the house to the other, and this is someone’s childhood right here. This is someone’s front door, open to the world, as a stranger walks past with a dog. 

Look at the bold people, the exciting people, the provocative people. The brave dressers, the loud talkers, the opinionated, the conscientious objectors, the boundary pushers. Imagine yourself into their lives for a moment. Feel the weight of the difference. 

And the quiet ones. The watchful ones. Try that on for size. Imagine your way into the parts of other people that are the most foreign to you and feel yourself back at the start line. That’s you back there. Hello.

Sit in a public space, a train or a bus or a cafe or a library, and look around you. Who’s your favourite? Who most needs someone to talk to them? Who’s got a pet who loves them? If everyone disappeared in an instant except for the people in this space: who will you stand next to? Who will fall in love with who? Who’s your biggest obstacle? Which one can cook? Who’s the talker? Who’s everyone going to underestimate?

In your own life, not many people have been around forever. You met them when you met them. Or did you? Had you walked past some of them without knowing? Had you “excuse me”d a person who would one day become your friend? There’s no way of telling, not really, which means: all around you, all the time, are potential friends. 

People are confusing and terrible and wonderful and hilarious and complicated and maybe so are you. Trying someone else’s life on for size, even if only for the moment you get a glimpse down their hallway, can be really good for your life health. So if you’re ever getting a bit sick of yourself, take the dog for a walk. Be the background noise to all the stuff other people are dealing with. Change the emphasis. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This was originally a column in The Big Issue. Buy the magazine on the streets from a vendor why don’t you!

Happy new year! What a momentous occasion! What a time to reflect! What a meaningful yardstick against which to measure our hopes and dreams! What a fabulous time to make resolutions. Because tomorrow, everything is going to be better. We’re going to be smarter, and fitter and more morally upstanding. We’re going to be charming and attractive and rich and witty and correct. Everything before now has been a shambolic accident, a reckless mistake, or somebody else’s fault. None of that applies now. Nope! Not anymore. Now, we have better friends, smarter ideas, boundless resolve, and new notebooks in which to plan it all. 

Here’s to the new you. Here’s to self-improvement. Here’s to your inevitable rise over the next 365 days while those around you, astonished, flail without a plan, sans notebook, the new year dribbling into drudgery before their very eyes.

Except here’s the thing. Time is arbitrary and a lot of things happen despite notebooks and planning. And that’s okay. Here are some things that are okay. This is a Public Service Announcement.

Ice cream is nice. Even vegan ice cream is nice. It just looks fun, doesn’t it, ice cream, and then you get a frozen ball of sweetness in your face on a hot day. Balanced on a waffle cone, I mean what a world.

That thing where you’re standing in the street and it’s just you and then the street lights quietly flick on and you look around like, “is anyone getting this?” but it’s not momentous enough to tell anybody so it’s just you and the street lights who know.  

 In fact, that kind of feels a little bit like that other excellent thing that happens, where you learn a word you’ve never heard before and then you hear it on the radio in the car a few days later and think “Ha! How about that!” and then someone says it in a cafe a couple of days later and you look at them as though maybe they’ve been spying on you and then you read it in a book and you think “oh come on, universe”. This phenomenon has been given a name: the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The fact that it has been given a name means that someone had that happen enough that they wanted to share it with other people, because just like the street lights going on, it’s just a lonely moment in the universe between you and a word, until it’s a named phenomenon someone can write into a crossword clue. 

Gardens exploding over the top of fences are lovely.

Overheard bits of dialogue between people whose lives are not yours are sometimes just interesting enough to take you out of yourself for a minute, and that’s a phenomenon that should have a name. The other day, I was in a cafe and I heard two people from music shops talking excitedly together in a booth in the corner. One of them, a man with a moustache, had just been estimating that he did “half a million in violins and cellos per year”. He stopped suddenly after that, leant conspiratorially in and lowered his voice. “Tell me”, he said, “What’s your approach to the flute problem?” Other people’s lives are happening around us all the time. You just never know what they might be dealing with. The flute problem, for instance. 

Clay is nice. Dug your hands into some clay lately? Tried making something with those hands of yours? Give it a burl. It’s really quite something to get lost in a craft for a few hours.

Comfortable slippers are just the business.

Reading in the bath. Some people hate it, but for those who don’t: reading in the bath is one of life’s pure joys and I commend it to you.

Write it down. Doesn’t matter what it is: your worries, the story of your parents, a To Do list. Don’t think of an audience for it. Just write it. See what happens. 

New year’s resolutions are fine. Sometimes they even work. That feeling of the ”new year“ feeling new and hopeful can be a good thing, too. But it doesn’t represent the fall of humanity when life doesn’t quite live up to your shiny new version of things. Find an exploding garden. Put on some comfortable slippers. Have an ice cream. Lovely things are everywhere, no matter what day of the year it is. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This was originally an article in The Big Issue. Please buy the magazine from your local vendor.

Hey. So. Quick question: say an alien came to earth, right? Took you aside. Wanted a few words. Say this alien wanted to make a whole new world somewhere out in the galaxy based on only the good bits of this world. You totally get an invite, but they need your help compiling the list of good things for the reboot.

I’m guessing you’d quite sensibly be listing important stuff like love and friendship and world peace and antibiotics and Netflix and so forth. And that’s great. Good for you. Those things are important. But it’s always good to be prepared. The worst thing would be to be beamed up onto this brand new planet you’ve helped invent, and to feel a longing, a nostalgia, for something left behind.

So look around you. What’s worth saving? You’d be surprised how many people, when confronted by an alien, forget the little things. Don’t be that person. Seek out the quietly delightful. This is a Public Service Announcement.

Don’t forget lemon zest icing.

Don’t forget reading in the bath.

Don’t forget the improbability of passionfruit. Wrinkly brown balls that grow on vines alongside the most incredible 3D flowers that appear to have been made by teams of Japanese designers and which, when sliced in half, leak a syrup full of seeds which you can spread on ice cream to make it taste even better for heaven’s sake. How did the universe come up with that? So make sure you get the alien to write down “the improbability of passionfruit” as an essential ingredient for a new world. Who knows where it will lead? That’s called innovation.

Don’t forget how, when you swim in the ocean and then look in the mirror afterwards, you can see how the salt has organised itself in line with your eyebrows. Eyebrow sea salt. An important component of the universe. 

Beach hair is a related but important factor in the world as we know it. The best beach hair is the beach hair where you barely recognise yourself in the mirror and the possibility begins to present itself that if you continued like this you could, in fact, become a different person entirely.

Don’t forget that thing where you see something someone has left somewhere - a pair of spectacles on a newspaper or a configuration of toys that makes sense only to the child who left them there - and their whole personality seems to be echoed in the way those objects are placed in the world. The fact that those objects, placed like that, make you quietly smile in their absence.

The inner peace achieved upon the completion of a desk clean.

Sideways grins.

Sandwiches.

The feeling of wanting to exclaim out loud about an outrageous twist in a book you’re reading.  

Accidental dozing.

Animal friendships.

The kind of laughter where you genuinely worry you might not be able to breathe and then you start thinking about the laughter itself and it’s the act of laughing that makes you laugh more.

Intergenerational hand-holding.

Expressions like “it dawned on me” and “I changed my mind” which we use every day but which are actually really clever when you think about it.

Watching people do really skilled things that don’t happen in your life because your life has no call for them but then you see the skilled people do the thing and you can’t stop staring and vaguely wondering if your life would be better if you too were a glass blower/circus clown/diving champion - and also just quietly the more you watch the more you think you’ve actually got this figured, this glass blowing/circus/diving business. You watch a backwards pike dive with a twist and you know, for sure, that the Canadian will be disappointed with that one, because watching skilled people teaches you things too.

Porridge. 

The mutual glee of sitting in an audience electrified by excellence.

Lying in the grass looking up.

The feeling of pride rising up through your chest that happens when someone you love excels themselves and you have to watch from a distance so all you can do is stand where you are in silence while they play the recorder or win an award or say something smart or take a splinter out of a dog’s foot or whatever it is. Silent, lonely pride. Keep that too. 

You’ll have others. Look around you. Or don’t. Close your eyes. Think of the little things. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

This originally appeared in The Big Issue. Buy it from vendors whenever you get the chance.

Sometimes, when things are annoying or overwhelming or depressing or infuriating and it’s building to a frisson of impotent fury and you feel like stomping your foot at the universe, the worst thing about it is that you’ve been here before. The worst thing is that this is so you. You’re the common element. You’re the one who always ends up standing in the middle of the world in a hot fury at yourself for not being better at life. It’s your fault. You’re too flaky, too bossy, too much of a dork, too messy, too lazy, too hopeless to get it together and be a real life human like everybody else. 

Here’s the thing though. Public Service Announcement: some scientists say that we don’t even have selves. That the self is a just a feeling. The ego is merely a neurological accident and that we tell ourselves these adorable little narratives as an organising principal, to help us  make sense of things. I understand that this may not be immediately comforting, but in some ways at least, it’s a helpful idea. Yes, you might be standing in the centre of the supermarket with raw egg running down your sleeve because you didn’t get a basket because you NEVER get a basket and now you are holding TOO MANY THINGS and an EGG EXPLODED because you are SO INFURIATING like that but no! It’s actually not me! There is no me! Not really. This is all just a cultural narrative being imposed onto a series of random events in a universe of which I am a small part. Just a series of cells, bouncing around. 

This is a Public Service Announcement. Forget the self. Lose the narrative. Observe the small elements that make up the fabric of the universe. 

Observe the way crowds move like they’re one entity, crossing the road from a football stadium like an arrow, dancing in the dying light at a music festival like one mass rising and falling with the beat. Riding bikes in a pack that narrows and thickens according to the corners. Behold the majestic tomfoolery of a Mexican wave.  

Notice how the unremarkable swallows and starlings of the daytime are transformed in the evening into lithe and showy circus clowns, dipping, weaving, backflipping and swooping through the clouds of insects as the sun disappears and the air is cool and still.

Notice the special kind of tired your feet get after running or walking on sand.

Stare at the night sky. Try and unlearn everything you know about it. Lose the narrative. Forget trying to figure out where the pan handle is. Forget the milky way and the science and the religion and just stand there and look at what happens to the sky when the lights go out.

Think about how amazing it is that air is constantly moving through you and also through everyone else and nobody ever talks about it and we can totally multitask and do it while doing almost every other thing in the world. 

Think about the human desire for narrative and metaphor. How we use it to make sense of things, to figure each other out, to learn about who we are. We write and we read and we tell stores and we fantasise. We use storytelling in marketing and psychology and architecture and politics and cinema and even in maths and science. It’s comforting and helpful and manipulative and lovely and maybe if you need to be reminded of it, it’s a good time to read a book.

Think of the fact that if it’s true that the self doesn’t exist, then neither do other people. That is to say, they exist, but only as stories. Stories you tell each other, by way of having a relationship. That means that when they’re gone, they’re not actually gone, they’re part of the story you’ve internalised. 

Too much? Causing existential angst? Fine. Think of cheese and chocolate and cups of tea and eating a really nice sandwich with a water view and new socks on. Think of holding hands. Think of crying in a movie. Think of clean sheets and watermelons and your favourite person’s hair shampoo and the feeling of discovering you are being watched by a solitary cockatoo.

Maybe we don’t exist in precisely the self-centred way we like to imagine. Maybe we do. Either way, pulling back the focus on the narrative can be helpful. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

This first appeared in The Big Issue. Please support your local vendor.

Hello and welcome to this bit! You will need: nothing. Not a thing. Zilch. Leave it all behind. This bit is an obligation free bit. No shipping fees. No “administration costs”. You won’t get a parking fine or a late fee. You don’t need to bring a present or a plate. You don’t even need to get public transport. Just step into this bit. Stand here. Take a moment. Have a think. Nobody else will bother you. It’s just you, hanging off the edge of the world, having a bit of a think. Want some things to think about? Don’t worry. It’s not a BYO situation, not unless you want. We have a long list. So here are some things to think about in this bit. This is a Public Service Announcement. 

Think of the smell of brand new knitwear.

Think about the feeling of having a much-needed shower. Everything thick and heavy falling away, just a little bit, with the water.

Think of the first belting wave coming at you in the surf. Ducking under. The silence. Emerging with a roar.

Think about the person you most like to visit. Think about their teapot. Their towels. The hand-cream in their bathroom. Think of how their sheets smell. Think of how different it is from every other place on earth and how generous it is to show another person all of that and how that person is you. 

Think of magnolia trees and hundreds-and-thousands and the fact that they are called hundreds-and-thousands and also bicycles and the colour turquoise.

Think of the sound of an ice cream truck late on a summer afternoon. 

Think about sparklers. Who invented sparklers? Fire you can hold in your hand! Fire that explodes in beautiful sparks right into the faces of small children who have never seen anything like it before and who are up well past their bedtime. Fire that costs a dollar for a packet of twelve and can make you the most fun auntie or uncle on planet earth.

Think about how you could have a line in someone else’s life. You could be the first person who is nice to someone all day. You could be the person who helps someone get to the person they love. “Oh yes”, you might say, “The airport is that way” and maybe, just maybe, that person will change directions and gets to the airport just in time. I know a man whose family came to Australia with brand new Australian visas a few decades ago. They approached the official at the airport. He took their passports, stamped them, then leaned forward and said “welcome home”. That guy got his line right. Try and get your lines right. You never know what impact they might have.

Think about music. How did music even happen? People experimenting with banging and sawing away at things and now look: there are music shops and concerts and musicals and rock stars and people teaching other people how to play and sing right across the world. Without the innate human desire to feel music soaring through our nervous systems, none of it would exist.

Think about the way people communicate when they can’t speak the same language. The mimes they do. The gestures. It is surprising how quickly humans can find ways to understand each other. 

Think of a bird coming in to land on water. Imagine that lovely draggy-feet thing they sometimes do that stretches a huge V-shape out across the surface of the water.

Imagine the feeling of doing something you can no longer do. A dive off the big kids’ board. A handstand. A cartwheel. Rolling down a hill without stopping. Getting a dink on a bike. 

Think of the feeling of rolling over from a sleep-in and having nowhere to be. The light coming in from somewhere and outside the sounds of Saturday.

Think of the singular sensation of going for a walk and stumbling upon an animal you didn’t expect to see. The shock of the moment of discovery. The animal watching you. You watching it. Nobody else to tell. Don’t want to move to photograph it. But somewhere nearby a branch snaps and it hurtles off and you’re standing, the reverence falling away into something approaching foolishness. “I saw a wallaby” never quite captures the magic.

Think of these things and other things or no things at all. Feel free to stay in this bit for as long as you like. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

This column first appeared in The Big Issue. Buy The Big Issue when you can - now you can even do t with a card instead of cash.