This is a true story. I was sitting in a park once, shoes and socks off, grass beneath my bare feet, sky scrolling above me like it was rewinding to the good bit. I was enjoying a lovely moment of watching people doing the various things people tend to do in parks… and I felt something beneath my thumb in the grass. 

‘Hey! Thanks for coming! Just follow me. Nice to see you. Trouble getting here? No? Excellent. Well: welcome to my life! Come in! Through here, that’s right. Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Ignore all this. Probably best to… yeah, step over it, that’s the way. Bit of a shambles, this bit. And that bit over there. And, oh, yeah, that other bit. Apologies for the noise, by the way. Getting some repairs done. Who’s what sorry? Oh that? That’s Dave. Yeah. Don’t worry about Dave. We’ve all got a Dave haven’t we. Dave mate? Give it a rest will you please. Now… when I open this next door, you’re going to notice a large fire. Do not be alarmed. We get past this bit, there’s a nice little room where we can have a cup of tea before we have to deal with the snakes. Here. Put this on. And try not to breathe in.’  

Whose side are you on? Are you with us or against us? Do you like the right things or the wrong things? Have you checked? Did you look it up? Are you sure?

Quick! Pick a team! Didn’t you know we’re at war? We can’t even agree on the facts anymore. All day every day is a struggle: who’s wrong? Who’s right? Whose fault is it? Who gets to be the judge?

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.

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?” 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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? 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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? 

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.