Like me, you have maybe been reminded recently about history. Someone maybe told you about the Spanish flu for instance, and how people wrote novels during it. Or other times in history - world wars, for example, you may have been reminded, were much more trying than what we’re enduring now. This is, of course, true, and sometimes it’s wonderful to gain a sense of perspective from the worst times in history. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to think of the times in history we don’t know about. The unrecorded. The times when people thought, “well that wasn’t much of anything”. 

It’s a cliché these days that Pixar films make people cry. Don’t know what a Pixar film is? That just means you are not intimately attuned to the viewing habits of small children. For that, you should be quietly relieved. Like, don’t boast about it, but well done. There are these films for kids, though, and they are cartoons for heaven’s sake, but they make grown adults cry. Recently, I watched one of these films, called Coco, and I may one day stop crying, but that is by no means a certainty. The film is about the Mexican celebration, the Day of the Dead, and in it, the souls of the deceased get to visit their loved ones for the day, unseen but celebrated and remembered. A lot of the film was about the grief of the living. For me, though, I kept imagining it from the point of view of the dead. Imagine! Just one day! Reunited with the familiar and the normal and the downright complicated business of life again. Even now, with all the things happening in the world, even with the mundane and the awful and the infuriating and the depressing, even with all that, imagine getting a whole day.

Well, well, well. Here we are. That happened fast, didn’t it. Everything, I mean. At once. A lot that felt, suddenly, like we were a toddler at a surf beach being surprised by a wave coming in from behind while we were busy watching a seagull. 

This one’s for when it’s all too much. Genuinely terrible. When, as it has been lately, your world feels like it’s on fire. When life feels unfair and out of control and terrible and awful and relentless because it is. 

I’ve been laid up sick recently - the kind of sick that makes you feel like a character in a Dickens novel, groaning and dabbing your forehead and passing out for days waking only to wonder why better healthcare hasn’t been invented yet. There really is nothing nice about it, and to all of you dealing with ailments and illnesses, long-standing or short-lived, all power to you at all. 

You’ve probably heard that mind-blowing fact about how when you condense the entirety of human history into a year, humans don’t arrive until that weird little period after Christmas and before New Year. 

The other day I saw a headline promising an in-depth article about why winning lots of money isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I laughed, of course. Stared into the middle distance for a bit thinking of all the terrible times I’d have if I won lots of money. I imagine you too cannot think of a single thing about suddenly owning millions of extra dollars that would make you happy. 

Do you remember the feeling of being on a team? At school, maybe? All of you together, trying to strategise your way around some problem or other? Or maybe at work - figuring out how to get things finished on time, shoulder to shoulder? Maybe you’re on a team with members of your family or your partner or your dog - going on a walk that’s a little longer than you expected and getting slightly lost before stumbling back into familiar territory and giving your team member a bit of a scratch behind the ears while you breathe a quiet sigh of relief. 

I recently saw a baby notice a statue. 

We were both waiting in line in the sun to get into an event in the inner city, this baby and I. I didn’t know the baby personally. She was looking over a parental shoulder, scanning the crowd, when her eyes fell on the statue above us. It was still and stern and pointing while riding horseback, its copper eyes staring down at the baby, whose brain was occupied, as all baby brains are, with trying to decode the universe. That was the moment I saw for the first time how bonkers statues are.

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.