*(I was going to share a different post but this is the one I landed on following an unexpected, life giving conversation. Next time we’ll acknowledge and face the capitalist logic we live in. Because we need to get around to that someday.)

1. You are not Alone in the Restlessness

One of the delightful byproducts of starting this substack is the behind the scenes conversations it has given me privy to. Henkrik Karlsson over at Escaping Flatland calls a blog post ‘a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.’ I love this. I knew it to be true before I started writing here because on a different platform, at a different time, blogging catalysed for me connections and conversations with a wonderfully diverse catalogue of people from around the world. People I cannot imagine I would have met in any other way wandered into my corner of the Internet and just like that we made a connection. Some of those strangers went on to become firm friends. I even took on and successfully executed substantial brick and mortar projects with a few of them. It was the best of times. An enriching, expansive experience.

And I’m beginning to experience it again. On park benches, across coffee tables, on the telephone, in direct messages, via email, I’m hearing about the textured lives that you are weaving with care and a quiet determination. It warms my heart how many of us in our forties, fifties and sixties are quietly carving out unconventional paths, refusing to pack up our toolboxes and ride into the sunset just yet. Determined instead to engage with all of our faculties in this business of living. Of being alive. We’re in vastly different places, but we are propelled by the same spirit and same sense of purpose and desire to continue to contribute meaningfully.

Some of us are stepping off the bus because we’re not sure we want to go where it’s going any more. We used to want to, we might yet want to again in the future, but right now, we’re off the bus and studying the map. Others of us who have been off the bus, who stepped away in the service of other commitments, are now ready to get back on and go on a new adventure. Still others remain steady in place, vision renewed and heart awakened. All of us have a strong sense that where we choose to go next is important. That shuffling mindlessly forward with the crowd will not do. We are not a monolith, obviously. We’re asking the same questions, but our answers and our paths will vary. Still. We all sense that we are in the process of fully coming into our own. We’re confidently poised for next.

I love these conversations and how full of possibility and hope and grounded in wisdom they are.

And mostly I’m writing this post today to let you know that you are not alone. We can’t rush our timelines: our stories unfold in time and space, each in their way and at their pace. But we can take comfort in the knowledge that we are not alone in embarking on such a journey: others are on the pilgrimage too.

2. The Restlessness Has a Name

Adam Grant describes the well-lived life as having a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Which is to say flourishing is finding purpose and value in what you do; experiencing competence in areas that matter to you and; feeling that you make a positive contribution to those around you. He contrasts flourishing to languishing which he equates to “living life in a fog.” This anti-flourishing, the state that positive psychologist Corey Keys describes as “a sense of emptiness, stagnation and ennui,” is by all indications a uniquely human affliction. Other life forms do not pine as human beings do.

I write this in order to make a claim that I have made before: there’s no point in punishing ourselves over our pining. Until heaven comes there is a reason to pine. The point, I think, is to learn to live with the pining. To recognise it, make peace with it, but not to let it lead you by the collar. To give it its proper place and set healthy boundaries around it. To reach for what could be, make progress towards it, celebrate the progress, perhaps stumble, lick our wounds, gather ourselves and keep pushing forward, keep reaching for what could be.

3. The Restlessness is Human

We live in a broken, disordered world.

But unique to us as human beings is that we are imago Dei: we bear the image of God Himself. We possess intrinsic worth, we are significant, we were created with intention and we are endowed with dignity. We are imperfect, corrupted by sin, fallen and broken, but none of these conditions have the capacity to destroy the image of God in us because our status as imago Dei is based solely on God’s act of creating us. To borrow from CS Lewis, once a King or Queen of Narnia, always a King or Queen of Narnia. By virtue of being imago Dei, we eternally mirror God, by his own declaration, however flawed we are or how far short we fall. This is who we are—moral, intellectual and relational creatures imbued with worth by virtue, simply, of existing, and embedded with an instinct to reach to something beyond ourselves.

Because of this we all have extraordinary potential. To admit this potential to ourselves is both exciting and unnerving. What is our individual possibility, what is the possibility of others around us and what is our possibility in community with others? What is the distance between us and our possibility and how do we bridge it?

These are questions that continue to churn inside of me. What a gift to know that I carry them alongside others. What a blessing to go on this journey with you. Thank you for the privilege of your stories.

If there’s a cardinal rule for Kenyan theatre aficionados in the 21st century, it is this: if you are in Nairobi and Too Early For Birds is staging a play, you drop everything, you shove your hard earned shillings into their theatrical pockets and you show up for it. This is a simple (if a tad pricy) hack for winning at Nairobi living. It is what I did a couple of weeks ago when they put on a brilliant production about Wangari Maathai, that late, great national heroine.

This was special.

To the world she is the environmentalist who built an incredible grassroots movement and became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. To me, as a Kenyan woman, she is this, yes, and much more. A mental stash of unfavourable local headlines transform and enrich this already impressive portrait into a giant statue of a larger than life woman, a true testament to what it means to live a life of unwavering conviction and steadfast action, to be clear about what you believe, courageous to stand by it against all odds, and to act consistently according to it.

I came of age during a fraught chapter in Kenya’s history, crossing into adulthood a generation after we had gained independence at a time when we were deep in the throes of a dictatorial regime. We were a fearful people then, forever glancing furtively over our shoulders, backs hunched, tongues reeled in, eyes darting back and forth, weighed down by a thick cloud of oppression.

In the midst of that dark chapter, Wangari Maathai was one among a precious few who would not be intimidated and would not be silenced. Such a pebble in the shoe of the Moi government that Members of Kenya’s Parliament once used a parliamentary procedure reserved for national emergencies only to interrupt their normal proceedings in order to rail against her for 45 minutes.

Wangari Maathai lent us her courage while we cultivated our own and for that she will always be a national hero.

The afterglow of the Too Early For Birds excursion led me back to her memoir, hankering for deeper engagement with the story of this extraordinary woman: who she was and how she came to be who she was. Which is how I found her profound personal thesis about The Making of The Wangari Maathai. (Working title mine, thesis hers.)

Wangari Maathai understood herself, in great wisdom and true humility, as part of something bigger: an actor within an ecosystem which fed her as she poured into it. The river that fed the ocean that fed the clouds that fell over the mountains that fed the river. As she zoomed out to a bird’s eye view and surveyed her life, she saw the multitude of people, the providential events and the path-altering circumstances that had fed into it to shape who she became and to direct the course that she eventually took.

A great river always begins somewhere, she mused. An insignificant spring becomes a stream which flows on until it meets other tributaries and together they become a river. Wangari Maathai understood who she became as the confluence of the numerous and diverse streams and you cannot understand the river if you do not recognise the streams that feed it.

Early on a stream formed from her heritage and her upbringing: a father who was an avid tree planter, and a Mugumo tree around which she grew up playing. For years this stream flowed steady beneath the surface, real but unseen, patiently forging its way into becoming a river.

Years later, downstream, the river grew, gradually, and then suddenly.

First an unexpected but welcome invitation to join the Kenyan board of the Environment Liaison Centre, an international organisation set up to ensure the participation of nongovernmental organisations in the work of UNEP whose headquarters had just been established in Nairobi. She was not environmentally savvy when she began this work, but her voluntary work with ELC, which included a 10 year stint as chair of the board, expanded her knowledge of environmental issues multiplefold.

Meanwhile, she was conducting postdoctoral research on the parasite responsible for East Coast Fever, a disease fatal to imported cattle. While doing this research in rural Kenya she noticed that the rivers would rush down the hillsides and along paths and roads when it rained, muddy with silt. A sure sign of soil erosion. At the foothills of Mt Kenya, she saw rivers silted, top soil flowing from the mountain’s forests where plantations of commercial trees had replaced indigenous forests and huge swathes of land previously covered by forest had been replaced by tea and coffee. She had gone looking for a biological remedy to farmers’ problems. She came away with the growing conviction that the cattle she studied were more threatened by environmental factors than biological ones.

Concurrently, she became involved with the National Council of Women of Kenya, an umbrella organisation for women’s groups in the country. There she learned about the challenges of rural women and slowly fortified her conviction that many of the challenges they were facing had mostly to do with the degradation of their environment.

At around the same time her husband ran for parliament and she campaigned alongside him. Together they promised to create employment for their constituents. Once the election was won, however, her husband lost interest in fulfilling this promise. Wangari was mortified. When she made a promise, she expected to keep it. She launched Envirocare Ltd, intending to employ these jobless constituents to take care of the gardens of the rich and to plant trees. Envirocare Ltd did not last, it ran a short and troubled course then disintegrated. But a crucial part of it flowed into the river: the concept of tree planting.

So while her environmental knowledge, vision and imagination were expanding through her work at Environmental Liaison Centre, she was simultaneously noticing the adverse effects of environmental degradation through her post doctoral workstream, was developing a conviction to act in tandem with conversations at the NCWK and was trying to put into practice what she had learned through Envirocare.

The stream had become a river, the river was flowing, the river was growing.

There’s something at once earthy and mystical about rivers, something within our reach but beyond our ultimate control. This is why, perhaps, they are invoked so often in lore. Wangari Maathai follows a rich Kenyan heritage when she draws on the river: from Margaret Ogolla’s The River and the Source, a multigenerational epic tale of womanhood and familyhood, to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s tale of the clash between new and old, and the people caught in the middle, in The River Between. We know rivers. We understand their significance. We respect their power.

Wangari leans into this timeless metaphor to call our attention to the ecosystem that birthed her, nurtured her and shaped her into who she became. With it she links her story inexorably to other people’s stories, lesser known stories that flowed into hers. We do not become great rivers in isolation. Our rivers do not spring out of nowhere. They’re fed by tributaries which are fed by numerous little streams that spring in surprising and unsurprising places. This is the cycle of significance, meaning and contribution: someone has come before, someone will walk beside, someone else will carry it forward.

The challenge to us is stark: are we rightly recognising and paying due homage to all the tributaries that have fed our rivers? Do we understand that we are not alone in our work and our accomplishments? That others have gone before and yet others work alongside?

One of my favourite anecdotes in Unbowed, the memoir, is of an early Greenbelt Movement tree planting ceremony to which she invites Senior Chief Josiah Njonjo and the Englishman Richard St Barb Baker of Men of the Trees. Men whom I had never hitherto heard of. It turns out they had begun to promote the planting of trees in Kenya way back in the nineteen twenties. Their efforts fell largely flat but Wangari honours them nonetheless, placing front and centre of the ceremony, as those who had gone before and prepared the way. Can we do the same? Who are our unheard ofs? The ancestors, the helpers, the witnesses? Can you name yours?

I have been thinking, lately, about the unlikely ancestors. About the little things that made a big difference. What it meant for my schoolmates to perform plays and dramatic poems based on scripts that I had written. What it did for my psyche and my sense of self in ways that I did not yet grasp and could not then articulate. Of the classmate who, when I met her decades later at business school, asked me pointed questions about my trajectory. How? Why? She poked and she probed. I squirmed a little. She had known me a long time. She was present at one of the earliest springs that fed the stream that became the tributary that flowed into the river. She was, still is, matter of fact, guardian of a particular truth about me. Her forthrightness discomfited me, but it also reset my memory. It reminded me of where I had come from and who I had said I was going to be.

I’ve been thinking, too, about the disappointment of journalism school and the doubt that it planted about which way the river ought to flow. And coming to terms with the truth of the river: that though it meanders, it will eventually flow into the ocean.

I’ve been thinking about how to be more thoughtful and deliberate about the trees I’m nurturing in my mountains: the books I’m reading, the ideas I’m interacting with, the people I’m spending time with and around, what I’m listening to, what I’m watching.

And as I write, I wonder: whose river am I feeding into?

Perhaps the biggest lesson we can take from Wangari Maathai is that great rivers are dogged in the face of resistance. The great river will make a way because it must. It will find its way to the ocean because that is its destiny. Wangari speaks matter-of-factly of sticking with a thing through time and resistance, focusing on what can be done and doing it, while paying no heed whatsoever to that which is not possible. That, in the end, is her winning formula: sheer doggedness.

But there’s a lesser known twist I found that animated me. She did not travel to Mexico for that inaugural UN Women’s conference out of which flowed the Global Women’s Movement and from which some of the momentum for the Greenbelt Movement flowed. Though the NCWK sent a delegation, she was not yet a significant enough player within it to deserve a place. Nonetheless she took the knowledge, insights and ideas that the Kenyan delegates to the conference brought back and ran with them all the way to a Nobel Peace Prize. There’s a lesson there about understanding the moment, hunkering down and doing the work. It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the room in the first instance, or if you’re confined, at the start, to the nosebleed seats. What matters is what you do with what you learn and how you leverage the moment when the tide is right. Time and opportunity are not diminished because others have a headstart.

So what if I’m older, gunning for a PhD, starting a new business while trying to build a life as a writer, all post 50. Blooming late does not blemish the flower. The meandering river still gets to the ocean.

Cheers to Wangari Maathai, still teaching us how to be free.

I have vivid recollection of an evening well spent by the banks of the Nile in Cairo a few years ago. I was at the helm of a small tech business at the time and a fellowship programme I was part of had gathered us in that layered, ancient city on a very modern undertaking: an ecosystem tour. After a day of visiting with businesses and attending panel discussions, interspersed with extended periods of stewing in traffic, we had retired to the outside terrace of the Kebabgy Oriental Grill where we huddled around tables, stuffed ourselves with baladi and hummus and decompressed from the day.

Time has desiccated the details of the night and left me the unadulterated essence. At our table sat a Brazilian student, an American journalist, a French entrepreneur and I. The conversation was expansive and meandering, a fitting tribute to the moment and place. At last the journalist, at least I think it was she, placed a tantalisingly simple challenge on the table: what would you be doing if you could do anything? Everyone was surprised at the speed of my response—how top of mind my answer was, how certain it came. I had a list of four things. I pulled it out, recited it to my dinner companions, promptly refolded it and stashed it back where sensible people file their wild dreams.

My list things were not out of reach things. Some of them I have always done in fits and starts along the margins of the other things that fill my life. The challenge was, and has always been, with stopping all the other sensible, rational things I was doing and focusing almost entirely on the list things. Going all in. That would be too risky. Too far, even for I who is known to have a decent appetite for risk.

Then something happened. The business that I had spent six years giving everything I had came precariously close to dying. To be clear, it was a riskier thing than most would have an appetite for, but it was not as risky as my list things and I had, for whatever reason, a non-zero amount of confidence that I, of all people, could make it work, as I had always done. Then life happened. Suddenly I was confronted with incontrovertible evidence that I am not invincible. It was a difficult chapter: my sense of self was dented and my ego was bruised. But when I was done licking my wounds, I found that everything had changed. A stumble, an almost failing, somehow set me free. It shifted the ground under my feet in an unexpected way. Anything can happen so why not let the anything that’s going to happen find you contributing where you feel most alive? If risk is universal and inescapable, if the possibility of failing is ever present in all things, then I might as well channel my energy towards what I have always wanted to do more than anything else. To my list things.

As TV Series final seasons go, I count Season 7 of The Good Doctor, a medical procedural, among the best. Solid growth for all the main characters. Resolution arcs that unfold at a brisk pace without descending into chaos or testing our capacity to suspend belief.

One arc I was particularly curious about in the final season was Dr Lim’s. What, I wondered, would they make of this older, highly competent, highly accomplished woman who was both single and childless. How would they tie up her story? Throughout the series the show writers had regularly cornered Dr Lim and forced her to reckon with her life choices. Did she choose not to have children or did the chips just land that way? Why was she single? What would she do differently if she could? Whether the show writers had planned it or stumbled upon it, this is a fairly accurate depiction of what older, single, childless women disproportionately face: the constant pressure to justify their choices and show their workings.

Enter Season 7 Episode 9. Dr Lim treats a construction worker who has been struck by lightning. Clint is his name. Turns out construction worker wasn’t what Clint had dreamed of becoming when he was growing up. In fact, he had once been in a band, he tells Dr Lim. The band had put out a couple of EPs but they didn’t do well so he did the sensible thing and got a day job. Next thing he knew he was a foreman for a roofing company getting struck by lightning. Risk had bolted right through his safe and sensible thing.

This experience has reawakened something in him though, Clint says. He’s alive and he will not take it for granted. He has decided to recommit to his music. What does it matter if he has to eke out a living playing clubs and bars, he declares, as long as he can look in the mirror and know he’s the person he wants to be.

Clint is, of course, a perfect foil for Dr Lim: a dramatic device inserted into her character’s path to cause her to reflect on her own life. We, as the audience, are supposed to wonder whether, when Dr Lim looks in the mirror, she knows she is the person she wants to be. This is the question that hangs in the air after Clint’s epiphanic declaration.

Then Clint suffers a seizure and the doctors discover he has a tumour in his frontal lobe. If left alone, it could progress and kill him. They have to remove it and, in order to get it all out, they have to cut quite aggressively, which means that after the surgery, Clint might not be able to play the guitar.

Clint is sad, obviously, but what can he do? Alive is alive, he says. He’ll have the surgery.

Next we catch a forlorn Dr Lim looking wistfully at a photo she keeps in her office. She’s the badass bike riding Dr Lim from seasons gone by, posing in stylish sunglasses and a leather jacket on her Ducati. The scene then transitions to her consulting Dr Glassman, the resident expert on all things brain surgery, on how to operate on Clint in a way that enables him to keep playing the guitar. Because, she explains to Dr Glassman, he was struck by lightning and remembered he was a guitarist and she doesn’t want to take that away from him.

Glassman tells Dr Lim that what she wants to do, that is, remove Clint’s tumour while preserving his ability to play, is a big swing. Then he adds that she looks amped up about it and that it suits her. He loves her energy.

Is this the show’s subtle way of signalling that she’s remembering who she is too?

The surgery is successful. Dr Lim removes Clint’s tumour while protecting his ability to play the guitar. She’s protected his ability to look in the mirror and know that he is the person he wants to be. She is that surgeon.

Maybe, we in the audience are left mulling, the point is remembering who we are and why we are where we are. For Clint, remembering meant taking a chance on his guitar again. For Dr Lim, it meant remembering why she became a surgeon in the first place. For me, it meant pulling out the list.

There’s a reason we choose our version of construction worker over playing in the band and it’s not that we’re lazy, stupid or cowardly. Often it’s because it is the reasonable thing to do.

The fringe things are fringe for a reason. They’re harder, riskier or both. Or they are completely dissonant with the capitalist logic within which we make a life. It would be foolhardy to pretend otherwise. This is why it serves no useful purpose to beat ourselves up over what we have not done or what we ought to be doing. This world, with all its distortions and imperfections, is the one we have for now and it is the one we get to live and strive in. We ought, on this account, to be gentle with ourselves and show ourselves grace. But we also owe ourselves the permission to dream a little. To stretch our imaginations about what it is possible to do and be and what is worth doing. We, and the world, deserve it.

Failure is baked into the very fact of attempting anything. As soon as we get up and apply ourselves to doing something, we could fail. Sometimes the risk is low, sometimes the risk is high, but there’s always a risk.

Coming fully into that understanding after the thing that happened has helped to temper my ego. I hate to fail but I well might. The harder the things I try the higher the risk of failure. It’s still well worth it to do the hard things. I had much rather fail than not try.

Henceforth I am resolved that my orientation toward the prospect of failure will be to ask myself who I become, even if I fail. I want to spend my life on the list things, and to do them creatively, courageously, with excellence and integrity.

Viola Davis said something during her recent acceptance speech at the NAACP awards: The definition of hell, she said, is on your last day on earth the person you became meets the person you could have become.

I must be in an uncommonly optimistic phase of my life right now because what her words made me wonder was what if the best happens? What if heaven happens instead? What if the person you are turns out to be a much better version of the person you could have become and you get to heave a sigh of relief and declare triumphantly: there but by God’s grace go I? What would that look like and how could you make it so?

If we fling our wildest dreams into the universe like an unhinged prayer, wrap our hopes in words, dare speak them, let them flutter out of our bosom and into the world, inscribed with our name, do they in turn reel us out of our comfort zones and into the terrifying prospect of becoming and being what we have hitherto only dared to dream?

I keep close to heart the counsel the American journalist from Cairo offered me at our next and last encounter: do not be afraid to be ambitious, she said.

Asking what you would be doing if you could do anything is a great place to start.

Providence dictated that I should read Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden the week after I read George Orwell’s 1984, a serendipitous albeit arbitrary ordering. One week I happened to pick 1984 randomly off an unread classics list I have been working through, the next, Book Club obligations brought Theo of Golden to the fore.

When I was done reading 1984 I wanted to fight somebody. I wish that I was exaggerating. I knew it was a dystopian novel but I did not expect it to end with so much darkness and defeat. Nor that evil would score such a resounding, unequivocal victory and that Orwell would do such a meticulous job of purging all hope from its pages. No light, no hope, no redemption arc equals waiting for Godot in the Valley of Death. What’s the point? Two weeks on, having recovered from the initial shock, I concede that dystopia has its place in literature. Dystopia works in Ursula le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, for example, because it carries with it and within it an imperative. A so what? It is an uncomfortable darkness that points towards light. My problem with 1984 was not where it took me but where it left me. On that account I still nurse a grudge.

Turns out though, that reading Theo of Golden was just the antidote I needed to rinse the bitter aftertaste of Orwell’s latter day pessimism off my literary palate. Because while Orwell cynically tests the limits of who we have the potential to become when we are the worst version of ourselves, Allen Levi explores the opposite end of the spectrum, gently encouraging us to imagine what it might look like if we sought truth, made beauty and lived well.

Theo of Golden has a muted beginning marked by the protagonist’s arrival in Golden, a small town in the American south. He’s a mysterious fellow, our Theo, in his mid eighties, dapper, delightfully mannered, evasively mononymous, in possession of a slight European accent and a heather-green flat cap. The town of Golden, meanwhile, seems to straddle the line between the idyllic and the typical of towns in the American south, an idea rather than a concrete place, but it serves the story and backgrounds the characters adequately. It happens, in the season of the story, to be in the throes of a downtown renaissance, in the process of coming alive again.

We don’t know what has brought Theo to town but he soon zeroes in on a project to direct his energy toward, hatching an elaborate plot to buy the portraits on display at a local coffee shop and to gift them one by one to their subjects. He concocts a harmless ritual in service of this end, sending handwritten invitations to the would-be beneficiaries of his generosity asking them to meet him in a public place. He’ll be the exquisitely dressed 86-year old man in the heather green cap.

One by one they meet him there. He gifts them the promised portrait then gently asks a question that unlocks their life story. He takes the time to see them for who they really are and speaks words of insight and affirmation into their lives. With his words and with his attention he bestows dignity. When they leave Theo’s presence they carry with them a little bit of his glow. And so it goes that Golden, and presumably the world, becomes a better, brighter place. It’s all very warm and fuzzy and maybe just a little too on the nose.

Soon, he cultivates a string of relationships with the cast of colourful characters that populates the book: a coffee shop owner, a boisterous Vietnam veteran now proprietor of a cleverly named bookshop, the local artist whose work is displayed in the coffee shop, a music student whose distinguishing characteristic is the Cello he hauls to and fro from the nearby university every day, a night janitor at the university, a former teacher, now a busker, an influential broker who owns the apartment he eventually rents, a homeless woman whose entire life revolves around her bicycle, a young accountant who harbours a secret regret.

Levi pulls back the curtain on Theo’s story laboriously, making both the reader and the residents of Golden earn the right to know. He grew up in Portugal we eventually learn, has lived all over the world and has come to Golden by way of New York. We do not know, until the sun is about to set on the story, why such a worldly man picked Golden. We deduce that he is a man of considerable means by virtue of his casually depositing a six figure cheque with the influential broker to underwrite his expenses, his impulsively and anonymously taking on the significant medical costs of one of the town’s residents, and his anonymously hiring a good lawyer for an illegal immigrant who he is not personally acquainted with. We do not know from whence his wealth comes.

We also eventually piece together by the aggregate of his actions that he is a connoisseur, and perhaps an aspiring patron, of the arts. He pays for portraits created by a local artist, sends art supplies to another budding artist confined to a hospital bed, buys the student virtuoso a high quality bow for his cello, tips the local busker generously, and enthusiastically encourages the homeless woman to pursue entrepreneurship with her beautiful invention, the Featherwood.

A quarter way through the novel, our patience is rewarded with a flashback to a tragic event in Theo’s past that has left an indelible scar on him. ‘Our’ meaning the readers’ patience. The residents of Golden are not so privileged.

And so the book ambles along down a sidewalk on story mainstreet, occasionally pausing to peer at a character through a chapter window but mostly just moving forward at a steady, unhurried pace.

There’s no central villain. It soon becomes clear that Levi has no desire or inclination to deal with unsavoury characters. He halfheartedly helicopters in two-dimensional minor characters to disturb the peace but is obviously discomfited by them and has no interest or investment in them. He ushers them off page at the earliest opportunity.

Nor is there, to compensate, a daunting obstacle that our protagonist must overcome. Sure, there is the sometimes delicate, sometimes complicated work of identifying and tracking down the people featured in the portraits, but Theo eventually delegates most of this work to others, confining his role to the composition of handwritten notes to each recipient and attending the actual meeting. Even here, his path is uncharacteristically clear for a protagonist. Can there be a hero’s journey without a viable enemy and a significant ordeal we wonder? Perhaps Levi means for us to conclude that we are joining Theo at the tail end of the journey, on the road back. That the obstacle and the antagonist are in the past.

But in the end there’s no way to sidestep the conclusion that we are in the hands of a staunch optimist by temperament, one in whom hope springs eternal and one who writes with a faint but unmistakable Christian accent.

The Audible version has an afterword that the book does not. In this afterword Levi describes Theo as a man who has made the decision to live a life that is deeply generous, whimsically creative, self forgetful and full of kindness. Then he beseeches us not to read Theo of Golden as an idealistic story but rather as pure realism. I understand why he feels compelled to make this plea but I demur. Theo of Golden is a ferociously optimistic novel and, by me, there’s nothing wrong with that.

I am reminded of a clip I watched of Toni Morrison responding to a question asked at a literary festival about how we survive whole when we’re all victims of something. She talks about behaving as beautifully as one can under impossible circumstances then asserts, very firmly, that good is more interesting, more complex and more demanding than evil. Evil is horrible but it is also silly and is not a compelling idea therefore needs to be dressed up elaborately in order to draw attention, she says. Goodness is just more intellectually compelling.

I love this.

We live in cynical times but perhaps overindulging that cynicism and admitting pessimism alongside puts our souls in danger of shrivelling. Levi’s description of the initially unwelcoming Mrs Gridley is sharply observed: ‘she had felt the slow contraction,’ he says, ‘of a soul that had given itself too completely and with too great a sense of importance, to the marketplace.’

Why not give ourselves over to a healthy dose of optimism and idealism instead?

In the course of his year in Golden, Theo bestowed many gifts, but the most meaningful and valuable were the least tangible: dignity and attention. My favourite relationship that Theo developed and nurtured during his year in Golden was with Ellen, the homeless woman. He did not try to solve her homelessness, although, given his orientation towards the world and his means, he could have if he wanted to. Instead, he accorded her human dignity with a bespoke handwritten letter and a portrait, gave her his genuinely engaged and undivided attention, and asked her about her story. He listened to her and affirmed her as wise and strong and, significantly to her, motherly.

There were others in the community who were kind to her. Shep. Tony. Jason. Mrs Ocie van Blarcum. But somehow she distinguished in Theo someone who saw her as human. Thus in church she declined kind Mrs Ocie van Blarcum’s invitation to sit with her family and insisted she wanted to sit with Theo. “No man has ever sent me a handwritten letter before, “ she told him. It was as simple and as special as that. She called him her one eccentric friend. Her friend. He graciously accepted a tour along the River as a reciprocal gift, and received her special handcrafted offering besides. That too was a deeply dignifying act. She saw that he did not see her as less than because she sometimes lived under the bridge.

Even though in encounters such as these Theo comes off as too good to be true, we indulge Levi for the most part and let him have his fantasy. He had, after all, signalled at the outset by the name he gave his protagonist that he had a mind to infuse him with the nature of God himself. Credit to some serious tightrope walking on Levi’s part that Theo doesn’t land on the page as insufferably perfect. It’s not so much that we feel that we can be like him but that he leaves us wondering what it would be like if we were to learn from him how to navigate the world with kindness, how to look intently into people’s faces and how to be a force for good in the world.

Speaking of indulging optimism and idealism reminds me of Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived TV series The Newsroom. It was one of my favourite TV series ever, mostly because Sorkin was unabashedly idealistic in projecting the image of what the news media could be at their best. Unsurprisingly, news media practitioners hated it: he bruised a lot of egos in his attempt at modelling what could be. The audience ratings were skyhigh, though, and that should tell us something.

I remember The Newsroom now because of a meta conversation that took place in the Season 2 finale between two principal characters: Sam Waterston’s Charlie Skinner and Jeff Daniel’s Will McAvoy. It was a significant exchange because the episode was originally intended to be the series finale. Sorkin, tired of the flak he was taking, was having his final say.

The conversation was embedded into a high stakes moment. The fictional Newsroom team had aired a false story on the back of forged footage resulting in a public outcry and industry uproar. So the leadership of the newsroom, Charlie, Will and Mac, had resolved to take responsibility for the error and resign in order to restore credibility to the organisation. But Charlie had begun to question that decision. Maybe walking away wasn’t the answer. Maybe they should stay. It had been a mistake, not an act of malice after all. It was while mulling this that Charlie asked Will if he had read Jedediah Purdy’s book For Common Things. He described how it talked about cynical times, people having terminal irony with a studied refusal to hope or care openly.

I suspect that Aaron Sorkin included this reference because he felt a kinship with Jedediah Purdy. Reviewers had savaged Jedediah’s book a decade earlier, just as they were now savaging Aaron Sorkin’s series. Jedediah, surprisingly young at the time of authorship, was scorned as, among other things, insufferably smug. Ouch.

He was an ”Optimist in a Jaded Age,” declared a review in Time magazine in partial explanation of the backlash.

That jaded age persists today but its utility, if ever it had any, is waning. It is easy to be cynical. It’s hard to be hopeful.

If I have to choose, I choose to be hopeful.

As to the technical elements, suffice it to say its literary deficits are not fatal to the project. The storytelling surpasses the writing, but not so much as to cause the stool it stands on to wobble. There are plotlines that could do with some tidying up, characters that could be more rounded and paragraphs that could have been tightened. But, overall, it works. Despite breaking a lot of rules of novel writing, somehow it works. Its deficiencies do not make it less, they make it what it is.

Even the end, although we come to it by a truly shocking turn, eventually does justice to the story, to my mind at least.

Forever more the town of Golden will be marked by two eras: Before Theo, and After Theo. And that, I suppose, is the kind of impact one wants to have on the world. Theo is our best self. A portrait of us living our best life. Cheesy? Absolutely. But load me up on the cheese please and thank you.

This house is reminded that we all need a spark of optimism in our lives. We have Theo of Golden to thank for that.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to walk in the fullness of the particular graces you have been endowed with.

By a particular grace I mean something that is synonymous with gifting but also carries some of the gravitas of calling. Being set apart for a specific task or role and therefore being equipped and prepared for it.

One of my particular graces might be the courage to step into the unknown. To take risks. To venture down the unconventional path. To sit in uncertainty. To be okay going alone if there’s no one there to go with me.

This is what is being mirrored back to me in the words lifelong friends and acquaintances alike are speaking into my life this season. It is not a realisation of epiphanic proportions, but it is something I have needed reminding of. Something I am glad to be reminded of.

Are we wired to see what others possess that we lack, but not to see what we possess that others lack? Or maybe it is that we spend so much time with ourselves that we become blind to what is exceptional about us. I wonder if this tendency is by divine design, a feature, not a bug.

I do know I sometimes marvel at graces in others that I recognise as lacking in my own life. Like deep wells of social energy, always available to feed and nourish the souls of others. Or the steadfastness that toils in a place for two, three, four decades, devoted and constant, without restlessness and roiling.

I also know that we don’t pick our graces: we are equipped for them by God, our nature and our circumstances. But we can cultivate them to bear fruit, even the ones we carry reluctantly. (One such particular grace I carry reluctantly is mature life singleness. I did not choose it, but it is an important part of my story. I carry it with peace, gratitude and the knowledge that it has shaped me into the person that I am today.)

I use the term particular grace to denote a God-given capacity because it seems to me more grounded and gritty, more sober, less frilly than gifting. It’s the reason I went on a layman’s quest to try to understand the biblical and ecclesiological use of the language of graces and giftings over time.

I learnt that Paul wrote in Koine Greek and used the word charisma to connote both a general gift, such as redemption, and a specific endowment given to a person so as to be used in service and enrichment of a community.

Turns out the word charisma is etymologically rooted in the word charis, that is, grace. Charisma, a thing of grace. A gift of grace. Jerome of Stridon’s translation of the Bible into Latin, the Latin Vulgate, used the word gratiarum, also grace, which influenced the discourse for the next millennium, Latin being the dominant literary language in Western Europe in that period.

Then along came William Tyndale. In 1526, when he translated the Bible into English, he rendered charisma as gifting. This in turn influenced the King James Version and set the trajectory for the entire English speaking Bible tradition.

This is an oversimplification by a novice, of course. I am skipping over a slew of theological debates between the protestant reformers and the Catholic church about the nature of spiritual gifts that almost definitely influenced these linguistic choices. Suffice it to show that I am not inventing the delicate dance between gifting and grace, and then to step aside and let the river flow where will.

My favourite find was a sermon by a Victorian Baptist preacher named Alexander MacClaren. Translating charisma as grace rather than gift, MacLaren contended, preserves a connection Paul saw between the charis (grace) given to us and the charismata (graces) that flow out of it. And then he added this nugget of brilliance: As a candle plunged in a vase of oxygen leaps up into a more brilliant flame, so all the faculties of the human soul are made a hundred times themselves when the quickening power of the life of Christ enters into them.

Every Christian, said MacClaren, possesses in some form, that grace which gives graces. Therefore each one possesses graces that flow out of that grace.

The challenge before us is to live fully in our particular graces, recognising that others have not been given them to our measure, while at the same time encouraging and freeing others to walk in their graces.

I think here of one of my favourite characters in the Chronicles of Narnia, Reepicheep. I’m no rodent aficionado but I am a great admirer of Reepicheep, of the tribe of the talking mice of Narnia.

Fearless and full of valour. Ready to take on anyone or anything, be it giant or dragon. His particular grace derives directly from the natural challenge of his tribe: their diminutive size. He says as much to Aslan when Aslan accuses him of being a little too fixated on his honour. Yes, he concedes, but have you seen how little we are, we have to be.

Fair enough. Even Aslan himself appears to concede the point.

Reepicheep’s valour is constant. It does not change according to the hour, the object or the surrounding. When Eustace goes missing on Dragon Island, Rhince mutters that it is good riddance. Understandably so because Eustace has been a nuisance the entire voyage hence. To everyone’s surprise, Reepicheep, towards whom Eustace has behaved particularly atrociously, rebukes Rhince. Eustace is one of their fellowship, Reepicheep declares, therefore he must be found alive or avenged. This is the code by which he lives and the code by which he is ready to die.

His valour is his destiny. When the travellers learn that the only way to break the enchantment over the three Narnian Lords asleep on Ramandu Island is to sail close to the world’s end and leave one of their party behind, Reepicheep’s particular grace meets its moment. Of course he is the one of the party who will be left behind. It goes almost without saying. He will go to the utter east and sail in his little coracle into Aslan’s country, never to return.

When the time comes, the sword that he has wielded with relish ever since we met him is thrown off. He shivers with happiness. He was made for this. This is his ‘This is where I go alone.” No one tries to stop him: they see clearly that this is his designated path.

Then there’s that other story near the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the cautionary tale.

When they get to the Utter East, King Caspian’s sense of adventure is awakened. He gathers his fellow travellers and announces that he is going with Reepicheep to find out what lies beyond. He proceeds to detail the plans he has laid out for how the band of travellers under his charge will return to Narnia without him and how his kingdom will be run in his absence.

He makes this pronouncement fully expecting everyone to align. He is, after all, their King. Fortunately, they do not. Not even when he becomes irascible. He is the King of Narnia, they tell him firmly, and he has a duty to his subjects. What’s more, if he continues to threaten to abandon his duty they are ready to disarm and arrest him in order to prevent him from going off with Reepicheep.

“You shall not please yourself with adventures as if you were a private person,” they scold.

Reluctantly he stays and has to suffer watching Reepicheep, the Pevensie children and Eustace head off where his heart longs to go.

There’s a bittersweetness there. In Prince Caspian, the book preceding the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, all of Narnia had come together to restore his kingdom to him, following which he had taken on the mantle of King that was bestowed on him by Aslan. A triumphant moment for Narnia and for the once Prince, now King. A new Narnia born.

Then of course follows the nitty gritty, knee-deep, elbows in, business of ruling. Not quite so glamorous as being hunted down, coalescing an army and facing an enemy. But it’s what one does when one is called to be a ruler. And the ruler of Narnia is who King Caspian is.

My favourite part of the Caspian stumble is that in that critical moment when he wants to cast off his calling and be damned, he is surrounded by people who know him. Keepers of his truth. The ones who remind him who he is when he has forgotten.

This is why I pay attention to the common thread that runs through the words spoken by those God serendipitously places in my path. Especially the longtime keepers of my truth. When they reflect back to me my relative level of comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty, I take it seriously. Perhaps this is the thing that I have in hand, just like the ordinary rod Moses held in that desert millennia ago that became a vector for the miracles that God performed for his people.

A while back I read something on LinkedIn that has stayed with me: One person’s acceptable level of ambiguity is another person’s swirling chaos. It came back to me recently when we went through a personality assessment exercise for a women’s group that’s in the early stages of its formation. A solid majority of our small band of women scored high marks as nurturers. Reader, I did not. Creative Pioneer is where I landed. Off the normal curve, but right where I ought to fall. Once upon a time I might have squirmed at what I do not have. Now, I am grateful for what I have.

Because in the end our accountability is for what we do with the particular graces that we have been given, not the ones we wish we had.

Frictionology (n.) 1. The study of the role of challenge and difficulty in learning and growth. 2. The study of the value and meaning of effort and striving in the lives of human beings.

There’s nothing quite so spellbinding as witnessing a miracle of nature unfold. Even at my big age, watching the timelapse of a caterpillar morphing into a monarch butterfly on YouTube is an event of sublime proportions. Utterly captivating. Bless the hands that labour to capture such beautiful footage for our enjoyment. Thank you, also, for so timely a reminder of the role resistance plays in the making of these beguiling, majestic creatures. The reminder that if a butterfly does not squeeze out of its cocoon, its wings will be malformed, rendering it incapable of flying. That the friction is a feature not a bug. Pun most definitely intended.

If we pay attention we begin to espy the pivotal role of friction and its extended family—struggle, effort, striving, grappling, exertion—wherever growth is sought and learning takes place. We build physical muscle by way of weight bearing resistance. The buried seedling is formed into a sturdy plant by breaking through the compact soil, reaching towards the sunlight. The blade gains its edge through grinding against a stone. Nature is strewn with clues that friction is the master sculptor’s tool.

Many many moons ago, as a student of education, I learned about productive struggle. Productive struggle is a process through which learning is achieved as learners apply themselves to challenging but ultimately achievable tasks. The role of the educator is to calibrate the pitch of the struggle so that it remains within a range where the learner is sufficiently challenged but ultimately able to overcome the challenge. That’s what makes the struggle productive. This range, this productive bandwidth, known as Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, is the distance between what a learner can do independently and what she can do with some instructional support. The good teacher does not teach what the learner already knows or what they do not have the capacity to grasp yet. She stays within that bandwidth where the learner experiences a reasonable amount of challenge: not too little, not too much.

Later, as I progressed in my career and became a student of leadership, I discovered that the productive deployment of friction surfaces in leadership and management literature too. For top of mind example, through Ronald Heifetz’s work on Adaptive Leadership and how to effect meaningful change within organisations. To prime for successful change, Heifetz posits, a leader must meticulously control the temperature within the organisation. This involves keeping the temperature high enough for team members to feel sufficiently uncomfortable and therefore amenable to change while simultaneously ensuring that it is not so high that the team gets overwhelmed and abandons the necessary work entirely. There’s that bandwidth again. Too little discomfort leads to complacency, too much discomfort leads to intolerable stress. In Adaptive Leadership, that band between too little discomfort and too much discomfort is called the Productive Zone of Disequilibrium.

Meanwhile, in the public square, conversations about how we deal with everyday frictions have gained momentum in the recent past in tandem with advances in technology. Our natural bent seems to be toward fashioning frictionless lives, but what effect will this frictionlessness have on our wellbeing?

Consider Sherry Turkle’s exposition on the subject In a TED Talk back in 2012 she raised the concern that people were increasingly eschewing face to face interaction in favour of technology mediated conversations.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation, she offered as explanation, it takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say. Adding also: human lives are messy, and we clean them up with technology. That is, we use technology to curate, retouch and edit our lives and to eliminate the friction of real time engagement with our fellow human beings.

This was back in the days where the overarching concern was the adverse impact of social media on human interaction. Further complications have surfaced since.

It’s no wonder that in another talk that Turkle gave two years ago, she sounded decidedly more fraught. This time her attention was fixed on Artificial Intelligence. She detailed her investigation into the emerging practice of people replacing real life friends with robot companions. A niche but growing phenomenon. People are forming strong bonds with these computer programmes and rejecting human connections, she lamented, because human beings are not as reliable as man made machines. The drama of human connection is exhausting, was how one user she encountered put it.

Which is not untrue. Human connections demand something of us. Technology, not so much. Technology is setting standards that flawed human beings cannot match. Our pretend conversations with robots are flawless. They listen to us. They understand us. They reassure us. They validate our thinking. They comfort us. They’re perfect conversationalists. Every crease of friction has been painstakingly ironed out. Under these circumstances, why would we hanker after the messy imperfection that is human connection?

In what might sound like a dramatisation of Turkle’s worst nightmare, the BBC’s Hannah Fry reported on a recent visit with a man who has a Replika chatbot as a girlfriend. Jacob does not appear to be your typical romantically unsuccessful man. He has had romantic relationships with women before and has two adult daughters. But now he has formed a romantic bond with an AI companion of his own design: A beautiful, very compliant woman who does exactly what she’s told.

When Fry prods him about this he retorts, so what? It makes him happy. What’s the problem? He tells Fry that his daughters see positive changes in him thanks to Aiva, his synthetic girlfriend. He seems happier. He insists that he feels more confident, stronger. Why, he asks, should he deal with real life situations he doesn’t like? He’s happy with his AI.

Fry wrestles with what this portends. What if we get to the point where everyone has their perfect synthetic partner who exists purely for their happiness, she asks. It raises the bar for our expectations of relationships beyond what humans can possibly live up to. Then what?

I do not know. I do know that Jacob’s rationalisation for giving up on human relationships sounds eerily like the excuses I proffered during that season when I had given up attending church regularly.

I just don’t have the energy to deal with people. I don’t want to. Why do I have to? Yes, of course I’m still a Christian, I just don’t want to deal with the drama.

Oy.

Talk about the woman in the mirror.

Andy Crouch concedes that all things involving persons involve a kind of strenuousness. You have to work, you have to attend to the other. If you initiate a conversation and then halt mid-sentence, no explanation offered, and return three hours later wanting to pick up right where you left off, any reasonable human being would be livid. Rightly so. A robot might not even register that you were gone.

This is why Crouch describes technology as magic. It produces effects without requiring the producer to become the kind of person who can produce those effects. It enables us to get things done without applying ourselves. To become the kind of person who can come up with a formidable idea, you need to go through a process of formation. So too to become the kind of person who merits openness and trust in an intimate relationship. Technology broadly, and Artificial Intelligence specifically, short circuits this. It cannot form you into the kind of person who can come up with a compelling idea, or the kind of person who is trustworthy because formation demands exertion, but it can provide you with a borrowed compelling idea or it can perform trustingness with you. You achieve a version of the outcome without becoming the kind of person who can independently deliver that outcome. That’s the false promise of Artificial Intelligence. Instant, effortless power. Instant effortless results.

The problem, Crouch says, is most of what develops us as healthy human beings involves some kind of exertion, discipline and vulnerability. Yet we continue to harbour and nurture the fantasy of eliminating all effort and vulnerability in our lives. What happens when we do this, Crouch warns, when we are not subjected to the right developmental experiences, is that the self we bring to the world is a thin self. A shadow of who we could be. Of who we are capable of becoming. There is no shortcut for the formation of persons. If there is, no one has discovered it. If someone has discovered it, they have not falsifiably demonstrated it. We’re cracking open the butterflies cocoon prematurely then wondering why it cannot fly. Everyone loses. Everyone is the worse off for it.

Speaking of Thin selfs: Jonathan Haidt expounds on the concept of Antifragility in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. It’s an idea borrowed from Nassim Taleb. Haidt’s book, which he co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, argues that protecting young people from discomfort, challenge and adversity produces psychologically fragile human beings. Children are antifragile Haidt says. They need challenges, shocks and setbacks. If you protect your children from these, they will be weak. The reason Gen X are resilient is because they were accidentally left to their own devices in childhood. The reason Gen Z are fragile is because they have been intentionally protected from friction and adversity all their lives. Hence the subtitle of the book: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

Friction lore has surfaced in interesting ways in other places.

In his conversation about writing with David Perell, Ezra Klein details the evolution of his thinking about what it means to read. Where he once thought reading was about downloading information into his brain, he now sees that when you are reading what you are doing is grappling with the text and making connections that can only happen through that grappling. That there’s something about spending time wrestling with something that integrates it into the way your mind works.

The researchers from MIT who conducted a study on Large Language Model (LLM) assisted essay writing would likely concur. They divided study participants into three groups. One group was assigned to write with LLM assistance, the second with the help of a search engine, the third instructed to write brain-only, with no assistance. They assessed cognitive load during the process of essay writing and then assessed the output, the essays themselves. The EEG scans of brain activity during the writing of the essays showed the brain-only participants exhibited the strongest activity, followed by the search engine participants. The LLM users exhibited the lowest brain connectivity. Self-reported ownership of the essays followed the same pattern, with the brain-only participants reporting the highest level of ownership and the LLM users reporting the lowest. And in the aftermath, the LLM users struggled to quote their own work. They did not do the cognitive legwork necessary to really process and encode the knowledge so that it became their own.

This reminds me of something I heard Matthew Lee Anderson say on the Trinity Forum podcast: there’s a unique cognitive burden that comes with sitting down and reading a book that’s 350 pages long. It is the sort of cognitive experience that is demanding, that asks something of you. To this astute observation I would add that because it asks something of you, it gives something valuable in return.

There’s an essay by Riva-Melissa Tez that went semi-viral about ten years ago. It was titled Silicon Valley has a ‘Problem’ Problem. I have used it a few times since in presentations about what sets apart the African innovation landscape.

Tez lived in the Bay Area and in her post she rued the fact that the cultural end goal of Silicon Valley seemed to be to achieve some form of a fully-automated, seamlessly efficient version of existence. This dubious end goal led to the framing of everything that resisted technology’s molding, any obstacle that stood in its way, as a problem. She vehemently disagreed with said framing. Not knowing whether you can get your Sushi delivered to your exact location at precisely 10pm is not a problem. Neither is not knowing where your nearest dry cleaner is. These are privileges and perks, she declared, not problems. Not having substantive problems to solve had blunted the impact of Silicon Valley’s considerable talent, and; trying to create a frictionless experience was in itself detrimental to the calibre of the talent in the valley. They were shrinking themselves by applying themselves to nonproblem problems.

What does all this mean for where we are today and where we’re headed?

I believe the instinct to minimise friction is a function of our collective history. Our ancestors lived through extremely challenging times and navigating those times to make today possible required concerted effort and ingenuity to overcome unbearable levels of friction.

There are pockets of humanity where that former hardness has not been eliminated. Places where human beings are not yet guaranteed basic dignities such as sufficient food, access to clean water, secure shelter, a relatively peaceful life and a decent livelihood. These circumstances exist far outside the Bandwidth of Acceptable Challenge and it behooves us to do all that it is in our collective power to do to change them permanently.

At the same time, we need to pay close attention to the other end of the continuum and all the ways in which we are turning the dial so low on friction that we are in danger of falling off into a mindless, purposeless complacency, stripping our lives of meaning. We are in danger of overcompensating for past frictions by overswinging the pendulum. Of becoming emaciated, flattened people.

Our social, intellectual and physical muscles grow where they encounter resistance. As they grow, so does our confidence, our sense of self. This is how we become our whole, rounded selves. This is how we build flourishing communities. Our everyday frictions make us and the total elimination of friction leads to the elimination of the wholly formed self.

The question is not whether we can eliminate all friction but whether we should.

Recently a friend led me down a narrow spiral staircase and into the crypt of St Martin-in-the Fields Church at Trafalgar Square, landing us in a bright little corner nook that serves, among other things, as a book store. Our original destination was the adjacent coffee shop so we steered left and exited, but soon enough, we were drawn back to that nook. I was enthralled. It wasn’t that it had a wide variety of books—I had been to a number of far better stocked bookshops just that weekend. It was rather the kind of books that it stocked: beautifully rendered editions of some of our favourite classics.

I picked up a few, including two poetry collections. To my credit, difficult as it was, after a couple of tries, I managed to shelf back the Wordsworth Luxe Collection edition of Jane Austen’s Emma. My highly marked up Penguin edition would do. Oh but these books were all so beautiful. My favourite new acquisition was a hardcover of The Great Gatsby. Also a Wordsworth Luxe Edition. It looks so exquisitely put together and by someone who obviously loves books. Substantial but comfortably portable, five and half by eight and a half inches, powder blue hardcover with the gold detail, the edges dusted in a cerulean hue.

It is a great read, and of course the story itself remains exactly the same whether you read this hardcover, a paperback version or an ebook. But I was moved deeply by the tribute that this edition paid to its material. Excellence paying homage to excellence.

As an indie book publisher in the idealistic madness of another life, I know the economics of publishing are such that this is not something you can do with every book.

I know.

Still :it is such a balm to the soul to encounter excellence, or at the very least, an unabashed striving after it. Excellence need not be out of reach of the modest pocket, of course. It can happen in other less gold-gilded, more pocket conscious ways. It begins, in publishing, with the care with which words are strung together, flows into to the editorial rigour that brings the best out of the author, to how the pages are laid out and designed to focus on and enhance the material, to the paper you pick and the printer you choose. Every step of the way, a commitment to excellence is an expression of love and care for a thing. Not just for the physical book itself but for the ideas it contains, the people it will reach and the lives it will impact.

Once upon a time I worked for an organisation that owned moderately-sized office premises in a suburb of Nairobi, complete with a lush garden back, front and around. One of my absolute favourite things about working in that compound was how our garden was tended. Lisalisa, the gardener, probably late forties, early fifties back then, bounded about the compound daily in overalls and wellingtons, garden tools in hand, always merrily about his business. If you had the time, he would have a story to regale you with. If you did not, he smiled and waved. What I remember most about him was how much he loved his job. How he brought a deep sense of pride, flair and zeal to it. Low lying flower bushes, main character in the garden’s opera, bougainvillea and such, were his sculptor’s clay and he was forever rendering them into all manner of beautiful, creative likenesses: a smiling face today, the shape of a tea kettle next month, a star of David come advent season. It was an immaculately kept garden, the kind the only response to which is to linger.

I am certain that I do not need to convince you how much such striving for excellence edifies the soul if you have at least once had the privilege to be in its presence.

A turn of phrase by Jessica Care Moore that reaches right where it itches, and scratches. Steph Curry sealing the deal against France in Paris with that golden dagger over Nicolas Batum and Evan Fournier. A breathtaking rendition of the Nairobi skyline by Mutua Matheka. When you first grasp what Rushdie is trying to pull off in Midnight’s Children. The Tabernacle Choir performing Mack Wilberg’s arrangement of that great hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. An exquisitely prepared and artfully presented home cooked meal. Opening your friend’s new App to test it and finding its user flow flawless. Listening to CeCe Winans in live concert. Standing in the middle of King’s College Chapel. The gorgeous dress Monica made herself for her wedding.

Excellence is all around us. When we see it, we cannot help but catch our breath. It stops us in our tracks. We recognise that we are in the presence of arete. Human beings operating in the full realisation of their potential. Human beings putting their very best into the mundane and the extraordinary alike. Fine craftsmanship is a source of wonder. Excellence touches something deep inside of us and demands a response. It points to something bigger, someone bigger, the ultimate source and ultimate audience of excellence.

There’s more: there’s the joy that those who pursue excellence bring to the task itself and to the product of the task. It’s palpable. It’s undeniable. Alongside excellence and pushing the boundaries comes pride in the accomplishment, but also, joy.

Because it is presented to us so flawlessly, it is easy to underestimate how much has gone into achieving excellence.

Lisalisa snipped and cropped a bush into the shape of a puppy for an hour perhaps, which in itself is painstaking effort. But how much time he spent thinking about what he wanted to render next and how he would render it is unaccounted for. As is all the time it took him to master the skill to turn a bush into a work of art. To sharpen and master his craft.

In Court of Gold, the documentary about the basketball gold medal quest at the Paris Olympics, Steph Curry reflects on that golden dagger moment. It was his fourth three-pointer in the last two minutes of the gold medal game at a time when Wembenyama and his teammates were still pressing hard, determined to stay in the game, spurred on by a boisterous home crowd. He had done it so many times, he said, that once he set it up and shot, he knew that if it didn’t get blocked, it was going in.

The done it so many times is the key. He’s not talking about doing it in competitive play, before a crowd, but on the everyday court, in practice. That is where the secret sauce is made. That is where excellence is brewed. Curry is famous for having one of the most rigorous practice routines in the NBA. He pushes himself intensely. Everyday. When he wasn’t performing at the top of his game at the beginning of the Paris tournament, that’s what he fell back on. He just kept pushing himself in practice. So much so that coach Kerr told him to ease up. Take a break. But he wouldn’t. Because he understands what it takes. It’s that kind of commitment and discipline that gives you the confidence to go to the coach during a high stakes moment and say, give me the ball, I know what I want to do with it. And the rest is basketball history.

Gabriel Marquez’s short story Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon is a startling fable, deceptively simple yet richly layered, as is much of Marquez’s writing. Ultimately, it is the story of how a poor man’s fine craftsmanship, his work of undeniable excellence, allows him to temporarily, and perhaps irrationally, upend the social hierarchy and play benefactor to a rich and powerful man’s son.

Pepe, the son of the rich man, commissions Balthazar to build him a cage. Balthazar labours diligently over it for two weeks, neglecting all else. He doesn’t shave. He almost doesn’t sleep. When it’s done, the whole town is abuzz with news of it—it’s the most beautiful cage the town has ever seen, the most beautiful cage in the world. His house is bursting at the seams with people come to behold this beautiful thing. A true work of art. But for Balthazar, it’s just another cage because he had been making cages since he was a child and it took him just about the same amount of effort. The excellence oozes out of him now, it is the mode in which he operates.

Along comes a doctor who has heard about the beauty of the cage and wants to purchase it for his wife. When he beholds it, it surpasses his highest expectations. He heaps compliments on Balthazar. He calls the cage a flight of the imagination and tells Balthazar he would have been an extraordinary architect on account of the complex three-storied structure he has designed and built. Balthazar, only a poor man, receives this high praise with a blush. The doctor then offers to buy the cage. Balthazar refuses. He built it for Pepe, it’s going to Pepe.

So Balthazar dresses up and takes it to Jose Montiel’s, the rich man’s, Pepe’s father’s, house. Except when Montiel learns of its existence and the expectation of payment, he is livid. Balthazar should never have taken a commission from a child without consulting his father. He scoffs and orders Balthazar to leave with his cage at once. Pepe, Montiel’s son, throws a tantrum and his wife, gripped with wonder at Balthazar’s creation alongside all the other townspeople, beseeches Montiel to let their son have it. Montiel stubbornly refuses to yield. Balthazar, seeing Pepe’s distress, gives the cage to the boy for nothing at all and walks away. It is his. It was made for him.

The poor man becomes the rich man’s son’s benefactor and then turns and walks away, head held high.

Between this dramatic climax and the end of the story, is an equally dramatic spiral: Balthazar becomes rowdy along with some hanger on townspeople who think he’s been paid for his magnificent work. He spends money he does not have, gets debauched while his wife waits at home for him, and gets robbed as he lies spread eagled on the street, abandoned by his fickle admirers.

The poor man is further back from where he began because he has left his watch at the pawn shop to pay for his revelry and his shoes have been stolen from him. I have a sense that I should pity him but I find that I cannot. He now carries the knowledge that he is the man who built the most beautiful cage in the world. He is a man capable of doing that. That is a bright light to carry indeed. He has done it once, he can do it again.

Andy Crouch poses an interesting challenge towards the end of his book, Culture Making. Throughout the book he has made the case that The New Jerusalem is the culmination of the great story God began writing for humanity in the garden of Eden. Cities, he argues, are the locus for the peak in human achievement and culture, and this is what The New Jerusalem will be: the apex of culture. His challenge is to always ask ourselves as we go about this life, what parts of what we do now deserves to find a place in The New Jerusalem? Books as part of its libraries, art to hang on its walls, music to serenade its citizens as they stroll the streets in the early evening.

I rather think that Balthazar’s cage for Pepe would find a place of pride in that city.

So let’s begin with something out of left field: I am a big fan of Steph Curry, and the Golden State Warriors. Out of left field because I’m one of the least sporty humans I know. I wish that I was kidding. With regards to the NBA, I rode the global Michael Jordan era NBA mania on a casual FOMU wave that flattened after his first retirement. I hardly registered his second stint. Then one day, about a decade ago, I read a longform essay about Steph Curry because I love longform essays. The unlikeliness and inevitability of his story reeled me in. I was hooked. I became a fan and began to follow the Warriors with avid interest.

I had always had it in mind to one day make the obligatory Warriors’ fan pilgrimage to Chase Center in San Francisco to watch the team live but no matter how many times I found myself in California, I was unable to make it work. Then in 2024 I got it into my head that if I didn’t tick this item off my list soon, Curry would retire before I actually got to see him play in person. With a renewed sense of urgency I plotted and calculated until things finally clicked. On my way to a conference in Mexico, I would detour via Houston to watch the Warriors play the Rockets.

Best. Time. Ever.

It didn’t matter that I was seated in the middle of a Houston Rockets crowd loudly cheering on the Warriors and catching a decent amount of stank eye for it. It didn’t even matter that Steph didn’t play in the game: he put on his usual pre-game exhibition for his fans and that was enough. My heart was sated. I posted my (poorly composed, sorry) photos from that adventure on Instagram and headed off to Mexico.

That’s when the puzzled private pings flooded in. You went to watch who? Play what? Where? When did you start to pay attention to the NBA? Basketball? You watch basketball? The near and dear and present were confused. I had thrown them for a loop. Turns out being an ardent Steph Curry fan wasn’t one of those things I wore on my lapel. None of the people who carry my stories, the people who remind me who I am when I forget, knew. Not one.

Yet it wasn’t something that I set out to hide. It just so happens, I suppose, that I am not proselytic when it comes to my interests. Often, rather than recruiting those around me and persuading them to come along, I look for people who are already immersed in those interests and jump in with them. That’s what I did as my interest in the Warriors grew.

But this brought home to me again how much it takes to be known fully by our nearest and dearest, and to know them in turn. Especially if we don’t live with them, because physical proximity helps us stumble upon random things about a person. If we live with others, we have built in witnesses to our lives, for better or for worse. If you are like me and have lived alone for more than three decades, it’s more complicated.

I read an article about VS Naipaul many years ago that made an impression. A scathing biography about him had just been released. Patrick French, the author, had demanded and obtained unprecedented access to all of Naipaul’s private journals and correspondence. He also had access to Naipaul’s wife’s diary. He spent countless hours over multiple years grilling Naipaul. He had, by all accounts, complete unrestricted access to the author’s life.

The result, The World is What it is, an authorised biography, was highly lauded when it first came out. Sam Anderson of the New York Magazine described it as perhaps the most shockingly authorised biography in the history of authorised biographies. Shockingly authorised, it turns out, because of the way it laid Naipaul bare in unflattering light. It exposed all the ways in which he was verbally abusive, flagrantly unfaithful and exceedingly cruel to his faithful first wife. It disclosed how he regularly visited prostitutes and physically abused the mistress he kept for a quarter of a century. It confirmed the niggling suspicion that, despite his own humble beginnings, he was a rabid and unrepentant racist and classist.

What was remarkable to me was that Naipaul treated this unflattering exposure with nonchalance. A shrug and an okay. He wasn’t thrilled with it, per se, but he was happy it was out there, he said, because people got to see him as he was before he died. He got to be known. If you came to the conclusion, after knowing him, that he was a narcissistic misanthrope, so be it. He wanted his monument built while he was still alive, as George Packer put it.

Frankly, this makes me squirm. Because no, I don’t want all my foibles and failings on full display in public. Sorry. There are parts of myself that I can only entrust to my people and I’m certain I do not want to broadcast them to the whole world. Maybe I’m not as evolved as Naipaul yet. Maybe I should hold off on writing a memoir.

I heard Salman Rushdie say something in the same vein to Ezra Klein as they discussed his autobiographical memoir Knife. That the principle of the autobiographical memoir is to tell as much truth as possible. If you’re not going to tell the whole naked unvarnished truth, then don’t write the book, he said.

What both men are saying, quite rightly, is that if you want to be known, lay all sides of yourself bare. That’s the only way.

The problem is, to be known is not necessarily to be understood. Nor to be liked. Therein lies the risk. Sometimes we pull back the curtain on who we are and people just don’t like what they see. It seems to me, though, far better to be disliked because of who you really are rather than liked because people think you’re someone you’re not. Henrik Karlsson of Escaping Flatland has a brilliant piece of advice: show the inside of your head in public, he says, so people can see if they would like to live in there.

I heartily agree. We should frontload our quirkinesses and our oddities. Not necessarily flood the streets, but make sure they fall like a steady rain so that someone who can’t stand it will reach for an umbrella. It will save everybody a great deal of time.

Frida Kahlo points out the distinction between those who love us and those who don’t.

Those who love us, she says, see us with their hearts and give us qualities beyond the ones we truly have. And those who refuse to love us can never be satisfied with all our efforts. What’s interesting is that in both these versions of us, we’re not really being seen in the raw. In one version, we are loved and therefore we are backgrounded by a beautiful blue sky, rolling hills, a rainbow maybe. In the other version, our very presence and our every step is stalked by ominous mood music. It’s a version of us at the core of both frames, but we present differently, depending on who is looking at us, and in the end, it is not all of us exactly as we are.

In the movie Shall We Dance, Susan Sarandon’s character is asked why people get married. Because we need a witness to our lives, she says. I have carried that one line with me through the years though I could not for the life of me tell you what the movie is about, whether I watched it to the end or indeed anything else that happens in it. It’s a powerful line. Perhaps more poignant to me for having lived my entire adult life as a single woman. The point is the witness sees something, and therefore knows something and maybe that makes it, and us, a little more real.

It’s why Tauren Wells’ Known is a balm for the soul: It’s both hard truth and ridiculous grace, he sings, I’m fully known and loved by You. God’s most consequential promise is I know you fully and I love you completely.

Sometimes we don’t know ourselves. Or perhaps we don’t want to know ourselves. We look in the mirror and we do not like what we see, so we close our eyes and pretend. Other times our eyes are wide open, and yet.

Remember when Elizabeth Bennet read Mr Darcy’s letter after she had turned down his proposal? She was reluctant to accept his version of events at the first reading. And then she read the letter again and the scales over her eyes began to fall off and it soon became clear to her that she, who prided herself in her sound judgement, had fallen into deceit. At the height of her embarrassment about how she had been mistaken, she exclaims in despair, Till this moment, I never knew myself! Her trust in herself is shaken to the core as she comes to the realisation that everything she believed to be true about the situation up to that very moment was in fact the very opposite of true.

To have faith in one’s own judgement and then come to such a moment can be deeply rattling and profoundly humbling. It is also getting to know oneself better.

But Oswald Chambers wants us to get rid of the idea that we understand ourselves. Only God understands us, he says. He calls it the last bit of conceitedness to go. Am I then really all that which other men tell of, Bonhoeffer writes from prison, or am I only what I know of myself? He lingers long in that uncertain place, between how others perceive him and who he understands himself to be.

If we are always becoming, then knowing ourselves and being known by others has to happen in the present continuous tense too, I suppose, unfolding right alongside who we are. Which is why it makes sense that only God, situated outside of time, can truly know us.

May you experience the unparalleled intimacy of being understood by someone who cherishes you.

Conversations regarding the place of work in our lives have become decidedly more fraught in this age of the commoditisation of AI. We will lose our jobs to AI, we’re frequently warned, it’s a matter of when, not if. Which begs the question: who do we become if we do not have our work? Let’s stretch our optimism taut for a moment and imagine that the world is able to pivot successfully into one that provides a Universal Basic Income so that everyone has the resources they need to live a dignified life when the robots take over at the factory. In this scenario, when there is scarce opportunity for employment and no need to work, will we still work? What kind of work will we do? What will the purpose of work be?

I turned fifty-five this year, the age at which my parents retired from their formal jobs and pivoted into small-scale farming where they have been steadfastly engaged since. Getting here makes me pensive. I cannot fathom retiring in the near future but I fully intend to gain more control of what I do, how I do it, when I do it and with whom I do it. Get off the corporate highway, so to speak, step into a drophead coupe, and explore those scenic back routes in the world of work. Perhaps this too explains my current preoccupation with the nature and purpose of work, what its possibilities and boundaries are.

Recently I came across a thought provoking essay titled Why Work by the brilliant Dorothy Sayers, first given as an address in 1942 in the middle of the second World War. Could this octogenarian essay’s ideas on work inform my thinking on work in our very different age?

Her definition of work crosses the bridge of time without incident because we are ideologically aligned. Work is an expression of our humanity, she says, and it should be undertaken for no other reason than love of the work itself and for the sake of doing that work well. It is a reflection of the image of God in us: God made things, and we who are made in His image, should make things. The notion of doing meaningful work for its own sake and for the satisfaction of doing it with excellence resonates. Nonetheless I concede that it rings a tad idealistic in our present world where there are always bills to pay. Like something we might reach for and not expect to grasp. But I am convinced that we must continue to work in the day of the robots, else we lose a critical part of what it means to be human.

Sayers insists that all work is sacred, whether it takes place in the secular arena or what she calls the ecclesiastical arena. Any barrier between so-called secular work and God is a barrier we ourselves have erected. The very first demand that the Church should make of a carpenter, she says, is that he should make good tables. A pious carpenter insults God if he produces bad carpentry. I love this to a tingle on my skin. Yes to all of it. Diligence and excellence in our work are an expression of our devotion to God. To her, a building must be good architecture before it is a good church and work must be good before it can call itself God’s work. Also: if you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian and do excellent work. That is what Christian work is.

An idea that seeps out of her essay though not fully developed: It does not matter what the details of the work are as long as it aligns with your giftings, talents and inclinations and is not contemptible, soul destroying or harmful. Writer, barrister, janitor, astronaut or farmer.

This idea is a noble one, and it sits in interesting side by side contrast with what anthropologist David Graeber disdains as the proliferation of ‘Bullshit Jobs’. In a 2013 essay, Graeber, intrigued by the realisation that despite unprecedented technological advancement in the preceding century, everyone was working more, not less, set out to understand why. A deep dive led him to the conclusion that a vast majority of modern jobs are in the administrative domain. Professional, managerial and clerical jobs, that is. The paper pusher class. Noting the burgeoning of this administrative class, Graeber had a vision of hell as ‘a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.’ This vivid image is the mirror opposite of what I deduce to be Sayers’ vision of heaven: a collection of individuals spending the bulk of their time working on projects they love and are very good at.

Graeber might consider Sayers’ framing of work as sacred responsibility a socialist construct but they have in common a desire to escape the modern day ‘squirrel cage’. Sayers might bristle on account of Graeber’s worker productivity language, but she would resonate with his questioning why society such as it is currently constructed seems to generate very limited demand for poet-musicians and nigh infinite demand for specialists in corporate law.

Sayers also asserts in her essay that the first duty of the worker is to serve the work first, the community second. This is a controversial sounding notion at the first reading.

It immediately calls to mind Dr House of the TV series House MD for me. (I’m a bit of a medical procedural aficionado, you will find, once you get to know me.)

Dr House is a character who is technically brilliant and relationally disastrous. He is a genius diagnostician, no one can dispute this. Time and again his work saves lives no one else can. He does deeply impactful work. But, he is also a misanthrope. He constantly uses, misuses and mistreats the people around him in service of his own selfish ends. Throughout the series, the writers resist writing him a sustained redemptive arc. The underlying message seems to be that he is just who he is. He is not interested in his patients’ humanity, only in solving the puzzle of their complex medical conditions. His work produces indisputable good in the world, but his methods consistently sow pain and discord. He serves the work but he shirks any responsibility to the community at every turn. Sometimes it makes for mildly uncomfortable viewing, and sometimes is painful to watch.

This is not what Sayers had in mind by what I can gather from her essay. The only true way to serve, she says, is to truly be in sympathy with the community, to be a genuine part of the community and then to serve the work without giving the community another thought so that the work is true to itself. Dr House ignores the community because he disdains it, not because he seeks to serve it with his best work. Its only value is in delivering a steady stream of human puzzles that he can poke and prod to satisfy his deep analytical nature and his obsessive curiosity.

Still, Sayers warning to keep community at arm’s length from the work is wise. Creative work in particular. It is true that it is impossible to do great work if you are constantly worried what other people think. That worry will distract you and lead you to produce subpar work. Do the work from a place of love for the community but at a distance from the community that allows you to give the work your very best. As with most things, the principle is universal, but the application will be personal.

In his introduction to Sheed’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, Peter Brown describes Augustine’s posture in the work as having his back turned to his audience throughout the work, oriented instead towards the God, in order to draw us into the sacred mysteries.

If I had leeway to dictate the nature of work in the coming age of the robots, I would design one fairly close to the one that I understand Sayers to have envisioned: one where we spend our time applying ourselves to work that we enjoy, find meaningful and are able to consistently deliver to a high degree of excellence. This is the vision for the post fifty five life too. And although I should not like to be beholden to the community, I would hope that my work would serve it. The point on which Sayers and I might quibble would be on the monetary compensation. But that’s an essay for another day.

I wish you the privilege of meaningful work today, and the competence and patience to do it with excellence.

(This is Chapter II of the Living Large Chronicles. Read Chapter I here.)

Exploring the prospect of living in a new place is one of the offshoots of my resolve not to shrink my life as I grow older.

I want to live large. I know that in contemporary use the language of living large has been appropriated for economic signalling, used to connote living with material abundance. Such a waste. I hereby reclaim living large to mean an open way of being in the world that makes room for more. More in knowledge and understanding, in contribution and vocation, in relationship with God and with others. Living expansively. Something akin to what I heard them call Great-Souled Living on the Imagination Redeemed Podcast. Yes, that.

But: I don’t want to glorify the novelty of uprooting oneself at the expense of holding steady over time and remaining deeply rooted in one place. It is possible to live an expansive life right in one’s back yard, gazing in wonder at the stars, and, conversely, a hemmed in, hollowed out one on a ship in a far away place, seeing only huge balls of flaming gas. The point is not moving, it is refusing to shrink.

So: here I am, in the prospective new place, on a reconnaissance trip. Boots on the ground to test a possible new life. Can a fact finding venture such as this be a form of spiritual practice? I have recently read excerpts from Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World for a class I’m taking. He rejects as false the partitions we erect between the sacred and the secular, advocating for receiving the whole world as a gift from God and living our lives in their entirety as communion with God. Seeing every common bush afire with God, Elizabeth Barrett Browning might say. In such a world, even something so logistics-laden as a reconnaissance trip can be a form of spiritual practice if we choose for it to be so. This is the orientation with which I want to move through the world.

It enchants everything. It enlivens even the most banal of things.

Could I live here? Where exactly would I live? What would I do here? How does all this fit into my unfolding story and how, conversely, do I fit into the evolving story of this place?

Although I have been here before, this feels different, perhaps because I am looking at it through a different set of eyes. I am mulling on, rather than brushing past the frictions. Like how the cold can sting even when the sun is out and the sky clear. Like the card machine on the Whippet bus that outrightly and repeatedly rejects my credit card. Ending up in Cambourne because I missed my stop. The cost of everyday things. The way I’m spending an inordinate amount of time nose buried in maps. Not being fluent enough in the nuances of the place to know whether the asking rent for a place is a steal or a theft. Feeling unmoored.

I am paying attention to the random acts of kindness too. Like when I was on the bus week before last. It had no Passenger Information Display up front, with a continuous scroll announcing where we were and where we were going, as other buses did. I was angsty because I did not want to miss my stop. Night was falling and the dark would complicate my navigation home. I asked the stranger next to me whether she knew the Vet Uni stop. No, she said. Then she whipped out her phone, opened her map app, zoomed in, zoomed out and studied it intently, eyes narrowed, brow furrowed. Following which she turned and said to me, here’s what we’re going to do. Reader, we had become a we. And we did. We (mostly she) figured out where I needed to alight. We waved goodbye and that was that. I still don’t know her name, nor she, mine.

This is not the only act of random stranger kindness that I’ve experienced here and that’s an important data point about a place.

In Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata has a fascinating depiction of Keiko, the protagonist, who has worked in the same store for eighteen years. I barely use my head as the rules ingrained in me issue instructions directly to my body, Keiko says.

My Nairobi life has that short circuit. There’s a great deal that I can do on autopilot.

Here, though, I have to keep my head fully in gear, no time for coasting. This is one of my key observations to date: that just as I had predicted, being out of my comfort zone has forced me to be in a constant state of high alert. Sometimes I’m fully aware that I don’t know where I am going and that I have to keep my eyes up to figure out what street I’m on and where I need to turn next. Sometimes I know, but not enough to completely relax my brace.

I was recently put onto an essay by Jeffrey Snover where he rehashes a speech Microsoft’s Satya Nadella gave his senior team about leadership. He said they had two controls available to them in pursuit of the successful execution of a project: the clarity, energy and culture they gave their teams was one, and how they allocated their resources was the other.

On this particular life project, I am currently a team of one, but I found what he had to say about resource allocation illuminating. The imperative for achieving extraordinary success, he said, was to allocate resources ahead of conventional wisdom. That is, attempting to make accurate predictions about what will matter in the future ahead of the pack. That, of course, calls for boldness and significantly increases the risk of failure. Nadella, well aware of this, gave his top executives permission to fail on one condition: they had to be intellectually honest.

And what does being intellectually honest look like? Four things, he said: you have to have a plausible theory of success in the pursuit of your goal; you have to allocate resources in line with that theory of success; you have to monitor your theory, and you have to pivot as soon as it becomes clear to you that your existing theory of success is implausible.

This, Snover proposes, is the architecture of success.

I’m on a somewhat different journey than the mammoth technology company that is Microsoft, but I find that this basic framework resonates. It could serve as an architecture for intellectual discernment too.

The current life project I’m undertaking is to define and build a good life for myself for this season in my life. I’m in the exploration phase, clear about the two overarching questions I want to answer for myself: a) can I make a good life here and b) do I want to?

To answer the question of whether I can make a good life, I have to be clear about what makes a good life in general, and what makes a good life for me in particular. Which takes me back to Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, often translated into English as flourishing. Flourishing, Aristotle posited, could be achieved by living virtuously, exercising reason and fulfilling one’s potential.

It is the last item on this list that preoccupies me at the moment. My convoluted career journey notwithstanding, writing is where I have always sensed that gravitational pull of vocation which I now feel compelled to yield to or forever feel displaced in my own life. I don’t know how else to explain it except to say that when I write, I feel most at home with myself, most alive, and most in tune with God. It is where I think best and the means by which I discover what I think. I will always have multiple interests and pursuits, but writing is an overarching priority for this season and forward. Writing especially as a core spiritual practice, for the glory of the Giver in accord with Schmemann.

There are practical considerations, of course, as part of the day to day demands of this embodied life. I still need to figure out a way to keep a roof over my head and pay the bills in this emerging dispensation. There’s also the fact that this version of a good life is quite a pivot from the one I cultivated in the past decade and a half. What becomes of all the skills, knowledge, experience and networks I have built and accumulated? Do I just pack them away in boxes in the basement and forget about them? Relinquishing what I have a firm hold of in order to take hold of something else, no matter how much I want it, is complicated. That’s what I’m learning. That liminal space between letting go and taking hold is fraught with self-doubt. To calm my nerves I remind myself that if I have to do other things for practical reasons, I will do them, in service of, not in lieu of, writing.

For now, I’m living the experiment, collating and interpreting the data. I’m making overtures, meeting and talking to people, and visiting places. I have more clarity than a month ago, less clarity, I hope, than a month from now. I am trying to allocate my time and resources according to my theory of success and, at the same time, to treat the journey itself as spiritual practice.

And so we move.

I have an agenda today. I keep running into the idea, lately, explicitly expressed or implicitly held, that reading literature is a waste of time. That its value is limited to the classroom as an archaic rite of passage, outside of which its purpose is only entertainment, and that in a world where there are many more efficient ways to inject entertainment into our veins. That it has no value in and for the real world and is superfluous to life and the pursuit of God.

I could not disagree more. So this is the one where I try to persuade you to read more literature, because literature is life giving.

By literature I mean works of fiction that invite us to encounter our own humanity and the humanity of others through the imagination, with reasonable latitude as to the nature and form of that encounter. It might be delightful, or shocking, unsettling or horrifying, it might resolve, it might not. What is true is that on the page and through the power of words, we catch a glimpse of the divine nature that God himself placed in man and all the ways that that nature can be expressed or distorted.

The best of literature is about human beings or their avatars wrestling with the complexity of their humanity, encountering the range, depth and expanse of the soul and responding in heartening, perturbing and dreadful ways. It sets them in configurations that are alternately mundane and wild, alongside other human beings who may be friendly, hostile or indifferent, among diverse things, places and ideas, and churns all these elements together to serve us new and enlightening ways of seeing ourselves, others and the world we live in.

Oswald Chambers speaks of the light that shines so bright that it is a kind of darkness. If you have ever dared look into the glare of brilliance, you know this to be true. Emily Dickinson offers up her powerful Tell the Truth But Tell it Slant. The truth, she suggests, is too bright for our imperfect selves to bear.

Two trains arriving at the same destination from disparate directions.

We saw this play out when David, God’s own beloved, the one after his own heart, did a terrible thing. He committed adultery with another man’s wife, impregnated her, tried to set up her husband, failed, and having failed, ordered him killed. A disappointing, tragic, domino chain of poor choices that displeased God.

So God deployed a story, delivered skilfully by Nathan, the Prophet. A story about a rich man who commandeered a poor man’s only sheep in lieu of one of his many. David received the story with indignation and anger. Unsurprisingly. The injustice of it is clear for all to see. He wished death upon the rich man. Only then did Nathan deliver the twist of the knife: the rich man, he revealed to David, was he. It did not matter that the poor man and the rich man were imaginary. It mattered that they were true.

Some truth in plain form is hard to receive. Its light is so bright that it blinds us. But when that truth is handed to us swathed in story, our lowered defences receive it, and in looking at it, we see clearly what has always been. In this way, literature can be a trojan horse bearing truth past our outer walls into our inner sanctum. Sneak past those watchful dragons, in C S Lewis speak, past our conceptions of ourselves and our self-deception, hold up a mirror, forcing us to see ourselves as we are. Stories bypass rational and emotional barriers to present difficult truths in ways that enable us to hear them. And faith is strengthened by encountering the truth.

That’s only one of the things that the best literature can do to us and for us. It can also deepen empathy by presenting to us flawed others and their human foibles in ways that gives us access to their imagined interiority. Would we join those who walk away from Omelas, or would we be among those who remain? It can remind us who we are capable of becoming as we watch little Lucy stand up to her older siblings and determine that if they will not, she must go where Aslan leads. It can force us to face our frailty as we witness The Death of Ivan Illyich. It can remind us we are not alone, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, and it can be, for a moment, a means of escape from the world, if we so desire it.

And then there is, into the bargain, the breathtaking showcase it provides of human creativity. It reaches for what is possible, touching it lightly, and in so doing, stirring up in us a sense of what could be. It is the product of the human imagination in much the same way as we are the product of God’s imagination, therefore it is not surprising that encountering good literature calls up the divine in us.

And with literature, unlike with other creative art forms such as music, art and film, there is a unique act of co-creation between writer and reader. The writer imagines and describes. The reader interprets and imagines. In that liminal space between writer and reader, worlds upon worlds are spun and woven.

We worry, rightly, that our attention span has been shattered by the proliferation of the visual and textual short form on social media and wonder whether we can carry the length of a substantial piece of literature. Fortunately, this adverse effect on our attention is not a terminal condition. We can hunker down and retrain our long-term attention. It’s a muscle we need to exercise and we are losing it because we’re not using it. If we read longer, and read increasingly more complex writing, we will wean it back. The way back to reading more literature , therefore, is by reading more literature.

I have heard it suggested, too, that championing the reading of literature is elitist. But that suggestion itself is an act of patronising snobbery. Aesthetic and literary appreciation is not the preserve of a particular class of people. Everyone has an aesthetic sensibility and people from all walks of life can and do appreciate good literature.

I offer two anecdotes in brief counter to the charge of elitism:

The one is recounted by Chimamanda Adichie in her highly regarded TED TALK, The Danger of a Single Story. In it she tells the story of a messenger who worked at a TV Station in Nigeria where she was attending an interview. Chimamanda describes her as part of the ordinary masses of Nigeria who were not supposed to be readers. But this messenger had not only read Chimamanda’s book, she had strong opinions about a sequel and was not afraid to express them to the author.

The other is from Jonathan Rose, who, in The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes, documented how one of the key complaints by young working class women in the UK at the advent of mass industrialisation was that the increased factory hours were eating into their reading time and time for other intellectual pursuits.

The pleasure of reading, of engaging the imagination and soaring into new worlds on the wings of words can be and should be afforded to anyone and everyone. If only we deign to address such fundamental questions as universal literacy and affordability.

If you have not read a work of literature in a while and your interest is piqued, I offer a short reading list to awaken your literary tastebuds:

Short Stories

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

Tekayo by Grace Ogot

The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen

A Righteous Man by Tochi Onyebuchi

Novellas

The Great Divorce by CS Lewis

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy.

Pick one, find it, read it, savour it. Don’t be afraid to face the questions it asks of you.

Opening yourself up to literature, even literature that takes you to uncomfortable places such as the pieces I have shared above, is opening yourself up to an encounter with the transcendent: with the good, the true and the beautiful.

Of all the miracles life affords, the most delicate yet durable, the most singular and far reaching, is friendship.

What CS Lewis says is true: friendship has no survival value; biology does not need it in order to engineer the self-perpetuation of the species. Yet like philosophy and art, it adds inestimable value to survival. Not necessary for life but indispensable for the life worth living.

By far my favourite Lewisian reflection on the subject is about how friends catalyse and augment one another. In each friend there is something that only some other friend can bring out so that as the circle of friendship expands beyond two, it becomes richer and acquires more texture. That’s because by ourselves we are ‘not enough to call the whole man into activity’. So we benefit when other lights besides our own shine on our friends and bring into focus the different facets of who they are. In this way shared friends see and experience more of each other, and, subject to practical limitations in the realm of time and space and social considerations of preference and affinity, we “possess each friend not less but more as the number of those we share with him increases.”

I watched a clip of Trevor Noah, emerging modern day patron saint of friendship, talking about something akin to what Lewis describes here. His friends are his horcruxes, he says, leaning into a Potteresque metaphor. Each of them keeps a little piece of himself that he wishes to keep. This one keeps his sense of humour, that one his tenacity. A good friend is someone who reminds you of something good inside of you.

Not all our friends will hold all the pieces of us all the time. As circumstances and trust unfold over time, some will come to bear more of us and carry the weightier pieces of us, but no one will ever hold every piece of us. The gift is that there are those willing and able to receive and carry the different pieces of us that make up our whole.

I’m fascinated by the rich and eclectic life that Aristotle lived. Because of all else we read and hear about him, many don’t realise how much he wrote about friendship. He is best known as a philosopher, of course, but he dabbled in everything: biology, chemistry, history, logic, rhetoric and more. He was carrying out scientific research to classify animals into genus and species on the one hand while building the foundation of formal logic on the other. And in the midst of all of this, Aristotle found time to think and write about friendship.

He was persuaded that good friends are an essential part of a flourishing life and he called friendship one of the most indispensable requirements in life. Which, at first glance, might sound incongruent with Lewis’ view. Except Lewis was describing a life at the edge of survival, Aristotle was describing a flourishing life.

When Aristotle tackled the subject of friendship, he wanted to get the full measure of it. To distill its true nature. Was it, as Euripides described, a mutual fulfilment of a complementary yearning? Or was it more after the fashion of Empedocles “Like seeks after like?” Also: are people drawn to those who are objectively good or those who are good for them, he wondered.

After significant churning, he crystallised his thoughts on the nature and shape of friendship. To be friends, he declared, you have to feel goodwill for each other, you must be aware of each other’s good will and the cause of your goodwill must be one of friendship’s three underpinning motives: pleasure, utility and goodness.

Those three motives flowed into his list of three types of friendship.

First are the friends of pleasure. You do fun things together and you enjoy being around each other but the friendship is sustained wholly by that enjoyment and once it ceases as people evolve and interests change, the friendship peters off. Think teammates, for example. Or young children and their first friendships.

Second are friendships of utility. Friendships premised on mutual, or sometimes one directional, utility. Perhaps a business, or shared vocational interests, or political alignment. Maybe two peers build a friendship at work that helps them survive a hostile work environment. When one or both exit the context, the foundation on which the friendship was built might collapse. At the end of their utility, these friendships are prone to falter too.

Third are what Aristotle called friendships of virtue. Longhaul friendships. These are friendships with and between people who resonate at a soul level, whose deep values are aligned. Kindred souls. They are friendships grounded in who people are. They can begin with utility and often bring pleasure, but they go further and do more.

Aristotle doesn’t suggest that friendships based on pleasure or utility are bad, mind. Only that they do not last beyond the range and degree of the motive. In other words, have them but don’t count on them.

You have to know your flow friends and hold on to your ebb friends. Some people are sincerely your friends when you’re in your flow but don’t know how to be there in your ebb. We must not demand of our seasonal friends that which we can only get from our perennial friends.

It’s complex and it’s complicated.

Friendships sometimes fizzle. Nobody’s at fault: sometimes people just grow in different directions, intellectually, socially, spiritually, or even geographically. For friendships to continue to thrive where there is no lived intersection, considerable resources of time and exertion need to be committed and expended. In other words, it’s possible, but it takes serious work. Sometimes we make the decision, consciously or unconsciously, to channel those considerable resources elsewhere and elsehow. Something that was real and tangible and meaningful becomes a shadow of its former self. But just because it has changed does not mean it was not true nor that it could never be true again.

Friendships sometimes break. All of us are flawed and human and eventually our brokennesses will rub up against one another and wound. Sometimes grace abounds and friendship survives these wounds. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Friendships sometimes sprout in unexpected places. You’re going about your life, tending to your patch, walking in your lane. Then you serendipitously bump into someone who’s got the soul of a kindred and you immediately know there’s a friend in there that you’re going to be happy making.

What’s also true is that friends change us. Friendship leaves an indelible mark on us.

Friendships are living things. Seeded and nurtured by individuals, they grow to exist as third entities outside of them and alongside them. Friendships grow and change and adapt as they are nurtured or neglected, always one or the other, never neither. Some bloom, bearing fruit and offering shade. Others blaze for a season then turn to ash. Some abide long in quiet step, present yet unobtrusive.

My boss passed away just over a decade ago. I had not known him long before he died, but it was clear in the short time that I knew him that people were drawn to him and that he had a particular gift for nurturing deep and meaningful friendships.

His friend said something at his funeral that I remember to this day: he said the day my boss died, his entire vision of his future changed. He did not yet know how he would do it but he knew he had to rewrite his entire future because my boss had always had a starring role in his imagination of every moment of his life and now my boss was dead.

Because of course as we are sharing pieces of ourselves with our friends, we’re making room for them in us.

I wish you the incomparable wealth of deep and abiding friendship today. Plant seeds, nurture them, watch them bloom.

This is the one about how we choose to live and the decisions we make about how to be alive in the world. Life happens to us every day; we can go along with it and see where we end up, or we can move out of default mode and steer.

Staying awake in your life gets harder as you grow older. You have travelled long enough to know both the highways and the backstreets, and your vintage is hard-won. You have gathered a life that now lies sprawled in eclectic patchwork across your passenger seat, your backseat and your boot. There are odd squeaks here, bumps and scratches there, but you know what they are, where they came from, and what they mean. The radio may be old, but you know instinctively how to angle the dial to listen to that full-throated Christian alternative rock that ferries you to your favourite window perch in heaven. You have earned the right to drift on the wheels of habit, experience, and success.

The question is: do you want to?

I recently re-read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library for my book club.

For those who haven’t:

Nora Seed, the central character, hates her life, so she takes steps to end it. Only, instead of dying, she finds herself in the titular Midnight Library, a place where her infinite possible lives are indexed and she can indulge her curiosity about how her life would have turned out if she had taken any number of different paths. A cornucopia of junctions leading down a seemingly infinite number of roads not taken.

So begins a series of journeys into her other possible lives, which, however intriguing, always end up disappointing her. Because such is life: whatever Haigian library life you choose, whichever Frostian road you take, you end up right there with you.

As it happens, I stand at a fork in the road myself and have recently determined to take the path decidedly more risky. Out of habit, maybe, but also because I want to keep my hands on the steering wheel. My beloved, family and friends alike, will tell you that this is neither new nor surprising. What once would have caused a storm at the announcing now barely ripples the surface. Just me being me. I have made the unconventional choice before, and despite everyone holding their collective breath, I have been okay. Better than okay. It has become not so much what I set out to do as what I end up doing. My “way leads on to way.”

Yet, even for me, packing up an established life to experiment with beginning again in a new place in this latter season is dialing things up a considerable notch. It’s not so much that I’m nervous as that I suspect that I ought to be nervous. So I vacillate between cautious anticipation and mild apprehension, churning the possibilities and pitfalls over in my head, occasionally wondering whether I have bitten off more than I can chew, reminding myself that big bites just take longer to chew.

As Blix said to Maddie: whatever happens, love that.

I’m going to do this, and whatever happens, I am going to love it.

I want the mindfulness that comes with being in an unfamiliar place. Mongoose on its hind legs, neck craned, intently surveying the savannah, reading the landscape at the tip of its nose. That feeling. Everything is new; nothing is familiar. You have to pay attention. You cannot take things for granted. It makes you more alive, moves you out of autopilot and into gear. I have a theory that this is why God called Abraham away rather than blessed him in place. To a life unfolding one step at a time, keenly watching and listening for the cue to turn from the Lord of the Dance. “It’s you and me, Abe.”

Learning. Growing. Creating. Writing. Pushing boundaries. Wrestling with ideas. Solving seemingly intractable problems. These are the nutrients that nourish my soul. This is the cluster of stars in the universe by which I calibrate my compass.

Always unto God.

I harken back to the words of Thoreau: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

This is the hope. This is the prayer.

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig traces the futility of the torture we put ourselves through over all the other choices we could have made and all the other people we could have been. But the value of yesterday lies in the school fees it paid for today. Today is the beginning; today is what matters.

The only way to live our lives is present and forward. If our eyes are forever cast sideways or backward, it can breed a kind of madness.

For the present is the point at which time touches eternity, says C. S. Lewis.

Mrs Elm says to Nora Seed, “the only way to learn is to live.” Which, absolutely true.

But conversely, the best way to live is to learn. To be an eager, voracious learner. To observe attentively. To read widely and closely. To set up hypotheses at every turn. To gather data wherever you can, however you can. To be curious. To ask all the questions. To listen keenly.

I want to live my life making the big decisions thoughtfully and consciously, letting the small ones squeeze into the spaces in between. These days, when I worry that I won’t know the decisions I’m making are the big ones until long after I’ve made them, I call up Arthur Brooks’ Big Four Framework (descriptor mine, framework his) as standard and measure: faith, family, friendship, and meaningful work. Those are the big pieces I want to keep my eyes on.

To be here is to be grateful. Grateful for what I have learned on the journey to here, and grateful for the opportunity to set out on a new adventure at the intersection where my faith meets my desire to do meaningful work in the world.

I am determined to guard my sense of wonder, and to live fully while being alive.

Let’s do that, shall we?

Join me on an adventure to I Don’t Know Where. We’re going to love it there.