Category: The Garden
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The way I see it, there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are active. Who change things. Who affect what’s around them, who make a difference, who shape the world in some way. And there are those who are more passive. Who let things happen to them… who drift.…
Letter to Isaac: Work Hard… Do Your Best
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Week seventeen, then week eighteen. The end of the isolation chapter, and something that shifted in me during the hardest part of it. I’m still not ready to say everything that happened in those weeks. But I can say something. The three weeks leading up to this point were the hardest of my life. Mentally…
The Enforced Brake – Covid Part 5
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Week seven, then week ten. The middle stretch of lockdown had its own texture… a mix of small wins and a particular kind of low-grade exhaustion that’s hard to describe unless you were in it. Week seven was actually a good day. I’d been championing a data science role at work for a while, pushing…
Rain, Tables, and a Job Offer – Covid Part 4
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Not everything from lockdown was heavy. These are two moments I’d almost forgotten about until I went back through the diary. Both involve Isaac. Both involve questionable decisions on my part. Week four, a Saturday night. We’d been ducking invites to a video call the DJ crowd had been running since the whole thing started.…
Small Acts of Ridiculous – Covid Part 3
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Week three of lockdown. Good Friday, April 2020. I wrote this one in real time, which is the only reason I’d share it. Some things are only honest when they’re written in the middle of them. Growing up, Good Friday meant the start of a great weekend. No work, good company, life lived to the…
The Blackest Good Friday – Covid Part 2
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March 2020. These are reflections from a diary I kept through lockdown. Looking back now, what strikes me most is how ordinary the beginning felt. There have been a handful of times in my life when I’ve felt the ground shift under everyone’s feet at once. The Berlin Wall coming down. September 11th. The July…
An Observer No Longer – Covid Part 1
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I wrote this the day after Emily died. I haven’t changed it. Well life does have a way of pulling the rug from under you when things are going well… Emily lost her battle. Not to the cancer she beat twice. But to the numerous infections her newly transplanted Spanish immune system couldn’t fight off.…
Emily
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A post from a few years back, when work had me on trains most weeks. A couple of small observations from those journeys that have stayed with me. To say work had been busy would be an understatement. It seemed every week brought an opportunity to visit a different corner of the country. Which meant…
The Friendliness of Crowds
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If there is one thing I want you to carry through life, one thing that will make everything else more navigable… it is this: have faith. I know how that sounds. I was the person who would have rolled his eyes at that sentence. I spent a good part of my adult life convinced that…
Letter to Isaac: Have Faith
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Think, for a moment, about the creation of the universe. The sheer scale of it… galaxies and stars and planets, all springing from something smaller than the head of a pin. Science tells us life emerged from chemistry, then organisms, then animals, then mammals, then people who are capable of sitting quietly and thinking about…
Letter to Isaac: Be Nice… Love