🐍 August; all planes no snakes, and the return of my brain
🎵 returrrrn of the brain 🎵
Hi there 👋🏻
It turns out that five days in the wilderness (literal, not metaphorical) does wonders for your brain.
Last month, I headed up to the NT with my two hiking buddies, to take on the Jatbula Trail, a five-day, 62km trip between Nitmiluk Gorge and Leliyn (aka Edith Falls), on the lands of the Jawoyn people.
Five days of hiking, sweating, eating the food we cooked and dehydrated, avoiding snakes, chatting, and hoping that watering holes we were swimming in were DEFINITELY croc free, was exactly what I needed.
And it was even more ideal because the entire time was completely void of any phone signal.
Honestly, on the first day I was a bit worried about all that impending time with my own thoughts for the next few days. But on day three I woke up, and it was like a huge weighted blanket had been lifted from my brain.
I felt like myself again for the first time since January, and had a whole new reboot of energy towards, well, everything.
I promptly made two lists (of course);
1) all the things I’m looking forward to for the rest of the year, and
2) all the things I want to use my new energy towards.
(Both of which were very satisfying to create.)
These lists also served a good reminder of all the things that I enjoy the most, that are the most important, and ultimately what I want from this funny thing called life.
I went for a fantastic walk last Monday morning with a friend (highly recommend starting your weeks like this btw), who has recently emerged from her own eight-month-long funk. Speed walking and speed talking with someone else who is bouncing with new found energy is a pretty fun activity.
It’s easy to think of times of limbo / uncertainty as being ‘between’ things. But, fortunately/unfortunately, they are also the thing. So we might as well try and live well in those limbo times, rather than putting everything on hold until ‘after’. Because that’s not guaranteed.
(This fact was emphasised even more when in the space of 24 hours I was sadly reminded twice of how quickly life can 1) change, thanks to a conversation with someone who’d experienced a life-altering accident, or 2) be taken away, due to living near the site of a fatal traffic accident.)
2024 has been a big/hard/difficult/interesting/weird year for so many people, so with 2/3 of it completed, maybe now is a good time to make a little bit more of living in the bit that’s left.
Later this week I’m going to dig out the Year Compass I completed coming into this year and remind myself of the hopes and plans I had for 2024. I think I might be surprised at how much I’ve actually achieved, amongst all the oddness.
In finding our brains and remembering to live,
Steph
PS. If you’re travelling soon, I highly recommend getting a travel eSim from airalo. I’ve been using them for over a year and it’s so much cheaper that the rort that is roaming charges, easier than trying to buy a local sim, and more convenient as you can run your usual home sim at the same time as your travel data sim (if you have a compatible phone). Get $3 off your first eSim here using code STEPH1595.
PPS. To borrow from Austin Kleon, this newsletter is 'free but not cheap'. You can support their ongoing creation and keep me in books by buying me a coffee as a 'thank you', recommending it to a friend, or using any affiliate links in the email.
The it list 🔥
Some of the things I’ve been enjoying recently…
Podcast & Substack - [SIC] Talks by Ben Dietz: This recent find (and the associated Substack) is an absolute soup of all things culture, creativity, business, and media. The amount that Ben must read to do the curation that he does blows my mind. Spotify
Podcast - After School by Casey Lewis: I recommended Casey’s After School Substack in my July bookmark edition (where I shared several of my favourite Substacks). Her wildly popular daily Gen Z culture download is now accompanied by a podcast, where Casey interviews Gen Zs about big topics like politics, dating, fashion, trends, social media and more. Hearing these smart young people chat about what they’re thinking about the world is very hope-inducing. Spotify | Apple
Podcast - At Work With The Ready, ft Dr Jason Fox: Knowing the wizard that is Jason Fox, and knowing the excellent work of The Ready, I knew this would be a great episode. I was not disappointed. I was particularly nodding along to the need for leadership teams to have more emergent conversations about what’s going on / sense-making, but without a need for immediate action taking. And the related need for defining meaningful progress that expands beyond metrics and uses more stories / metaphors. Spotify | Apple
EP - Foreign Spies/Zero Sum by The Smile: The Smile are releasing their second album in one year! What a treat! It’s called Cutouts, it’s out next month, and in the meantime they’ve released three tracks on this little EP.
Film - Kneecap: I caught this at the cinema the weekend and it was brilliant. A raucous and funny, fictional origin story about the actual Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap. It’s as much about colonialism and dying languages as it is about music. Probably one of the best new films I’ve seen this year.
Snack - Chilli plantain chips from Woolworths: Obsessed.
Album - Asleep in the Back by Elbow: I feel like each year I have an ‘anchor’ album. Which typically ends up being one of the albums I have downloaded on my phone so gets heavy rotation when I fly. This year I’ve been revisiting the beautiful 2001 debut album from Elbow.
Album - Happiness… Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch by Our Lady Peace: This album will forever unlock the ‘being 15/16 years old’ part of my brain. Still great. [Side note: I feel like every relationship should leave you with a new band, and OLP were the band I inherited from my first boyfriend].
📚 What I read this month 📚
What made it off the TBR pile this month…
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
I liked: The world building and the dystopian nature of the context of the book; a world where over-population and over-consumption has exacerbated the divide of rich and poor, so people take to living out a happier life on the OASIS online world. It prompts some very timely questions about identity, what’s ‘real’ when it comes to connection with people you’ve never met in person, who may be a fictional version of their real selves (even if that fictional version was imagined by that real person).
There were also some really interesting speculative ideas about privacy, and the mega-corporations who end up gobbling up everything and therefore essentially owning your every decision and transaction.
I didn’t like: I found the nature of the challenge everyone was participating in a little repetitive, and the cat and mouse between whether the evil corporate overlords would win and take everything, or whether the people would prevail. The character development was a little shallow and predictable, but wasn’t unbearable.
Sneak peek: currently reading…
Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders. It’s a short collection of speculative fiction imagining futures where Indigenous sovereignty is fully reasserted in a future version of the Tweed.
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston. A book about a case of mistaken identity, and the realities of being forgotten as an older person living in aged care.
Some places I popped up recently 👋🏻
Offbeat on Air podcast - I had the most fun chatting (and sometimes ranting) to Lavinia and Mili about futures thinking and the future of L&D. Listen on Spotify or Apple.
Smart Company - I wrote about why all CEOs should be futurists in my last Smart Company piece. A new piece is dropping this week about what happened to the future of work we were promised, which you can read here when it goes live.
App - The People Spot: Each month I pop up in the audio tracks of the People Spot app sharing a few interesting signals about the future. These audio clips are included in the free download (iPhone only) and you can use the code STEPHC for an additional two months free access to the full content library in the app.