This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Matt Hoffar. Matt was born with a bone condition and has broken more than 40 bones. He’s had a liver transplant, and he’s now waiting on open heart surgery. He has been a basketball coach, worked for the Vancouver Grizzlies in the NBA, a stockbroker, and a boxing promoter. He still trades and invests, and today he’s a writer and creator in animation, developing a comedy series. He’s also one of the most positive, curious people I know, and I wanted to explore how he lives so fully.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

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1. My Weekly Reflection

One of the reasons I feel so resistant to final answers or neat equations about what makes a good life is that someone will share something from their life that undermines or complicates whatever conclusion I might be approaching.

I’ve spoken to people who experienced abuse that sent them down a path they might never otherwise have taken, shaping them into someone they are now happy to be. They still hate what happened to them, they wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and yet they’d struggle to imagine their lives becoming what they did without it.

I’ve also heard people reflect on the obstacles they faced because of discrimination, and how those experiences shaped what they felt called to do. One artist I spoke to dedicates himself to observing the broken bones of this world and sharing something human or beautiful from them.

I find these experiences difficult to reconcile with any neat equation for a good life. They don’t make the terrible things that happen to people any less terrible. But they do make it clear to me that we know little about what a life will become.

When I interviewed 100 people privately around this question, health was comfortably the second most frequent answer, after relationships. I suspect we often think about a good life in terms of what needs to be present. If something is missing, we assume the life is somehow lacking.

I’ve known this week’s guest, Matt, for well over a decade, dating back to when I lived in Vancouver. He was born with a bone condition and has broken more than 40 bones. He’s stopped counting at this point. He’s also had a liver transplant and is waiting for heart surgery.

When I asked him “what is a good life?”, he promptly opened with:

“I feel like I’m living it.”

I spoke to him a couple of weeks before this interview, and he told me about the surgery he was waiting on, among many other things. I’m continually impressed by how Matt engages in life and how engaging he is, regardless of his history with health conditions. When I speak with him, he’s noticeably attentive, curious and caring. We laugh a lot. There’s a real consistency to how I experience his presence.

In our interview, Matt reflects on how waiting for heart surgery isn’t necessarily as intense an experience for him as it might be for someone who has never been seriously ill. His history has shaped his relationship with the medical system, which has been a place of healing for him. It’s partly a case of who he is, but also of what his experiences have equipped him for.

There’s a quirk to this life that I keep noticing. Sometimes, navigating the very things we wish weren’t there builds or shapes something in us. This doesn’t mean everything happens for a reason – tell that to someone in a war zone. Sometimes life is just awful. But we can never know what might become possible further down the line.

The conversation with Matt also makes me think about how easily we can make the very things we have, or don’t have, into the things on which our happiness depends.

Have you ever considered that the thing you believe will make you happy is already present in the lives of many people who are still miserable? It might be material, in terms of money, fame or a bigger house. Or it might be a partner, a family, or some other form of relationship we believe we need.

And conversely, there are people living without the very things we desire or fear losing the most who still find ways to enjoy their lives.

This isn’t a pep talk to turn that frown upside down, or a call to remain mindful and equanimous no matter what life throws at us. I’ve spoken to people for whom difficult times have meant nothing but hardship and despair.

These are more things about life that continue to intrigue me. They leave me more open to the potential that there’s always room for what we cannot presently imagine.

The more I listen to people’s lives, the less certain I become about what a good life must contain. At the same time, the possibilities for what my own life might become seem to expand.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What do you tell yourself a good life must depend on?

2. What has surprised you the most about your life path so far?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

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4. Full Episode - Living Fully While You Wait with Matt Hoffar - What is a Good Life? #194

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Matt Hoffar below.

About Me

I am a coach, writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people around this question. What is a Good Life? is a podcast and newsletter that invites us to question what we’ve been told makes for a good life, and to pay more attention to what really matters: our relationships, the moments that make us feel more human, and the experiences that connect us to one another. After hundreds of conversations, I’m increasingly convinced that the good life we are sold and how people actually experience it are very wide apart. These conversations and reflections offer another way of seeing the world, and an invitation to live a little differently.

This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Philippe Birker. Philippe is a Co-founder of Climate Farmers, an organisation supporting the transition to regenerative agriculture across Europe. He also runs the social music label Hug Records and is rebuilding an abandoned village with friends. This episode is filled with inspiration to pay more attention to how we live, whom we love, our connection to the land, and the power of working on something we find meaningful.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

I did something I’ve never really done last week.

At some point my toddler had crawled into the bed at night. So as I was woken by the rummaging of bins being collected in the courtyard, my usual alarm clock on a Tuesday morning, my three-year-old’s head lay on my shoulder.

I could hear her breathing so clearly. So I lay there for a time and then I noticed the fluctuations in my wife’s breath too.

The thought came to me that I am presently hearing the two most important sounds to me in the world. How lucky am I that I can hear them.

My mind briefly floated to people who went to bed last night with those sounds, and have woken up without them. To those that may wake up tomorrow without them. That no one in my family is guaranteed to wake up tomorrow.

So I lay there for a bit longer.

This morning I woke up to go to the toilet just before six and then I went back to bed briefly.

Once again it was the three of us in bed after another visit during the night, and I could hardly hear a thing. All I was aware of was a stress in my body.

After lying there for a few minutes, I finally noticed my daughter’s breath and I briefly smiled thinking of my experience last week. Today it seems it is the stress that needs my attention. I could feel it in my bones.

I have often alluded to my present financial constraints or difficulties in this newsletter, as they have increased in the last few years. Earlier this year I had to register for welfare.

My working life in recent months has been a mixture of this podcast and newsletter, trying to distill and understand how to build my coaching work commercially, outreach, and applying for external jobs without much traction. It is a bit choppy and strained at times, even confusing, and yet I am also writing the second of two books from this project.

Whatever savings I had left are almost gone. The pressure and need are most definitely ratcheting.

As I made my way to a desk I use in the office across the street at 6:30 this morning, I realised this is what I’d write about and it brought me some peace. Over the last few years, as my lack of financial success has been playing out, I am surprised at how often I return to peace. How stress is the visitor rather than the baseline, how contentment and gratitude remain far more prominent.

In this week’s interview, Philippe shared a story that brought a striking contrast into focus. He found himself in South Africa as part of a university placement for a semester after he initially applied to get a placement in California.

Outside of his course he coached kids basketball in a township. The spirit of the kids and their sense of community really struck him. One day he saw a kid with a Chupa Chups lollipop who was sharing it with nine other kids. It blew his mind how crazy this would be to see in Germany or Holland. He said most Europeans would find it gross.

When with these kids, he thought of a woman on his course who was so distraught by not getting the exchange semester she wanted. Like it was the end of the world. Given the lives and homes of these kids, he almost couldn’t reconcile the two observations. In general these kids seemed happier than most people he knew in Europe.

It left Philippe with a very clear understanding that money is a useful tool that solves real problems, but beyond a certain amount pales in comparison to love and relationships.

I know something of this from the other side.

Eight years ago, I was part of a team to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange and I made a few hundred thousand that year when a share price increased. Shortly after, I was offered a role at another company with a 40% increase to my base. I’ve written before how a rip of electricity I felt when doing a body scan the weekend before that role began led to me walking away from it on the first day of the job. I had no clear vision but I wanted to follow this path I feel I am supposed to be on. I still feel that way now.

Last week, I came home one evening to get something, and my daughter excitedly ran into my arms and asked me to dance with her before I went back to the office. She then took mine and my wife’s hands and there we were dancing.

I could never have imagined eight years ago that this would be where I am. And yet, if you were to visit my home at any given moment, you might struggle to see how the story of my life detracts from the experience of living it.

I don’t think it will always be like this, it is a season of life. But I feel my life is teaching me something really important, revealing it to me through direct experience not through a pithy statement in a book that I repeat. I feel an odd gratitude for it.

Our culture places so much emphasis on how your life looks from the outside that it can be difficult to appreciate the experience of living it. But that experience persists. My daughter invites me back to it, and it brings me peace, so too does paying attention.

I will be very pleased and grateful when more money and material abundance is part of my path once more, if that is the case. If you are listening God or Universe, let it be so. But I would be very surprised if it makes me much happier.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Where does the story and the experience of your life feel most confusing?

2. What lessons has your life taught you that you feel an odd gratitude for?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - Living Life With Open Arms with Philippe Birker - What is a Good Life? #193

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Philippe Birker below.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a coach, writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people around this question. What is a Good Life? is a podcast and newsletter that invites us to question what we’ve been told makes for a good life, and to pay more attention to what really matters: our relationships, the moments that make us feel more human, and the experiences that connect us to one another. After hundreds of conversations, I’m increasingly convinced that the good life we are sold and how people actually experience it are very wide apart. These conversations and reflections offer another way of seeing the world, and an invitation to live a little differently.

This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Kat Miles. I read a post on LinkedIn one particularly gloomy news day that really lifted my spirits. It was about a movement by the Brixton Traders & Community Association, led by Kat Miles, and how she and her fellow traders are working to bring Brixton Village and Market Row into community ownership. Our whole conversation is filled with inspiration around doing what you think needs to be done, standing up for what you believe in, and the cultural value of community.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

“The lack of what I would like to call baseline truth within politics and in our society is really shocking.”

In response to my weekly opening question of “is there a question you are exploring as you move through life?”, Kat responded with a wondering around what level of honesty the wider world will accept, how that differs from what she will accept in herself, and how to navigate that.

As a child she was asked about a family situation where she had simply told the truth. It was shocking to her that it caused so much trouble for her and that she was punished for simply saying it as it was.

There is a poignant image she shared of herself as a child, sitting in the wide windowsill of her bedroom, staying up after bedtime, looking up at the night sky and contemplating the nuance of honesty. We assume this level of evolution with our honesty, adults teach children about it, although I don’t see that holding up.

We load honesty with so much morality that it’s hard to examine it with curiosity. But there is considerable value in asking what is my relationship with honesty – am I even honest with myself?

In my life, I was granted a reprieve from this resistance to examining it when a whopper of a self-deception fell apart. I created a narrative around how my father leaving the family home when I was a toddler would never affect me.

When the obviousness of that fallacy became clear to me on the other side of it, I became obsessed with honesty for a time. One experiment I ran was carrying a notebook around with me for a couple of weeks and I took note of any lies that I told: anything from an embellishment, an excuse for being late, dishonesty around intentions, and more.

I’d mark down a tally mark every time I did it. I was pretty amazed by how frequently the marks would appear even with my own awareness that the experiment was underway. It was usually for the sake of ease or protecting a vulnerability rather than anything sinister, which I think is true for most people.

When I finished the experiment, I did the typical thing of making a rigid value of honesty and went through a phase of attempting to protect that over anything. Even the humanity I’d show others, all in the name of honesty.

But when I chilled out I noticed something much more interesting.

Honesty for me has little to do with morality and far more to do with the comfort I felt in my own skin – and the absence of discomfort.

I think the lack of baseline truth that Kat alludes to creates so much dis-ease in our lives. When there is enough space in my life to notice, I feel the tension in my own body if I have been dishonest and I am suggesting otherwise. It eats away at me. Acknowledging the dishonesty is almost more self-preservation than morality. The justification of widely held standards or deceptions does little to soothe it.

As Kat points to in the interview:

“Dishonesty, this is for me, is a massive thing that makes me very unhappy. And I think in the world it makes most people unhappy. It’s the cause of a lot of unhappiness.”

I remember speaking with a psychologist one day who told me how he got out of a conference the following day by saying he was unwell. I just said, “Ah so you lied.” He suggested, “Well if I am sick tomorrow, then it wouldn’t be a lie.”

I was briefly taken aback by this, but then I recalled all the messaging adults give kids about goodness and honesty. The word lie or liar carries so much weight.

I don’t think the biggest problem is whether we occasionally lie or not, it is when we lose the capacity to realise we have done so.

Lately I have been playing with an idea I have around the “second reaction.” It is not focussed on fixing or overcoming our immediate reaction but our response to something that is habituated.

If I lose my cool, instead of defending it, or demonising myself, I am more interested in how quickly can I acknowledge to someone that yes, I have lost my cool. Even mid-flow in the act of losing my cool. I’ve told my wife I love her mid-argument, and apologised while it was still going on. It totally changes the vulnerability we are willing to share or the accountability we take in the immediate aftermath.

I’m interested in not hanging all the importance of an event or experience based on our initial response, but how we respond to that initial response. The psychologist’s “If I am sick tomorrow…” is the second reaction. That is where he could have said, “Yeah, I lied.”

With dishonesty, I don’t find the interesting part to be if a human ever lies or not. But our response to it.

From the hundreds of interviews I have conducted around this question, exploring our relationship with honesty has profound effects on how comfortable we feel in our own skin. It is not by some deluded sense of perfecting ourselves that the interesting changes occur, but in initially meeting ourselves where we are.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. How would you describe your relationship with honesty?

2. What does it feel like in your body when you’re being dishonest?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - The Truth Will Set You Free with Kat Miles - What is a Good Life? #192

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Kat Miles below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

UPDATE: This newsletter now goes out on Wednesdays.

This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Nikkolas Smith – artivist, Hollywood concept artist (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Sinners) and #1 NYT bestselling illustrator. We talk about art as empathy, how art has helped him process grief and injustice, and the making of his hand-painted picture book The History of We. This is a conversation about holding onto our humanity as a way of meeting the broken bones of the world.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

There is a beautiful thread throughout this conversation of really seeing the humanity in each other.

Nikkolas talks about how his portraits deliberately seek to look out at you, make eye contact with you. They look to humanise what are often marginalised people.

I first became aware of his work through a stunning picture book called The History of We. It was for a time in the daily rotation of books I’d read to my daughter at night. It goes back to the origins of humankind in Africa and traces the incredible innovations that modern humans were making there for tens of thousands of years before we spread further throughout the world.

As he discusses in this podcast, the intention of it is rather beautiful:

“It’s that core of humanity and can we just remind ourselves that we’re all related, we’re all connected. There is a lot that is done to try to split us up, divide us, and do all these things. But we’re literally all one human race, quite literally.”

It’s funny how whenever I hear someone speak those kind of words with sincerity, how much it can move me. And then I look around at the world and wonder how it is possible that we do what we do to each other.

What has amazed me in recent years is just how possible it is for people to feel and remember this connection.

After becoming a father three years ago, I’ve shared many an intimate moment with a stranger.

Whenever a father is carrying their toddler in their arms and Ava is in mine, there is an incredible warmth to the acknowledgement of each other. Proper eye contact is made, there is little awkward glancing away, but a comfortable smile is often my experience.

I’ve had similar moments with my dog over the last 6 years in Berlin. People are so open to stopping and chatting when the dogs engage or play with each other. Waves, even from across the street, are exchanged.

It is almost poignant then when some of these same people don’t look to engage if I have neither my daughter nor dog with me.

It is strange with the thousands of commonalities and experiences we share – breathing, replenishing cells, thinking, heartbeats, emotions, family, friends, heartbreak, love, despair – that one more thing in a given moment can lead to an effortless connection. It can dissolve a barrier that otherwise might exist. It shows to me how flimsy that barrier must be in reality.

I have mentioned before that saying hello to as many people as possible in my neighbourhood has profoundly changed my life. It all started by missing the daily greetings I’d get from locals when I lived in the countryside in Peru for a year. How when I arrived in Berlin that my day felt emptier without those brief moments of contact.

Even though I didn’t speak the language, how the sincerity of one particular older lady with a warm wrinkled face struck me. With only greetings of the time of day shared, I felt we built something through our daily eye contact – I could see something in her eyes that really meant something, like her heart was pressed into the gesture. How I’d look forward to passing her house in the hope she was sitting in front of it.

When I came to Berlin and repeatedly greeted my neighbours, how after initial tumbleweeds, a real warmth with my neighbourhood developed.

I know there are many material things we may suspect are part of a good life, but I don’t know of many more valuable experiences than sitting outside my local café, on an ordinary weekday, and the likelihood of at least a dozen people greeting me as I sit there and they go about their day.

The more I stay open to that connection, the more the judgements and the feeling of separation feel fleeting rather than the background noise to my life.

Much of what I am noticing from the hundreds of interviews I have conducted around the question of “what is a good life?” and from my own life, is that if we consistently pay attention to the subtlety of the multitude of relationships in our lives, something extraordinary happens.

Something really shifts in how we view people at large. It can be the difference between feeling at home in this world or feeling wary of it. The repeated seeing, acknowledging, and connecting with others is all that is required.

There is a quote often (wrongly) credited to Einstein that has nonetheless stayed present with me during the last decade:

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”

I don’t know who said it, but it makes sense to me.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there someone in particular in your life right now that you would benefit from seeing and acknowledging their humanity?

2. Do you believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - Seeing The Humanity In Each Other with Nikkolas Smith - What is a Good Life? #191

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Nikkolas Smith below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

UPDATE: This newsletter will be going out on Wednesdays for the foreseeable.

This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Harrison Gardner – an author, broadcaster and builder based on the west coast of Ireland. He presents Build Your Own Home on RTÉ, and has written three books on self-building and the housing crisis. This is an inspiring conversation about building your own capabilities and committing more fully to your life.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

What makes you feel safe?

In this week’s interview with Harrison, he suggests what really makes us feel safe is: access to shelter, to food, to water, and to community and communication, the people around us.

He also mentioned that a lot of our anxiety stems from the fact that we are no longer in control of being able to provide, or know how to provide, many of those things for ourselves.

He said at one point that knowing he can build his own shelter has led him to move through life with a certain level of trust. Wherever you go if you have that skill people will need and welcome you, whether in his time in a slum for a couple of years in India or in Dublin 8 in Ireland or when building his own home out of a derelict stone cottage in the west of Ireland.

Of course money plays a role in this, but Harrison clearly indicates, it is not the only lever we can pull for change in our lives, we can learn once again to do many of the tasks we have now distanced ourselves from.

“We’ve been trained to think money is the only lever we can pull to change our lives. It’s absolute bullshit.”

Before speaking to Harrison, for many months now, given all the turmoil in the world, given all the predictions of future turmoil, I have been wondering about how distant we are from being able to look after ourselves.

Growing food, building things, having access to water.

It feels kind of strange or synthetic this life we have created of looking at screens, whether working, distracting, or entertaining ourselves.

How so many of the careers we are creating have so little physical-world application or use.

I remember back in my finance days befriending a man who ran a fund, who invited my wife and I to his place in California. It was a gorgeous property and we had our own house to ourselves on it. He grew and picked his own olives, had solar power, a water source, chickens, and so on.

He had community and connection with the other farmers in the area and would trade. He is a really interesting, warm, and thoughtful character.

He had this one story and question he’d share with his well-educated kids, and he shared it with me and my wife too. You are approaching this hilltop town in Italy, with a large wall around it. There are only limited spaces in it and you want to get in – a thriving community exists inside and the same cannot be said for outside.

You knock on the door and they simply ask you, “what do you do? What will you contribute?”

I heard it around 9 years ago and it has always stayed with me in some shape or form.

It often makes me laugh when I overhear people trading stories of the importance of their work and their position. Imagining them answering the question with great gusto to a confused looking gatekeeper at the top of this hilltop community.

It somehow makes me pay more attention to the rooted experience or necessary essentials of life.

I often wonder, through my own current fiscal phase of life, why I still feel so much safety and trust in how this life of mine is playing out. The people and relationships around me do an awful lot.

I lay in bed in a fevered state for a few days this week, with at times little to distract me, and my mind having plenty of space to wander or think. It was easy for images to come of my wife and I, we’ve been together for 10 years, sitting on a porch somewhere, in our 80s sharing a huge laugh together. It made me smile a lot.

Even one day, as the sweat was seeping into the pillow behind me, it was easy just to watch and marvel at the game and make believe conversation my daughter was creating on the bed beside me. Even just looking at her healthy moving limbs.

Since interviewing Harrison last week, that question of what makes me or us feel safe has accompanied me around.

When I was finally back on my feet this week, after four days in bed, I took my dog out for a walk. The blue sky above me was particularly easy to notice and the trails the pigeons were making from one rooftop to another on the opposite side of the street. Noticing that made me feel oddly safe.

As I wandered round my neighbourhood, saying hello to anyone I passed, exchanging smiles whether I knew them or not, it had the same effect on me as observing the birds.

I keep experiencing this sense that the way our culture lives and what it rewards does little to nourish what it actually feels like to be human.

The good news is that what seems to work seems far more simple and immediate than what is sold or suggested elsewhere.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What makes you really feel consistently safe?

2. How would you answer the gatekeeper at the hilltop?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - Building Your Own Security with Harrison Gardner - What is a Good Life? #190

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Harrison Gardner below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Toko-pa Turner – an award-winning Canadian author and dreamworker whose work explores the relationship between psyche and nature. Her first book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, has been translated into ten languages and received the 2018 Gold Nautilus Award. This is a fascinating, grounded conversation about listening to the wisdom already moving through us.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

For Toko-pa Turner, having room was a big part of her sense of a good life. Room to be present and to notice. Room for a conversation or to reflect on a dream.

She shared a moment with a dear friend in her 70s who, after a simple ritual, began gently weeping. When Toko-pa asked how she was doing, her friend simply said: “It’s just so short.”

Her friend then suggested that moments had become more precious as she got older.

Presence has been a big theme throughout these 300+ interviews. Our distracted and busy existences make it difficult to experience.

We sit down for a coffee with a friend and it is instantly on the clock. Our days are filled with anxiously packed appointments with little room. Calendars more than bodies determine our days.

So much of modern life feels forward focussing.

I shook my head at seeing Christmas cookies and cakes in the supermarket already this week. How can that one day ever live up to such a build up?

In our own lives how normal has it become that we will willingly write off a couple of weeks before our holidays, working really late hours, and suffer any amount of stress to sit on a beach for a week. We seem to trade experience for outcomes.

One of my earlier guests mentioned we live in a world where the end justifies the means, but asked do the means justify the ends?

It is an interesting question to ask ourselves even when we get what we want.

In response to this busy madness, presence has become something mystical rather than something ordinary and every day.

Presence doesn’t protect me from the pain of being human. But the quality of my life through repeated noticing – uncomfortable sensations in my body, laughter, buds on a tree blooming, dog shit or broken glass on the Berlin streets – completely changes this experience of life.

I often see presence being sold as a tool for getting more favourable outcomes or great transformation but that is not how I see it. It is more about acclimatising to the intensity of my life whatever I am experiencing, whether great joy or grief.

I once interviewed a man who was reflecting on the experience of having his leg amputated.

He mentioned the excruciating pain of the limb dying and there was no escape from it. One day he realised, in the midst of that, that the pain level wasn’t actually constant.

“It shifted. It was still, to use a traditional pain scale, it was still a 10 at all times. But actually, if I focused on it, I realised it wasn’t the same all the time.

I began to see ebbs and flows in my pain, moments where it seemed not as intense, as painful, or moments when perhaps it increased. And it becomes quality over quantity, if you like. We quantise the world rather than sensing its qualities.”

This year has left me with more financial constraints than I have experienced before. There are definitely moments of stress and wondering how will I make ends meet through my present work or finding a job.

Whenever I tell people openly about this, they immediately look to lament my experience and console. To tell me how tough it must be. But in the main I have had a great year. Regardless of some developments and setbacks, the experience of my life is largely one I relish.

I find it remarkably easy to be with my daughter’s laughter whenever it occurs or to really feel a hug from my wife. I still wrote a book that I am proud of. I sleep very well.

My life is all of that, not just one thing.

I am simply in a season of my life where this is the case. I don’t want to waste a whole winter by wishing it was summer, life is so short.

Whenever the uncertainty of this life feels like it is getting too much, it is really satisfying, without trying to change anything, to see that I can sit with the intensity of that experience.

For me, peace comes from acclimatising to whatever is rather than having a magic wand.

It feels less about being comfortable with the uncomfortable and more knowing I am ok regardless of what happens or doesn’t happen.

Presence is what is left whenever you stop interfering with what is.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What aren’t you noticing in your life right now outside of a present drama?

2. Have you ever felt surprisingly ok in a situation you hadn’t wished for?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

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4. Full Episode - What Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You with Toko-pa Turner - What is a Good Life? #189

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Toko-pa Turner below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week there is no podcast after a couple of interviews were postponed. Many are scheduled in the coming weeks so the normal flow will return from next week on. So this week I am sharing an experience that left me with an overwhelming feeling of this being a good life.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

There is a man in my local café whom I see almost every morning with his husband.

We are not close friends in that we don’t socialise outside of seeing each other in the café, but we greet warmly and will often share short funny encounters.

Before my daughter started Kita, he would see us there almost every morning.

He approached me one morning and asked in German if he could start taking photos of me and my daughter without us noticing. He had an idea and didn’t offer any more than that.

Knowing his general vibe, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

Over the following months he took pictures of us. Sometimes without us noticing. Sometimes with comical espionage behind the leaves of a banana plant. But mostly we didn’t notice.

Until one day, months after he had stopped taking photos of us, he approached me and my daughter in the café and presented a book.

It was filled with thoughtfully curated photos that covered several months of our morning ritual together.

He did it discreetly, without any fanfare.

He’s not a photographer, and there was no hook.

And I instantly welled up.

I went to make a fuss of him and his gesture but he really didn’t want that and he just went back to his seat.

When a woman in the neighbourhood heard me share this story, she mentioned that one day, after she and he had discussed a band she loved from her teens, he rang her doorbell months later and dropped off a t-shirt he created of the band.

Same again, little fanfare and off he walked into the sunset.

Some people, eh?

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Has anyone you didn’t expect anything from ever done something incredibly kind for you?

2. Have you ever done something incredibly generous for someone who is neither family nor a close friend?

About Me

I am a facilitator, coach and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Laura Costello. Laura is Chief Communications Officer at Hometree, a nature restoration charity, and also led the Good Life 2030 Ireland project which invited people across the country to imagine a brighter future. We explore how people responded when asked to consider what makes a good life and what Laura has learned from the project.

If this project resonates with you and you’d like to support it, please consider a paid subscription. I could really do with your support 🙌

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

During Laura’s research for the Good Life 2030 Project she interviewed a man who after reflecting on the conversation decided to sell his house and move.

It’s incredible how we can affect each other in certain encounters.

It reminded me of a moment a former guest of the podcast shared about her husband. He was in his late teens and working at a gas station in the US. He was talking with a customer and the customer remarked how smart the young man was. He suggested he should consider going to college. Nobody from his family had gone to college before. Several decades later her husband is a professor and considers that moment to be pivotal. He never saw the man again.

It’s strange, the mixture of things that makes something stick or not.

I once suspected I had left the keys in the door, inside our apartment, as I was closing it and leaving. I warned my wife ahead of time that this might be the case. Even though it turned out not to be true, I now nearly always slide my hand over the lock on the inside of the door as I close it.

As I do this I often laugh to myself wishing my power to adapt and change a behaviour so rapidly and consistently was used for something more useful or where my behaviours have greater consequence.

I sometimes get messages from listeners to the podcast that say a specific episode led them to something new or clarified a new direction. There are obviously many episodes that don’t have that effect on them.

I am sure there are many of you reading this who despite therapy, coaching, retreats, and twenty self-help books on a topic, still find something simply hasn’t shifted.

I don’t know what the formula is for it all but I have seen enough to know that any particular moment or interaction can change us or our situation, whether marginally or significantly. We mostly never know ahead of time when it will be.

It may be something small that slowly accumulates over time that we even forget the source of it. It might be a thunderbolt and make for a great story one day.

A moment I often reflect on from these interviews is of a man in prison mentoring some of his fellow inmates on addiction recovery. He involuntarily sighed and said aloud that he didn’t know what his purpose in life was. Only for a young man, with little interest in recovery in the group, to suggest the very thing he was doing in that moment was it.

He talked about being in his cell later that day and that observation taking root within him.

The beauty for me as someone who gets to interview so many people around this question is that hope rarely seems to leave me. It is a gradual accumulation from consistently hearing people reflect on their lives.

Yes, tragedy or suffering may also be around the corner for me – there are so many things out of my control. But I have heard so many moments where something unexpected happens – something that people simply did not see coming – that they are eternally grateful for.

As Laura points out in this week’s conversation, it may just depend on whether we are paying our lives enough attention to recognise them when they arrive. Just as we can’t ever fully know the effect we can have on each other, we might also pay close attention to our actions in that regard too.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Has a fleeting moment with a stranger ever meaningfully altered your life?

2. Have you ever been surprised by how you have influenced somebody else’s life?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

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4. Full Episode - Your One Wild & Precious Life with Laura Costello - What is a Good Life? #188

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Laura Costello below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I had a conversation with Ewan Townhead – an entrepreneur, coach, and author of Artist, Merchant, Seeker: Bring Your Whole Self to the Path of Work. We explore past-life memories that shattered his worldview, a period of burnout that gave clarity, and the seven years it took to write his book. If you're trying to integrate different parts of yourself into your work, this will give you plenty to consider.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

My daughter blew out the 3-shaped candle on her birthday cake a couple of days ago. I don’t think I have ever seen a smile quite like it. She asked me or my wife to sing happy birthday to her on and off for the last month when we played together. It seemed like one of those moments in life where the experience exceeded expectations, as she gazed around a table full of family members all beaming and singing in her direction.

I sat in an airplane seat for two hours yesterday without a device, only for my eyes to be repeatedly caught by rows of smart phones and tablets in front of me. I ended up periodically checking in on The Truman Show from a lady’s phone two rows ahead of me. I spent the rest of the flight looking upwards to avoid the shiny flashing things and repeated the cycle many times. The tight Ryanair seat for this 6’4” body making both the strain and comedy of the moment more apparent.

I am in a strange sort of a confused fog these days. My life isn’t presently adding up to some traditional ideas of success, yet it feels remarkably good. Whether the two possibilities cross paths again for me is something I can’t possibly know. I suspect that not knowing has something to do with how it feels.

I love the act of exploring what things mean to individual people in all these interviews, yet I feel such an aversion to drawing conclusions or templates from those individual experiences. I find listening to and sharing in the experience feels as useful as it gets for me.

One experience may be about connection, growth, suffering, intention or confusion. In one moment you or I will be a hero or a villain, have succeeded or floundered. And it all goes on. Someone will die and it will all go on. Differently sure, but it all just trundles on. Ideas of legacy seem a bit thin in the midst of that.

A belief that makes perfect sense to one person might sound naive or foolish to another, regardless of whether it is useful to the person who holds it. Do you want to tell someone in a war torn country they are in control of their lives or destiny? Would you tell a couple trying for a baby without becoming pregnant that they need to manifest more?

I recall an early interview in this series with a woman who wished she would stop seeking to make sense of it all. I wonder at what point that pursuit actually gets in the way of a good life.

2. This Week’s Question

Q: Is there an area of confusion in your life you need not make sense of?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - Artist, Merchant, Seeker with Ewan Townhead - What is a Good Life? #187

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Ewan Townhead below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with OONA – an anonymous performance artist known for her works Milking The Artist, Dear David, and Look Touch Own. We discuss data, extraction, the body as art, and what sovereignty means through physical, digital, and spiritual lenses. This was a really thought provoking and stirring conversation that left me optimistic about finding connection and intimacy in the places we'd least expect it.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Do you ever get the feeling that we are valuing the wrong things? Valuing more what can be measured while discounting the significance of what we can’t measure so easily.

In this week’s interview, OONA gives the example of an apartment building or a hotel trimming the bottom line of a business by firing the doorman but not accounting for all the intangibles that would be lost from all the interactions the residents or guests would have with that person.

It made me think of a past interview I had with Madelaine Ley. She was recalling the difficulty she experienced when trying to get funding for a charity she was working with:

“We want to be able to put things on a graph, on a slide, at a board meeting. I’ve been writing a lot of these grant proposals for these boarding homes and I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

Just how could you measure the profound gift of a birthday cake to someone whose birthday had been forgotten for 20 years? And then you brought their birthday cake.

Or fixing somebody’s guitar who hadn’t been able to play and couldn’t get their guitar fixed for years because they couldn’t afford the $20 repair. And now they could finally play.”

Throughout all these 300+ interviews I am conducting, I have become increasingly aware that there is a considerable gap between what we have been programmed to think will yield a good life and the experience of one.

A past guest alluded to the significance of the cultural scripts we follow, while another pointed to the influence of the advertising industry in cultivating an image that doesn’t match up with how we feel in this life.

Both are powerful influences in us no longer thinking or deciding for ourselves.

Yet I am continuously heartened by how people respond to this question of a good life when you give people a moment to reflect on their lives. In group conversations I’ve hosted on this theme, the simplicity and importance of non-quantifiable moments that bring so much meaning to people’s lives come pouring out.

“Dancing with my toddler.”
“A few glasses of wine with an old friend.”
“A hug after I lost someone close to me.”
“Growing some vegetables for the first time and harvesting them.”

Without a consistent paying attention to and appreciation of the unquantifiable and realising their significance, we can get really lost in the scripts of life we are told and what advertisers suggest.

We can almost destroy the usefulness of what can be quantified by making it the only thing we pay attention to.

I sometimes wonder why this project continues so effortlessly for me, by and large. Lord knows it is not for the money.

The connection I make with another human each week is a big part of it. So too is the act of sharing in their process of making meaning.

But most of all, it is a repeated reminder of the simplicity of what they actually feel is meaningful to them. I can’t help but be aware of the same things in my life as I go about my day-to-day tasks or when I am walking down the street.

It doesn’t sound particularly sexy or like something that will go viral – more an accumulation of drips. But it has made a profound impact on my experience of life regardless of fluctuating circumstances.

It feels like the forgotten part of life. What exists outside of the numbers. A part of life that feels rather abundant and present if we remember to notice.

I hope this newsletter and podcast can help you remember too.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What do you value that rarely brings you a felt sense of value?

2. What has become more meaningful to you as you move through life?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - Self-Sovereignty, Surveillance, and the Body as Art with OONA - What is a Good Life? #186

Listen to or watch the full conversation with OONA below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Sarah Marquis – the National Geographic explorer who walked 14,000km alone across Australia and author. She shares why fear is a construction we choose to believe, surviving a fall in Tasmania that left her crawling out of a gorge with a broken shoulder, and the grief that followed her mother’s sudden death. Sarah is a force of curiosity and nature – it was both a joy and inspiration to sit with her, so I suspect you’ll take a lot from this episode.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Sarah Marquis has spent 25 years walking alone through some of the most remote landscapes on Earth. In length, her expeditions are the equivalent of circumnavigating the planet on foot.

In the clip below, she shares a story of breaking her shoulder and crawling her way out of a gorge for three days, only to be met by a thick forest. Then, in the midst of navigating her way through the dense forest and wondering if she will die there standing up, she yells out from somewhere deep within her, “I will never give up!”

When it came to the grief she experienced when her mother passed, she saw it as an expedition of another kind. She needed to be with it, whatever it was.

She began to closely observe and respect what the terrain of her experience was. She said something particularly striking to me.

“Everything was new, and I was like, okay, I guess I don’t sleep anymore. Okay, I guess I cannot have a conversation with anybody without crying.”

She mentioned that if she needed to cry for three days or two years, that is what she would do. She suggested that any time she encounters the unknown, it changes her – it allows her to grow in some way.

It brought me back to another interview I did a long time ago with Dr. Simon Western. He mentioned losing a brother when both he and his brother were very young, and the devastating effect that had on his family.

Even in moments when things were going well in his late teens, when he had lots of friends, a career he was interested in, and being a bit of a party animal – he used to go off on his own, and people couldn’t make sense of it. They’d wonder, “What is he doing?”

And he’d say, “You’ve got to go and discover your melancholy. You’ve got to be with your melancholy.”

He said that at the time he didn’t really know what he was saying, but later in life he realised the significance of this act.

“I got in touch with loss and grief, and it made me feel whole. I realised that something changed within me, and I could live again, or I could engage again in a different way.”

As I was wondering this morning what this week’s reflection would be about, I took a break to paint with my daughter. As I left my home to go back to the office, a moment from another interview with Bob Anderson came to me.

“When my dad died, I loved my dad so much. It was intense grief.

And the surprise was, as I dropped to the bottom of, or deep into, that grief, that sitting right there at the bottom of it was joy and gratitude. The joy of knowing a love that deep, that fierce, that would hurt me this much.

And so I think that’s a good life. We can more and more deeply become who we are.”

There is something quite poignantly beautiful and satisfying about the path to growth, wholeness, and becoming not being tied to some reframing or expediting.

Not muscling our way through, but knowing the experience as intimately as we can, without knowing where it is going.

It feels central to a good life.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there something you are trying to force your way through that you need to sit with for longer?

2. What has grief taught you about yourself and about life?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - Sarah Marquis on Fear, Instinct, and Surviving Alone in the Wild - What is a Good Life? #185

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Sarah Marquis below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Dr. Miriam Meckel - award-winning journalist, professor of communication management at the University of St. Gallen, and founder of ada learning. We explore a burnout that became a life-altering depression, the vulnerability of turning her private writing into her bestselling book Letter to My Life, and why she believes embodied experience - not intelligence - is what separates us from machines.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Next week I am taking a short break, I will be back with episode #185 the week after.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

What if the point of your existence is simply to experience whatever it is you experience in any given moment?

At different points in this week’s conversation, Miriam suggests what AI can’t replicate:

“It’s the embodied experience that we share as human beings - but we don’t share it in the sense that I know how it feels for you to embrace a tree. I can imagine it might feel similar to what I feel when I do it, but I don’t know. I will never know. I will never be able to step into your consciousness and feel how Mark feels this.”

It brings to mind what my guest, Ralf Wetzel, said last week about his first therapy session. He was showing the outside world something different from the inside and at one point his therapist said to him:

“Ralf, don’t tell me the facts, tell me how you feel. Stop reporting.”

He was initially exasperated by this, as he thought he was already sharing everything. This was uncannily similar to my first therapy session when I used to live in London:

“How do you feel?”

I began to explain my thoughts.

“Sorry to interrupt, I asked how do you feel?”

I started again, telling her of my interpretation of an experience that prompted me to start therapy.

She interrupted again…

After the third time she interrupted me she said as plainly as she could, “How do you feel, are you happy, sad, angry?”

I didn’t know. I sat in silence for a moment, then simply said, “I am sad.”

Over the last decade I have continued to fine tune my capacity to simply share whatever it is my experience is with other people. I don’t mean some wild, undiscerning disclosure, irrespective of time, context, and place.

But at the very least a nod to it.

Like Miriam alludes to in the interview, I find that articulating an experience in the moment seems particularly important.

It builds a strange type of resilience in me. The act of sharing my specific human experience and being with it myself.

This quote from a past guest, Adam Mastroianni, has remained close to my thoughts since I interviewed him last year:

“It hollows people out, pretending that something is important that you don’t think is important, a lot of us have the capacity to do that for a long time, but it takes such a psychic toll.”

Right now I am bewildered with my financial situation in life, and when I don’t hide that from myself or others, it very quickly falls into the sense of it being another experience. Just another experience.

I feel so much of what we consider a problem is our reaction to the situation and not simply the circumstance itself.

In this week’s interview Miriam reflected on the decision to publish her writings from the period of a burnout and depression, against the advice of many people in her circle at the time.

She eventually came to the conclusion that sharing it was a public statement: “This is me and I am not capable of performing all the time, so you have to accept that or you will not see me or get all of me.”

There is a considerable relief I find in not maintaining the image so much and more concentrating on the experience. Not only does it leave us more connected with ourselves and who we are, it also creates an abundance of connection with people around us.

If my focus is more on cohering what is happening internally and externally, and acknowledging my experiences, it profoundly changes my sense of peace. I find it easy to feel like I am simply fulfilling my role in this world.

And my experience of this peace seems consistent irrespective of outcomes.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there a relationship in your life that could benefit from you sharing more of how you feel rather than merely stating the facts?

2. Is there something you are presently pretending in your life that is taking a psychic toll on you?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - Resting in the Core of My Identity with Dr. Miriam Meckel - What is a Good Life? #184

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Dr. Miriam Meckel below.

(Due to some technical difficulties on my side, the full video is not available this week, clips and shorts are still available.)

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Ralf Wetzel - a leadership scholar who has taught at leading European business schools, and a clown and mask performer whose solo show Absolutely Reliable! has played the Edinburgh Fringe. We explore what it means to have a good relationship with fear, tracing Ralf's path from a childhood under surveillance in communist East Germany to the unexpected places he found relief - among them, a plastic clown nose.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Ralf was standing in front of a class of senior-level bankers - twenty-five of them, seven years into his role at the school. Half of them just got up and left. He had no idea what to do next.

He stopped the class, closed the door, took a clown nose out of his bag, put it on, and inhaled with his eyes closed. A couple of seconds fully alone. Then some clarity came.

He invited the class back in and asked what they thought was happening. They said what he was offering didn’t feel useful to them - the connection between them was broken.

So he asked: “Do you have experience of your own relationships with clients breaking down?”

Silence.

Then one man with grey hair, early fifties, said, “Yeah, those were the most horrible moments in my professional career.” They spent the rest of the session exploring that breakdown, and what it meant for their own work.

In a nutshell, this defines much of my perspective on life.

Imagine how excruciating it would have been to listen to Ralf in that class after the break if he had just ploughed ahead and told them why what they were doing was actually the right way, why it was applicable, and what they might not be getting.

Can you recall times where you have done your own version of that? Whether at work, with a loved one, or while a new relationship is forming.

A great superpower with regard to human connection is being able to acknowledge what is occurring right now. The significance of sharing a distant life story, even if personal, pales in comparison to the impact of being able to say, ‘This is what I think, feel, and see in this moment,’ and asking the other person: ‘What do you see?’

If there is barely a hint of defensiveness in what you notice and share, you would be amazed at what conversations unfold from there.

Even if what you have shared involves accountability for how you have messed up, it is highly unlikely the other person won’t be able to relate on some level. A couple of episodes back, Kadam Adam Starr referenced the significance of knowing yourself in knowing others. When you know your own experience of life so intimately, you know the same basic experience of so many others too.

When we realise this, it picks apart one of the great myths of our time: that in order to really connect with another human, you must develop yourself in several areas first.

Think about that - the thing humans have done naturally for millennia now apparently requires self-improvement first. I see it very differently. It is more about dropping the distortion and resisting the urge to make up stories to save face.

It is a strange trade we are making, hiding ourselves and then sacrificing the possibility of a real connection right now.

Get back to the point of where we are right now. Who you are in this very moment. It is always available to us. How could we possibly hope to connect with someone if not from there?

Everything else is just smokescreens and performance, and a watered-down version of what connection can be.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Was there a time where acknowledging everything as it was led to a greater connection between you and another?

2. Can you recall a moment where not acknowledging things as they were led to a connection deteriorating further?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

Subscribe now

4. Full Episode - When Fear Becomes My Partner with Ralf Wetzel - What is a Good Life? #183

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Ralf Wetzel below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Lior Steinberg - urban planner, co-founder of Humankind and author of The Car That Wanted to Be a Bike. We explore why so many cities remain trapped in car-centric design decades after urbanist Jane Jacobs first warned against it. It is a thought-provoking conversation on how often change feels impossible until it is here.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

It was 40°C for two days in a row here in Berlin the weekend before last. This conversation with Lior was recorded during the heatwave of that week.

Even by Irish standards, I have a strong aversion to the heat. People in my neighbourhood in Berlin, in winter, will often see me walk around in a T-shirt as temperatures approach freezing.

So, through those particular eyes, it is not very surprising that I felt I was pre-witnessing an end-of-days-type scenario.

My daughter and I went to my local ice-cream shop at one point, and even though we were under the shade of a parasol, my legs felt like they were being cooked from the heat of the concrete.

As we made our way home, I saw only a handful of pedestrians in the distance on what is usually a packed street, maybe mirages.

Indoors, our usually cool apartment didn’t dip under 30°C for that weekend. Lying around in my boxers and intermittently spraying my body with water became the norm.

Earlier that same week, when the temperatures were relatively more tolerable, in the mid-30s, I was cycling across the city. I was on the bike lane next to a busy road in the centre of Berlin. I could feel the beads of sweat roll down my back, the dryness in my mouth even though I was hydrated.

The heat pounding down from the sun, bouncing off the cars, up from the asphalt.

Then I cycled for a few seconds through a pocket of trees. The air cooled, the temperature dropped noticeably, and I could breathe more easily.

And then, after a few more rotations of my pedals, I was once more back into the concrete oven.

“There is no air-con that does such a good job. There is no technology that will make our cities cooler than planting trees.” - Lior Steinberg

It brought back to mind a vision I semi-regularly have of a major European city. To any reasonable eye, this is it; our existence here is coming to its end.

There is a red burning around us, bodies on the ground, people thirsty with no water in sight, and there is a man in a suit, holding a white board and a message above his head, urging us not to lose hope, to remain calm:

GDP is at 5%

If that day does come, it will be tragic, and absurd, that perhaps we could have just planted more trees and not cut so many down.

In the interview, Lior points to us being trapped in a car-centric system that prioritises the needs of cars over what helps humans flourish. Without humans at the centre of those designs, we experience loneliness even while surrounded by millions of people.

More widely, we prioritise accumulation over what we actually need.

We need air to breathe, yet we still contribute to deforestation and pour plastic into our waters and poison plankton - all to maintain economic edges. Logic and rationality left the building a long time ago, even though we still dress our decisions up in that language.

However, despite the failures that Lior has faced in what he promotes, he retains some hope for us. The cigarette ban in many public spaces is one of them. There was a time this would have seemed unthinkable - when we could smoke on planes, when Hollywood stars and footballers were promoting cigarettes on TV - and yet one day, you couldn’t even smoke in a bar.

The other source of hope - and this one comes at a terrible cost:

“Crisis will make us change our habits. We will not be able to continue to do things the way we do.” - Lior Steinberg

Crisis carries its own potency for us personally too.

Throughout all these interviews, one particular moment stays close to my mind. It is of a prisoner in a rehab and recovery wing, telling his fellow inmates about hitting rock bottom, saying that he just doesn’t know why he is here in this world. Then a young man, with little interest in recovery, suggested to him that the very thing he was doing was his reason or purpose in life.

Change can come in unexpected moments.

Another interview moment comes to mind. A man who smoked from his late teens to his early forties quit last year, and it was easier than he expected. It came from a conversation with his two youngest children. They were talking about the environment, about things people do that harm themselves. And they asked a very simple question: if you’re talking about that, why do you still smoke?

He didn’t have an answer. Something then simply shifted.

I remember quitting booze for a time when a psychologist initially mentioned it to me as a helpful part of the process while I was in therapy. I couldn’t imagine not drinking on St. Stephen’s Day (the day after Christmas) with my oldest friends. I recall even saying that out loud to her: “What about Stephen’s Day?” Like it was a reasonable objection to something that was causing more suffering in my life.

While I might have the odd glass of wine every few months now, the thought of a rake of pints would make me wince.

We are a strange creature. I have no moral to any of this. Mainly just confusion.

However, before you continue to berate yourself for all your self-help work not taking you to a disciplined utopia, or your mental understandings not playing out into changed life patterns, two things:

1. We live in systems that are getting in the way of simple necessary responses.

2. You have no idea when change is coming.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What is the most obvious, simple, and accessible thing you could regularly do to benefit your life that you are not presently doing?

2. Is there a radical change to make in your life that seems almost unimaginable to you right now?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Cities That Make Us Happier with Lior Steinberg - What is a Good Life? #182

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Lior Steinberg below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Kadam Adam Starr - international teacher of meditation and Buddhism for over 20 years and the principal teacher at Tara Kadampa Meditation Centre. It is a conversation about self-knowledge, the attention economy, meeting difficult people with friendship rather than judgment, and the realisation that a good life may come down to how we choose to show up each day.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

“When we get to know ourself, what we struggle with, our potential, we quite naturally understand where everyone else is at.” - Kadam Adam Starr

Throughout these interviews, I keep finding moments that strike me as a particularly healthy way of meeting the world. Adam’s is one of them, and it also pokes at one of my great fascinations: why has all the inner work we now have access to seemingly done so little to make us happier or more content?

I’ve had a number of experiences, on retreats, at gatherings, in forums, where people assume they’re collectively doing it differently to the culture they’re criticising, and yet to me it has felt like a different version of the same thing. So much of our inner-development seems rooted in the very thing we claim to be moving beyond - not only the wish to feel more content but the desire to be special, to be better than others. The game changes, but the desire underneath stays the same. Competition in a new outfit.

Adam’s perspective here is rather beautiful. If you sit with yourself long enough - really acknowledging both what you struggle with and the potential you carry - it becomes much easier to have compassion for yourself, and then for everyone else. When you stop looking away from what you actually are, you start to see how nuanced a being you are: full of competing desires and values, peace and busy-ness, love and judgement.

And once you’ve sat with that in yourself, you begin to meet other people who are simply in the same place. Timing may have put a different variation on it, but it’s largely the same struggle.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes when someone confides a present struggle to me, I break into a spontaneous laugh - it’s all so familiar. As was the hope or expectation that we were going to escape the human experience in a given moment.

There’s a lovely link between what Adam is describing and several past guests in this series. Cormac Russell spoke about the thresholds of self-help - how useful it is up to a point, and how easily it tips into self-obsession if your attention doesn’t also expand outwards. Sit with yourself long enough and compassion becomes hard to withhold; the same is true of the attention we turn toward others.

Last week, Dr. Karen Jacob pointed to the importance of recognising anger in yourself, and then neither demonising it nor judging it so harshly in others. This week, Adam suggests that “a certain mental stability comes from being in touch with the reality of your own life.”

And it works both ways. In recognising our struggles, we often recognise the significant potential we hold for love and compassion too. That echoes something Bruce Anderson shared, his belief that our gift often emerges from our deepest wound:

“The indigenous idea is that you come into the world with your gifts and you encounter struggle. And it’s not until you encounter the struggle that the gift is cracked open and made available to you. So I have to see the person sleeping next to the dumpster as an incredibly gifted person because of the trauma that they have experienced in their life.”

Taken together, these perspectives tell me something I keep coming back to. Your practice, your streaks, your hours on a meditation cushion mean very little if your relationship with people doesn’t markedly shift. If it doesn’t markedly shift how you see other people.

Or, as Steven D’Souza put it: “I grow in my spirituality when I grow in my humanity.”

2. This Week’s Questions

1. How have your own struggles helped you to be more compassionate to others?

2. When has your inner work tipped into self-obsession rather than connecting you to others?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Finding Peace Within Myself with Kdam Adam Starr - What is a Good Life? #181

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Kadam Adam Starr below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Karen L. Jacob, PhD - clinical psychologist, Program Director of the Gunderson Residence at McLean Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. She shares how a father's dedication shaped her need for meaningful work, how four years of uncertainty after college turned out to be the most formative of her life, and how a chance encounter with a patient led her to specialising in borderline personality disorder.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

Figuring out what you don’t want is part of the process.

This is a lesson that continues to arise from all these interviews, as Karen’s story so clearly demonstrates.

She recalled spending four years before graduate school trying several things that weren’t really a fit. She watched her friends begin climbing the corporate ladder while she pursued different paths and waited tables on weekends to pay the bills. For her, this was a period of considerable personal growth, which was also agonising at times. She felt lost.

We can often feel like we are stuck or lost by not knowing what we want, to the point that we end up discounting the significance of understanding what we don’t want.

We can also over-inflate the importance of thinking we know what we want in theory - you have to try it out. I recall interviewing a partner at a consultancy firm who was also a yoga instructor. He harboured hopes of transitioning into yoga full-time until he went through the process of organising a handful of retreats and realised what the life of someone living that profession entailed beyond the image he had of it.

None of this is wasted effort; it is all part of the process of refining what might be meaningful and realistic. It makes life more of an experiment rather than a matter of winning and failing.

Meaningful work rarely arrives the way you expect it to.

Karen didn’t seek out Borderline Personality Disorder as something to specialise in. In fact, it was considered to be a particularly challenging area to work in when she began her career, and she initially steered herself away from it. It was when working in a department that specialised in diabetes that she crossed paths again with a client with BPD, and it all began from there.

I once interviewed a therapist and best-selling author who tried to be a priest, a college professor, and a musician. This wasn’t a path he could ever have predicted. I recall a senior business executive telling me that she never saw a five-year plan come to fruition. This is not to say we shouldn’t plan, but rather that there is an element of discovery in life that is beyond our control - more like a conversation with life than a determination.

The way you show up matters too.

Even work that feels meaningful can become less so depending on how we engage with it. Conversely, work that isn’t a perfect fit can still teach us something.

Karen mentions how her own realisations about parenting and letting go of control affected her work. How once she was deeply invested in the outcome, and how learning to step back and let other people own the process was hugely impactful on her work and continued to make it meaningful in new ways.

I recently interviewed a meditation teacher who suggested to me that meaning for him was derived from how present he was when engaging with another human being and situation. Just like the conversation he was engaged in with me and the walk he was scheduled to go on afterwards with a friend.

Even situations we no longer wish to be in can reveal something about who we are, what matters to us, and where we might need to go next.

If you are currently in one of those moments you consider yourself to be stuck or lost, perhaps you are really in a moment of understanding more of yourself before the next move becomes clearer.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there a period in your life when you felt completely lost, only to later realise it was part of your process?

2. How important is it to you that your work feels meaningful?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - The Art of a Meaningful Life with Karen L. Jacob, PhD - What is a Good Life? #180

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Karen L. Jacob, PhD below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeld - Chairman of Umeå Kallbad and Head of Nature for People at Rewilding Sweden. He shares how his father's death became a turning point, how cold water swimming became a doorway back into his body, and how a small group of friends turned a Sunday morning dip into a movement.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

“I didn’t even realise there were seasons before I left London.”

At one point in Dan’s life he was working in the restaurant industry and he would frequently work 80 and 90 hour weeks. When other restauranteurs would come to his establishment for lunch, he would scoff at the notion that someone needed a lunch break.

A pint of wine, two servings in one plastic cup, in a late night dive bar was his first drink after work and he was smoking two packets of cigarettes a day. So the almost daily cycle went.

And as the path predictably goes, he went on to move to the countryside in northern Sweden, ended up working with a rewilding group to help restore our relationship with the living world, and he also recently had a podium finish at the Ice Swimming World Cup.

It is very easy to hold up both of those images as night and day, as a dichotomy. But I don’t see it that way. Nor do I see it as linearly bad and now good. There will be ups and downs continually regardless of the stories we tell.

What I am more interested in, from interviewing 300+ people around this question, is how life flows in really unpredictable ways. Sometimes there are clear turning points, other times it drifts, sometimes our repeated intentions compound.

For Dan it was a moment at his Dad’s funeral, when his father’s best friend in a tender moment between them cupped his belly and lovingly and quietly said to “look out for that, son.” It reignited his love for the water and swimming. And took his life in directions he said he could never have imagined.

The interesting thing for me is not the finality of it, but how it will keep moving.

But how nice it is to sit by the roadside for a moment and consider you are somewhere you could not have dreamed of at one point. I do this frequently with myself and in conversation with friends. It feels important to acknowledge.

Last month I had an exhibition, from this project, on display at a forum in Athens. As I stood between the pieces and looked around at the walls they were hanging on, considering my experience in finance, I had a moment of “how did I get here?” Financial precarity and all.

I finished a book last month, once again from this project, that filled me with a deep contentment as I gazed out at my neighbourhood from my office desk. I have been trying to write some version of it for three years, a mixture of relief and feeling full. It has also provided me with several uneasy moments since of how exactly do I publish it.

I had another moment with my wife this week where our child was crying loudly and there were a few frosty exchanges and curtness between us as we tended to Ava. I was amazed by how quickly we found a way for our hearts to open between us after they appeared to close just moments before.

How am I a part of a healthy relationship of 10 years given I often felt like a guarded, insecure wreck in past relationships?

I think the temptation with our lives is to grade the transitions and changes as bad or good, as problem and solution, as stuck and complete.

Where we sacrifice so much of now with the promise of something different. The ends justify the means rather than attending to life as it is.

As Dan points to in the conversation, even his wellness practices became ways to quash certain feelings rather than let them linger.

We attempt to live through winter solely by wishing and dreaming of summer. The winter will shape us every bit as much the summer does if we let it.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Is there an aspect of your life that at one point you could only dream of, that you haven’t fully acknowledged?

2. Is there something you need to accept as part of your life even if it is simply difficult?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Trust, Water & Rewilding with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeldt - What is a Good Life? #179

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeld below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week, I'm reflecting on a conversation with Lucinda Millward - founder of The Baskerville Project, whose work brings the body and nervous system into collective inquiry. We explore what it costs to speak our truth - and why so many of us have learned not to. From the paradox of using other people's words to say what we cannot otherwise say, to why courage literally means to reveal one's heart.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

I open every interview with the same question and close with the same one. Everything in between is a completely organic conversation. It requires my complete attention to what is happening right now, otherwise I have nothing else to work with.

The interview would collapse, like taking a cake out of the oven before it has set.

The significance of this attention in conversation has been one of the biggest discoveries of my life.

“Keep talking I am listening” as someone checks their phone in front of me.

I have grown accustomed to stop talking and telling whoever I am with that I can wait. That they can’t possibly tend to both and do them well at the same time.

To have several moments in my day where I get to look into the eyes of a real and unguarded human as they look back into mine is life changing.

I have often put this lack of attention down to distraction and self-interest.

But Lucinda offered a perspective that adds another layer to it:

“If we are really going to listen to someone, really listen, then we consent to being altered by them. And that’s scary.”

It’s true.

If we spend time together in a totally present and unguarded way, I will be changed by you. You will be changed by me.

That is both a scary and exhilarating thought.

But it is happening anyway.

In the interview, Lucinda references an idea from Dave Snowden on identity. He suggests that identity is an emergent property defined by context, relationships, and the stories we share within a community.

Throughout this project of interviewing more than 300 people around this question, I don’t know where some of my thoughts and ideas begin or end. Sometimes I only realise months after that I have adopted a perspective or a way of living from another guest. I don’t sit down and intend to do so, it just happens.

We like to imagine ourselves as independent and self-determined. Yet we are constantly being shaped by one another.

There is a trade-off in how much we are willing to let go of control and how much we want to feel connection.

As Lucinda suggests, when we are in a moment where we can look deeply into the eyes of another, even in silence, then there is no armour or place to hide. For her, that is where she feels most alive and real.

These moments are much closer than we think, often just a moment of attention or a meaningful question away.

Like: “What is a good life for you?”

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Who do you feel most unguarded when speaking to?

2. In whose presence do you attempt to control the conversation the most?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - The Courage To Be Heard with Lucinda Millward - What is a Good Life? #178

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Lucinda Millward below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week I’m reflecting on my conversation with Sam Smith. Sam sees life as a big old experiment. He used to play professional rugby, before starting a few businesses. Last year he wrote his first book, The Door Was Never Locked. In this conversation, we explore identity and the stories we carry without questioning. If you are navigating any big life transitions right now, this conversation will be particularly helpful.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

When Sam came off the rugby field on a Sunday as a 13-year-old, it was the point of the week where his parents looked the happiest. The rest of those Sundays would take on a really light and fun quality.

He internalised this as: when he is good at sport, it makes his parents happy.

When he was coming out of rugby, whilst he knew they loved him, there was also a real fear of: but they’ve made so many sacrifices and this makes them happy.

A coach he was working with invited him to go and speak to his parents about that. In response, his mum said, “My goodness, Sam, the reason we were so happy on a Sunday when you walked off the pitch was that it was the first point in the week that you looked the happiest.”

It left a real impression on Sam.

“It was this incredible moment for me to see that how wildly wrong we can interpret a look or a word or anything. They were happy because I was happy, and that had always been the case. Yet I’d carried a very different story for a long time.”

There are two things that this story stirred in me.

Firstly, throughout these 300+ interviews, many people have noted the significance of when their attention moves beyond their own personal inquiry and personal sensations to the outside world, nature, and other people’s experiences.

I recall one woman who was stuck in a heavy conversation right up until the point she viewed the Grand Canyon for the first time - her whole breath left her body and she just broke into tears. The relief of her smallness in the context of this larger existence was freeing.

There is something about an outward gaze with our attention that moves us away from both being the centre of the world and feeling the weight of the world.

It allows us to feel more compassion for ourselves and others. Much of what we experience as someone doing something to us is often just the unavoidable mess of being human. Nobody can fully escape this mess.

Secondly, it just made me think of the importance of getting to know your parents intimately. Sam joked that we forget sometimes that they had a life and a story before we existed.

It’s easy to view our parents primarily through the impact they had on us, rather than as people shaped by their own histories, fears, and limitations.

Or that they, like us, can make bad decisions and are prone to anxiety, struggle, and stress at times.

Much like the woman who, standing before the Grand Canyon, momentarily lost her position as the centre of the universe, I find it liberating to widen the scope of my story and become curious about my parents’ lives.

What was their childhood like, how were they as teens, how was the transition into parenthood? What were the highs and lows of their lives? When were they happiest? When were they most afraid? What are they most proud of and what do they regret?

There can be plenty of reasons why questions like these aren’t discussed when we are younger. But as an adult, I must say it is quite relieving and connecting to hear much more context.

I worry sometimes that much of our self-inquiry is fixated on ourselves almost in isolation from the people and world around us. That while our understanding of ourselves becomes much more nuanced and hopefully compassionate to our own humanity, that we don’t extend that to others.

There is something very sad and isolating about all this inquiry if we don’t look out with the same quality of attention.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. What story are you presently telling yourself that might not be true?

2. What reminds you that you are not the main character in the world’s unfolding drama?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - Complicated Locks, Simple Keys with Sam Smith - What is a Good Life? #177

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Sam Smith below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.

This week I’m reflecting on my conversation with Doug Skoke - Founder & CEO of LFG NOW!, a boutique executive search firm. What begins as a question about why dogs are so emotionally regulating opens into something much wider - grief, crisis, therapy, love, acceptance, and what it actually means to lift others up. It is a real gem of a conversation.

If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.

Take care, Mark

Subscribe now

1. My Weekly Reflection

One of my favourite places to be is between my sleeping dog and sleeping toddler on a midday nap.

Watching diaphragms rise and fall. Inhales. Exhales.

Occasional movements of limbs and light snores from my dog. It is easy to get intoxicated.

On two separate occasions, after both their arrivals, my wife halted me in my tracks. I was waxing lyrical about them being in my life, specifically them.

A few months after we collected Alma from a shelter, I mentioned that I was so glad that the sequence of events unfolded as they did, so that we ended up with her.

To which my wife responded, “Do you think had we picked any other dog, you would not have ended up loving that dog too?”

Fair enough.

A few months after Ava was born, a similar exchange occurred. I told my wife I was so glad we’d waited - that otherwise we wouldn’t have had Ava. She asked, “And do you think, if it had been another child, you wouldn’t have felt the same?”

Once again, fair enough.

When I shared this with Doug in this week’s interview, it brought up some memories for him around adopting his sons.

With his first son, he wondered during the adoption period about his capacity to love, a fairly common question for parents going through the process.

“Will I love, can I actually find that in me? To love this newborn that’s being delivered in a different, albeit beautiful way. But, yes, it’s the same answer. I mean, it’s an unequivocal, “of course, you idiot.” And your heart just expands.”

He experienced a similar pattern of thought the second time round and the result was just the same.

“The heart just expands. Love is a beautiful thing. Love is, unconditional love is, a really a big emotion.”

Jennifer Garvey Berger, in last week’s episode, talked about this idea of rising up to love rather than falling into it. That the lens of possibility we hold with love is too narrow.

For most of my life I felt love only existed with immediate family, partners, children, and perhaps a handful of long-term friendships (which was only expressed with several drinks).

Now love feels far less personal than that, less rooted in story or continuity. Yes, with certain relationships it is easier to access or notice, but it more broadly feels like love simply exists.

Almost akin to presence, we can experience it in a moment, a gesture, a look, without a building up to or working on.

Realising this makes this world feel like a very different place.

And if you pay attention, you notice the presence of certain portals that make this realisation easier to make.

For Doug it is a golden doodle called Harley, and for me a Romanian street dog called Alma.

2. This Week’s Questions

1. Can you think of a moment where you were surprised by your capacity to love?

2. With whom or in what setting do you most easily feel love? Where does it feel most out of reach?

3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast

4. Full Episode - What Is It About Dogs? with Doug Skoke - What is a Good Life? #176

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Doug Skoke below.

For Apple podcast click here.

Subscribe now

About Me

I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.