What is a Good Life? #132
Navigating Life's Complexity with Kate Arms
Join the conversation 📣
I’m launching a monthly What is a Good Life? group Zoom call for paid subscribers. Each month, we’ll explore themes that are emerging from the podcast. They will be interactive sessions where we all take part, living this question in conversation with fellow curious souls.
There’s also a founding membership option that, along with the monthly group sessions, includes a one-on-one personal interview exploring this question more deeply. If this resonates see the subscription options here:
This Week’s Podcast
On the 132nd episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I’m delighted to welcome our guest, Kate Arms. Kate helps people and organisations create effective systems in which people thrive. She is known for her expertise in building and maintaining organisational systems that support innovation and creativity, and the psycho-social challenges faced by gifted, highly-sensitive, twice-exceptional, and creative individuals. Her career has taken her through law, technology, publishing, non-profits, and the arts. She co-founded the Neurodiversity Coaching Academy and is the author of L.I.F.T.: A Coach Approach to Parenting, the Extreme Resilience Workbook, and several short stories featuring horror tropes and second chances.
In this conversation, Kate shares her lifelong inquiry into the complexities of being human and how to thrive amidst life's challenges. She reflects on the interplay of grief and love, and the importance of mindfulness and presence. She emphasises the need for systemic change to foster a more thriving world and the significance of becoming an elder who stewards wisdom for future generations.
This conversation is an invitation to actively and wisely participate in your own experience of becoming.
The weekly clip from the podcast (2.5 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (60 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
I’ve had an intense week.
I don’t know how the rest of you are feeling.
It contained so many ebbs, flows, sharp edges, and soft embraces.
Until last Sunday, I had a bizarre ten-day period where I could not stop writing the present version of my book, What is a Good Life?
For ten days, I felt like I was being visited by a storm of words, and any opportunity I had to write, I had no choice but to take. Late into the night, at the crack of dawn—wherever there was space.
When that subsided at the start of last week, there was definitely a deflation.
A cooling off.
While I still don’t exactly know how the book will go, I’m realising how much work is still required.
I felt a bit detached from the rest of life.
Not quite as engaged in conversation as I normally feel.
Little energy for anything new.
Not even time alone in my local café drew its usual satisfaction.
It was also compounded by things that seeped in from the outside world.
I don’t consume much news, but I glance at the headlines now and then. The absurd range of what makes the headlines.
Even noticing a disdain for my own intrigue with headlines I thought were moronic clickbait.
Jagged judgements coupled with dismay at the culture we have created.
The daggers of hearing about controlled demolitions of housing in Gaza, and watching a nature documentary with plastic-strewn beaches where fluffy albatross chicks feed.
The idea of extracting meaning from the circus of modern life—let alone some of its travesties—seemed like a far-fetched notion.
And for pretty much the first time in the almost two years since my daughter has been with us, I felt almost burned out by the constant cycle of work and parenting.
She’s not yet in daycare and won’t be for a while, and though I wouldn’t wish to change that, Berlin is not where our families are based, and that felt significant this week at moments.
While the work is what I love, it requires so much navigation of both novelty and uncertainty.
The intensity of making a living in a way that tests or experiments with how I sense the Universe works—not in some entitled nonsense of manifesting whatever I want, but in how the conversation or relationship with life may actually function.
All while being aware that if I had written the same reflection a week ago, in the midst of that flurry of words, I would have told you I was experiencing something I’d never experienced before:
A sense of connection, intensity, and expression that I may have only dreamt existed in my work.
It is a funny old thing to navigate this life.
Sometimes longer walks with the dog and afternoon naps with a child seem like the only useful response.
All these circumstances, energies, cultures, noticings, and actions, swirling around in my awareness.
Whenever it gets like this, I consider myself blessed to have a wife with whom none of this is hidden.
My wife and daughter are incredible anchors of meaning when the rest of it seems so random.
When ideas or efforts to serve or help seem so futile.
Their presence feels incredibly real. My relationship with them never feels inconsequential. Their capacity to touch my heart or funny bone never seems to fail.
I have no neat bow or takeaway from this.
Simultaneous confusion, fog, and clarity.
Hard to believe it is all real at times.
The ache and stretch of it suggests it is.
Who knows.
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?! Subscribe here
3. Full Episode - Navigating Life's Complexity with Kate Arms - What is a Good Life? #132
4. This week’s Questions
Can you remember a time of deep uncertainty when you knew, without a doubt, that there was only one right decision for you?
Is there something that always feels meaningful to you, that anchors you somewhat in the unknown of it all?
About Me
I am a coach, podcast host, and writer, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed nearly 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.
If you’re interested in exploring your own self-inquiry through one-on-one coaching, my 5-week group courses, or fostering greater trust, communication, and connection within your leadership teams, feel free to contact me via email or LinkedIn.
Sending love and strength, and gratitude for all that you do. These are strange times indeed, and its hard not to feel discombobulated. I can relate to so much of what you say (though right now I could really do with going through a "bizarre ten-day period where I could not stop writing" 😁)