Event Announcement 📣
I will be hosting a day long event in Berlin, Exploring Presence, with Johnnie Moore on September 17th. There are just two places left if you’d like to join us.
This Week’s Podcast
On the 138th episode of What is a Good Life?, I’m delighted to welcome Edie Pijpers. Edie is a self-taught painter, musician, and writer whose work flows across the porous borders between music, colour, story, dream, and video. Raised in the Netherlands, Edie travelled through Paris, Sydney, and Los Angeles before planting roots in the Hudson Valley. Over the years, she has released five albums, held art shows in Nashville and New York, painted murals, published mindful children’s books, created intimate video pieces, and collaborated on the oracle deck Healing the Inner Child via Hay House.
In this conversation, we explore the essence of creativity and the balance between doing and being. We explore the importance of giving space and time to ideas, as well as attuning to the muse that lives as presence in ordinary moments.
Ultimately, she highlights the significance of relationality, living attentively, and embracing the flow of existence.
The weekly clip from the podcast (3 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
How often do you consider the significance of place and space in the context of your own good life?
Listening to Edie’s journey in this week’s episode, much of it resonated with me.
Living in different places opened new possibilities for her — moving from Rotterdam to Paris to embark on a creative life, relocating to LA and then New York to further commit to her path, and more recently, moving from the bustle of NYC to the countryside, where nature became integral to her creative process.
The slowing down and the space that nature affords her continue to shape how she creates.
Her story made me reflect on the role of place and space in my own life, and how they have supported some of the bigger changes I’ve experienced.
When I spent a four-month sabbatical in India in my early thirties, it was, on the surface, to explore meditation and Vipassana. Yet it also provided a clearing where nothing was expected of me — even room to fall further apart if that was what was needed.
Of course, I couldn’t instantly adopt a mindset of expecting nothing from my trip; I still longed for greater mindfulness, inner peace, or life direction. Yet the shift of place laid a foundation for much of what was to follow.
Similarly, stepping away from client-facing roles — where I didn’t feel I could truthfully share how I was doing — gave me room during a year of therapy and internal work to feel more myself.
My second sabbatical, a year in the Peruvian countryside, offered another cocoon. I had just quit a job with a 40% pay increase on the first day, and if I’d returned to Dublin or London immediately, the pressure to explain “what was next” would have been a bit much. That distance gave me the courage to sit with not-knowing.
Being in highly career-focused environments would have pressed me to create a story, while my choice to wander already created confusion in certain relationships. The space Peru offered helped me resist that pressure.
These experiences were not about running away from the “real world”. Rather, they gave me the chance to question what this world and life really are to me. Would I choose them again if I disengaged and then re-engaged?
Berlin feels right for me for now: bustling with creativity, where people dress and behave as they please without attracting much judgement. Unlike in Vancouver or London, where the first or second question is often “What do you do?”, here I know people fairly well without much idea as to what they do — and it feels freeing.
With so many ways of approaching life here, there seems little external pressure to follow any prescribed path. When I travel home to Ireland I sometimes feel the weight of the life I was conditioned to live.
I don’t feel this from any person in particular — I suspect nobody really cares. It feels more like an energy, or a kind of muscle memory, of what I am supposed to care about there.
Berlin may have been too soft a landing — or perhaps just right — as my direction continues to emerge. It is a place where the art of becoming doesn’t require too much explaining.
This week’s conversation has reminded me just how significant different places and spaces have been at pivotal moments in my life.
Whether it was beginning to hold expectations of myself more lightly in India, resisting the urge to immediately create new narratives in Peru, or a loosening of conditioning in Berlin.
New places seem to offer a choice: how much of our baggage and self-appointed labels will we carry with us? It’s less about inventing a new persona or denying who we are, more about recognising that some of what we carry may never have been ours to begin with.
What about you? How has place or space shaped your journey?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Full Episode - Tending To What Emerges with Edie Pijpers - What is a Good Life? #138
4. This Week’s Questions
Is there somewhere you feel called to visit or move to?
Is there a particular place or space that inhibits you?
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.
Your reflections resonate deeply with me Mark. Especially this part: ''New places seem to offer a choice: how much of our baggage and self-appointed labels will we carry with us? It’s less about inventing a new persona or denying who we are, more about recognising that some of what we carry may never have been ours to begin with.'' Moving to Ireland enabled me to open my baggage and dump the things that have never been mine. I feel lighter here because of that :)