Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring big questions around what really matters to people. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
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
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
What aren’t you noticing in your life right now outside of a present drama?
Have you ever felt surprisingly ok in a situation you hadn’t wished for?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
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.
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.