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.
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.
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Take care, Mark
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 with 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
What makes you really feel consistently safe?
How would you answer the gatekeeper at the hilltop?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
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.
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.