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Big waves
May 18, 2026 @ 7:26pm – Melbourne, Australia What do athletes do but create difficulties for themselves so that they can grow through overcoming them? – Viktor E. Frankl
It’s easy to find yourself under pressure in a game of tennis.
In singles, you’re alone, with no teammates to rely on. You alternate serves, with each service game presenting a chance to be broken. Within each game, pressure can build quickly from long rallies, often decided by a line ball or a mistake (unforced error) rather than a winner. A few of those at the wrong moment and the match is lost.
Since most points end on errors, the general strategy is to play one shot longer than the other person. Get a high percentage of your first serves in. Don’t miss returns. By playing good enough, you send pressure back over the net.
It also helps to be talented. Nadal is an example of a player who applied pressure by having seemingly no weakness to exploit. On clay he would whip every shot into something that felt like a “bowling ball” on your racket. Players like him, Andy Roddick says, leave you no choice but to “pick your poison” and hope you get lucky.
Even if you’re one of the greats, pressure is still a factor. They might not admit it, but we can see it expressed in smashed rackets, weird shot selections or slumped shoulders. So if you can be great at hitting the ball, while thriving under pressure, even better.
Djokovic, who famously “takes your legs, then takes your soul”, typifies this sort of player who is strong both mentally and physically. Not only does he win a lot, but he seems more likely to win when he’s a set down. Maybe it’s only against big waves: 5th set tiebreaks, stadiums filled with booing crowds, that he can reach “the true limits of his capacities.”1
This ability to withstand and do well under pressure provides a huge advantage. Imagine two equally strong players duking it out for a championship. The pressure steadily increases over the course of the match because neither of them is making mistakes. No one can break serve. Every point starts to matter more than the last. The gravity in the stadium is increasing. When you’re flooded or taken over by pressure, you think you need to be perfect, when good enough is fine. You believe the momentum you had a few moments before is lost forever. Game over.
But the player who can see through pressure notices most of this. They’re able to recognise that the suffocating air in the stadium is quite breathable. The gravity no longer affects them in quite the same way. They’re still missing their first serves, exhausted and drenched in sweat but they’re not blinded by pressure in the same way. Their perception is less distorted.
And because they can see a bit more clearly, they might catch a glimpse, a small recognition that their opponent is suffering in just the same way.
Related writing: Partly cloudy, Swimming under pressure, Inner Game of Nick Kyrgios
- Tim Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, Random House, 1974. ↩︎
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Ugliness
July 11, 2024 @ 6:51pm – San Francisco, CA I got nothin’ to do but today – Stephen Stills
No one likes to be called ugly. Someone has decided that they think a part of you, like your nose, is unpleasant to look at, and they’re letting you know about it. An insult like that can sting, but it’s just words, and with some practice and a healthy amount of self-respect, one should be able to shrug it off. You think I’m ugly? So what?
But what if the person calling you ugly is you?
What do you do then? It’s not possible to stoically ignore yourself like you would a deranged stranger on the street. And if you really do think you’re ugly, you must believe it’s true, which like organised religion is not something you can easily reason yourself out of. When we critique ourselves, painfully, we become both the attacker and the victim.
To get out of this uncomfortable bind, one has a few different options. Externally, you can change your appearance that is bothering you, in hopes that it makes you feel better or different. Take hair for example. You might change its colour, cut it, chemically restructure it into a different shape or attach someone else’s hair. Internally, you might disintegrate into shyness, avoid looking at your reflection or pretend you no longer care. Resisting, fighting and trying to remove our ugliness never seems to work very well and are temporary fixes at best.
Rather than trying to change, we need to embrace, love and accept ourselves. But how? In comparison to hacking away at our bodies, acceptance can appear to be passive and ineffective. What are we meant to do exactly? And how are we meant to love and accept ourselves if we are stuck with this thing we want to get rid of?
What we really want is removal, not acceptance, but accepting doesn’t need to be contingent with the ugliness disappearing. If it was, then it wouldn’t be acceptance. In practice, acceptance doesn’t really do anything with the ugliness. It’s still there, staring at us. But it does mean sitting there with it. We sit there, even as every molecule we are made of wants it to go away.
Over time, and with practice, you may even start to enjoy your ugliness. Enjoying doesn’t mean you necessarily want it to stay, but you have found some minute aspect that you’re okay with. It’s ugliness, but like other kinds of ugliness that we see in the world, we don’t need it to go. It still looks bad, like a stain on your trousers or a rubbish bin filled with dog poop, but deep down, you’re kinda okay with it.
And if one day, it finally does go way, you might not even notice.
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Giving up
December 17, 2025 @ 11:52am – Watsonville, CA We are wired to solve problems. It doesn’t matter how big or small the problem is. Once we recognise a problem exists, we usually do something about it. We buy a band-aid for our blister. We take night classes to train up for a better job. We get counselled for our relationship problems. We leave angry comments on YouTube.
We really value problem solvers. If you’re clever at solving hard problems, companies will give you lots of money. We vote for politicians we believe can solve our problems.
Survival is the problem we need to keep solving. And through a certain lens, our lives are a series of responses to different shaped and sized problems.
That’s why it’s a little unsettling when someone faces a problem and says they can’t solve it.
What do you mean you can’t? That’s not what we like to hear. We’d rather hear about solutions, options and ideas for making something better. We don’t want to hear about giving up.
But sometimes that’s all we can do.
This is the crisis Nora (Renate Reinsve) finds herself in the film Sentimental Value. She’s struggling with a suffocating depression and cries out to no one in particular: “Help me. I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do it alone.”
After years of ignoring advice from doctors, friends and the latest scientific research, people often say they started to lose weight in earnest when they couldn’t see their toes anymore or weren’t able to pick up their grandchildren.
Alcoholics say something similar when they start Alcoholics Anonymous. They introduce themselves to strangers as an alcoholic who is powerless over their problem with alcohol.
Admitting to a huge problem that you don’t know how to solve isn’t fun. That’s why almost no one does it. Instead, we keep looking for a place to hide, like we’re in the desert looking for shelter from the sun. We believe we are capable of doing anything. We rely on excuses, clever logic, stories and other fabrications that sound like problem solving and progress.
But when we admit we can’t do something, or that we really don’t know how to proceed with our lives, at least we’re being honest. In that moment, we are seeing our life, in whatever shape it is in, clearly and truthfully.
If we really can’t do it, we can’t do it. And that might suck.
But that’s a pretty good place to start.
Also published on Substack
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Creativity
April 1, 2026 @ 12:33pm – Melbourne, Australia Human creativity is responsible for many of our greatest works of art. Michelangelo’s David. Anything by David Lynch or David Byrne. Music, paintings, sculpture, film. These things can connect with us in different ways at different times in our lives. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a creative person, you’re likely someone who at least appreciates the creations of other people. That’s why it can feel wrong that a machine could be capable of the same creativity we have.
But what exactly is so special about human creativity?
Losing it
Animals and children make creativity look easy. Children are “independent arbiters of significance”.1 They invent stories, poems and riddles without trying. Animals are less clever but can be spontaneously creative too, inventing new games, dances and songs. We could call this natural creativity.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to last. It’s more likely we are surprised by creativity when it decides to tap us on the shoulder. One morning, in that drowsy, hypnagogic state, I briefly saw a poem about wasps. The words weren’t mine, or anything I had read before. Still half-conscious, I attempted to edit and add to the poem. But with every effort I made to improve it, the poem got worse. This is normal creativity. Judgement, over-thinking and all the other delights of the left-hemisphere leave us feeling dissatisfied with our creations.
The Source
That wasp poem was weird, and I have no idea where it came from. Creativity is mysterious like that. Even Mozart admitted that he had “nothing to do with”2 his best ideas.
“Thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish…Those which please me, I keep in my head and hum them… Once I have my theme, another melody comes, linking itself to the first one, in accordance with the needs of the composition as a whole: the counterpoint, the part of each instrument, and all these melodic fragments at last produce the entire work.”
Mozart and other masters are examples of the heights of human creativity. We could call this abnormal creativity. It can almost feel alien to us mere mortals. If we’re sipping inspiration through a straw, people like Carl Jung or Walt Disney are wading around in a lake of it. But even if they might have more of it, it’s the same stuff. Nothing special.
Most of us aren’t Mozart. And most of us have lost our natural creativity. So it’s no wonder we are irritated to hear about a machine winning art competitions. We shouldn’t be. Creativity might be a mysterious thing, but it’s always in us. And it’s not special, it’s natural. Children and animals are constantly pointing out how simple and easy and joyful it can be to create. We really can’t help but be creative. We just need to stop getting in our own way.
So let’s stop making creativity special, and start making things again.
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Stopping
March 8, 2026 @ 9:58am – Clunes, Australia Occasionally, when we push ourselves hard during a workout, we hit a wall. I don’t mean collapsing, I just mean stopping.
Sometimes it happens without us noticing. We just find ourselves standing still, panting, hands on hips instead of running. Sometimes we can push through and find some strength to continue when we’d usually stop. We might chalk this up to some new mental mindset or technique, but a lot of the times we don’t know what worked.
In all these situations, the person giving up is the same person we’re all used to being. You. The person who tends to think the same thoughts. The person with your genetics. Your habitual consciousness.
I know myself pretty well at this point. If I leave the situation in the hands of my typical self, I know what’s going to happen. When I’m swimming laps, I might think, “OK, I have one more lap in me.” And that’s what will happen.
But in that particular moment, when we just need to run for a few more minutes or lift that weight one more time, do we have to be that same old person? Is that habitual frame of mind the best one for the job?
When we ask that question, another follows. Who might it be more helpful to be?
Maybe we need to briefly become someone or something else, or briefly stop being ourselves. This might happen spontaneously. Like, you’re in the pool and for a minute, your leaden legs filled with lactic acid start to slash through the water like a tiger shark’s tail.
To make this sort of thing to happen, we need to find ways to give up control and allow it to happen. Then, and only then, do we open up to the possibility of something different happening.
Originally published on Buddha Bike Substack
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Humblings
February 27, 2026 @ 9:23pm – Melbourne, Australia When we are by ourselves, it can be easy to become delusional.
A little bit too much pride, and we fall for the illusion of being more than we really are. A little bit too much doubt, or fear, and we can believe that we are hopeless.
That’s one of the reasons we need other people.
Other people can help to break the illusions that we have cast around ourselves in private.
For example, it might be in your nature to believe you are a very neat and tidy person. This might even be somewhat true. There’s hardly ever a dirty dish laying about. You’ve got good manners.
But if you ever find yourself around someone who is much more orderly than you, it can be hard to keep this act up.
Maybe you’re eating a meal with this person, and you realise that they carefully place their cutlery down on the plate while they’re not eating. And you, to your shock and horror, wave your knife and fork about like a pirate.
In that instant, you just aren’t as orderly as you thought you were. In a very particular, personal way, you’ve been humbled.
This is a good thing.
Most of the time, we hang onto our habits and beliefs so stubbornly that it takes a certain kind of person or event to have this effect on us.
I tend to think I’m a pretty calm person. But one day, I’m sitting in a theatre waiting for a show to start and I notice a very calm older woman sitting near me. She’s incredibly still. She’s simply sitting. I realise my legs have been thrashing about, my fingers have been itching my scalp and thumbing through my phone. In contrast to her, I’m all movement.
It might never happen, or take a lifetime, but at some point, our confirmations and expectation are eventually bowled over by reality.
This is a good thing.
Reality is a good thing. But that doesn’t mean it feels good when it smacks you in the face.
Reality can hurt because it is shattering and dissolving something we thought was true and good and right. That’s what a belief is. I’m competent at riding a motorbike. I’ve got a business mind. I’m a good person.
These ideas can give us a lot of structure and stability in our lives and how we orient ourselves in the world. When we can’t hug them close, it hurts. We might feel like we have nowhere to stand or nothing to hold onto. We might suddenly feel small, or weak, or strange, or odd, or imperfect, or broken.
But once the pain, which can often be just a mild irritation, subsides, humbling is always a good thing, because reality is always a good thing.
It’s always new and refreshing. It’s always spontaneous. It’s what is actually happening.
And although it can feel comfortable, familiar and safe to pat yourself on the back, and to tell ourselves certain things, even if they are partially true, we tend to be better off when something or someone comes along and unapologetically and undoubtedly shows us we don’t know what we are talking about.
Originally posted on Substack
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The garden
February 8, 2022 @ 4:22pm – Freeport, Bahamas The following is a lightly edited transcript from my grandmother Jane Clement
But if I walk in the garden and I don’t actively think, everything is beautiful.
It’s when you start thinking, that things start falling to pieces.
To try and spend time not thinking is quite difficult.
To me, meditating is too (structured) to be the practical answer. For anyone to meditate for a long spell, maybe that’s a mistake.
Maybe, it’s the meditation that flashes through you which you don’t even really know you’ve had. That’s the real stuff.
Because that really is the answer isn’t it? That’s life. If you put (life) on a platform as we’ve done the last few minutes, it’s not the same thing at all.
It’s the difference between me describing a house to you and suddenly seeing it.
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The gratitude police
February 3, 2026 @ 5:49pm – Melbourne, Australia Well I had a job, but I got laid off. I had a heart but it got too soft. I had a girlfriend and she lied. I had a wife but my wife she died. – Buddy Guy
The Buddhists organise suffering into eight groups.1
The four major or universal sufferings are birth, aging, sickness, and death.
The four minor sufferings are of having to part with loved ones, of having to meet those one hates, of being unable to obtain one’s desires, and suffering arising from the five components of life.
If you’ve ever itched your neck on a hot day, caught a flu, or bumped into an old high-school rival, you can rightly say you have suffered.
And if you spend a few spare minutes learning about current world events, you will quickly see just how much suffering is happening to humans and animals at any one moment.
Most of us can intellectually understand the suffering that happens in distant countries or to people we’ve never met, but it’s very hard to comprehend. You could tell me my house burned down, and I could imagine it, and maybe start to feel a lot of stress and shock, but it’s probably not until I see the incinerated remains of my living room that reality would sink in.
The other thing we learn when we read the news is that we are not all suffering equally. A person living in a refugee settlement in Dhaka is dealing with a very different material situation than a person born into a middle-class family in Zurich.
I’m in that second group. Pick any framework or wellbeing score you want, I could tick off most of the boxes. I’m just not suffering that bad.
From my position, when I feel anxiety, sadness, loneliness or anything else that’s clearly not good, I quickly remind myself that it’s not that bad in the scheme of things. It really could be worse.
It’s true, it could be worse, but why aren’t I allowed to feel dissatisfied? Why is it that a warden from the Gratitude Police™ taps me on the shoulder and tells me how inconceivably lucky I am to possess my current living arrangements?
Because even if I don’t allow myself to feel miserable, even if feel guilty that I dislike something about myself or my life, it doesn’t mean I’m not suffering.
It’s legit, 100%, grade-A, USDA certified suffering. Trust me.
It’s suffering, just in the form of something like guilt. Suffering becomes inescapable in this sense. Like water, it fills in all the gaps, ensuring that every available person suffers, if they want to. Guilt is also “arrogant”, author Robert A. Johnson writes, “because it means we have taken sides in an issue and are sure that we are right.”2
On the flip side, guilt can prevent us from being happy. When we find ourselves feeling joyful and carefree, someone (perhaps the Joy Police™) grabs us by the scruff of our neck and says “hey, not too much of that Joy stuff. Don’t you know there’s people hurting?”
Don’t listen. I could reel off lots of things that I’m incredibly lucky to have, but I could equally do the same for all my sufferings. We all could. It’s what fills every film, novel, play or conversation at a bus stop. But there’s no Olympics to compete in, leaderboards or medals to be awarded.
No matter who we are, or what we are, we’re all suffering and to ever think we need to create more of it, is simply more suffering.
Originally published on Substack
- https://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/dic/Content/F/212 ↩︎
- Johnson, Robert A. Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche.HarperCollins, 1991. ↩︎
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The wisdom of hypocrisy
January 17, 2026 @ 1:39pm – Melbourne, Australia “Hell ain’t a bad place to be” – ACDC
No one likes to be a hypocrite. No one wants to be wrong, look stupid or say something obviously contradictory.
But we are often wrong, about lots of things, most of the time.
Instead of trying to be less wrong, we usually just pretend we are right. I’m pretty good at doing this. It’s easy. And I think most people do it too. You just ignore all the little things you’re wrong about. This is called confirmation bias, a perceptual error that causes us to ignore or undervalue contradictory evidence.
But once in a while, I’ll get a reality check which pops me out of my bubble. Something will happen that forces me to see my own hypocrisy.
- I’ll be complaining to myself about my job as I walk past someone welding steel in 105 degree heat. I wonder, do I want that job instead?
- I complain to a friend that I’m bored and they immediately ask me to help them with an annoying task.
- I spend months making a case for a feature to be built, but when it finally gets approved, I resent the fact that a co-worker gets to work on it instead of me.
It’s painful to hear these little truths. I don’t want to admit how close-minded or petty or self important I’ve been. I’d rather ignore them or make up some other story about what was going on. And usually, that’s what I do.
But if I can sit with them and digest them a little, new opportunities arise, which weren’t available before. What not to do. Where not to go. What not to say.
Hypocrisy doesn’t show me the truth , but it does shows me untruth, which is still pretty useful, and objectively better than whatever fog shrouded alley I was lost in moments before.
The physical events of my life don’t change either. I don’t instantly get a new job or a promotion or whatever. But I do get to change my desire of things to change.
In this way, we can move forward through life, removing hypocrisy bit by bit.
Originally published on Substack
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This time it’s personal
December 26, 2024 @ 3:09pm – Mt. Martha, Australia I bet they’d love your sparkling personality – Carol Sturka, Pluribus
The easiest way to piss someone off is to poke fun at something they take personally. Their haircut. A pair of brand new sneakers. Don’t do this. They will get annoyed. Because when something is personal, it hurts.
The personality is a project that we’ve all poured a lot of time and resources into. It’s what we show off in our elevator speech or on a first date. It’s our personal trivia, odd quirks and what we’ve tried to desperately iron out and improve with therapy, self-help books and travels abroad.
Take me for example. I’ve always liked to ride bikes. I might even say that I’m a cyclist. But if someone thought that I was riding 50km/h in a bunch of fitness freaks every morning at 4am I would get a little upset. That’s not me, I’d think. I’m not that kind of cyclist. Even if it’s close to the truth, I’d feel a bit annoyed and misunderstood.
I also have this blog called Buddha Bike. You should read it! But I’m not a Buddhist. I don’t know any prayers or have a favorite sutta. I don’t wear robes (unless my dressing gown counts). I would get upset if I was introduced as Buddhist. That’s not me! At least, that’s not how I think of myself. Writing this blog is tied up with my personality, so I’d take those comments personally.
It hurts when we take things personally, but it also hurts more when we take things too seriously. When I’ve written (here and here) about taking things seriously, I meant it in a much more positive way. Like “singing like your life depended on it”. That’s what a concentration camp survivor told David Lee Roth, who then followed that advice for his whole career. Or it’s like when we participate in a race and we don’t care about the result, we just try and do our best (even if our best might fluctuate wildly). This is what we should encourage kids to do. This is what growth mindset is. It’s wholehearted. Maybe we could call this healthy seriousness.
In comparison, unhealthy seriousness is cringing, defensive, overly sensitive, fearful, neurotic, self-conscious and self-absorbed. Sounds like fun, right? It’s a fragile attitude and position to take on life. Like a tiny quivering half-blind Chihuahua, it’s got no choice but to end up scared and barking at a streetlamp. For example, if one takes their appearance very seriously, they’re suffering every time the wind ruffles past their hair. If you take the formatting of your word documents really seriously, you’re suffering when someone comes in and changes the font size. You were too serious. You clutched onto it too tightly, and now your hands are bleeding.
To escape this pain, people have found all these different ways of taking themselves less seriously. There’s the extroverts who seek out the attention, turning their faults into fame and enjoying a heavy reality distortion field. But they can also be dangerously unhinged and narcissistic. There’s the monks who have switched off their personalities but live alone in a cave and are scared to turn the lights on. There’s preppers who don’t trust or need to rely on anyone, but end up paranoid and alone. And there’s the few who have been able to unplug themselves from society’s rules but end up disconnected from themselves and others, making normal relationships and jobs impossible
Although I can admire these types from a distance, purely for their ability to shed self-consciousness and sensitivity, many of these ways of living don’t seem that healthy or appealing.
Instead, we could be finding ways to relax this seriousness, like author Robert Moss writes to “look at your issues and life choices … without judgment and always (I trust) with a sense of humor.”
One way to do that is finding ways to laugh at yourself. Can you laugh at how you are rewriting that post on social media? Can you laugh at yourself picking out the right shirt to wear? Can you admit that you’re being a little bit too serious about it? Some of us have turned something like a profile picture into a matter of life or death.
But unlike seriousness, humor always feels like relief. Laughing deflates. Releases pressure and tension. Unclenches. You’re basically laughing at the world not ending. Annoying stuff still happens. Disappointing stuff still happens. But we don’t need to take it seriously1.
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