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.
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.
November 23, 2025 @ 3:52pm – Camberwell, Victoria, Australia
Here are some notes, quotes, songs and writing from last month. This is probably my last post before the end of the year. At some point in January I’ll compile all my notes for the entire year.
Thoughts
Motivation is important, but it’s difficult to drive forward if there’s a part of us that has their foot stamped on the brake. We tend to set a louder alarm clock when there’s a part of us that is tired and wants to rest.
It usually comes as a shock when we recognize how similar someone else is to us.
If technology had a slogan, it would be something like “there’s still a few bugs to work out”. It’s never finished.
I think there’s a real cost to watching hours of television every night, especially for younger people. Streaming makes the problem both worse and cheaper. It’s like subsidized rubbish. At least a Blue-Ray is unsubsidized.
If you can, acknowledge your tiredness. It’s not even unpleasant. What’s unpleasant is ignoring your tiredness or not even knowing that you’re ignoring it. Say to yourself, “Yep, I know, we’ll go to sleep soon.”
There’s spontaneous conversation and then there’s the pain of wanting and wishing the next conversation to be the same.
Hell is not giving yourself space between ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’.
There should be a decent reason you are only giving 40% effort.
Any time I’m doing something that requires me to wait a few minutes, like boiling a kettle, my hands leap at the opportunity to fidget and scratch.
A sleep cycle is about 1.5 hours. If you wake at some ‘odd’ hour in the night, translate it to cycles instead: Oh, I’ve just woken up after sleeping for a few cycles. It makes more sense.
I’m automatically assigned ‘team leader’ for a day. It’s hardly got any power or real responsibility. It’s more a contact person if anything. But almost immediately people emerge from the group who want this job and don’t want me to have it.
There’s been a stain on my bathroom door for months. I finally look at it closely. It’s mould. I clean it, sand it, wipe it, paint it.
I swim crawl much better when I breathe despite the water, meaning I don’t adjust my position so much. Usually I’m breathing around the water, gasping to fit a breath in without swallowing water.
I remember a bumper sticker I saw when backpacking years ago. It said something like “Life: This isn’t practice.” I think you can read this and feel worried, or just read it as an important fact to remember.
A lot of modern weight loss techniques are about going fast. Whizzing smoothies, interval sprints, flapjack burpees. But you can lose weight doing everything slowly.
This year I opted to not be part of my apartment buildings’ committee. Most issues have quietly resolved themselves without any intervention from me. I wonder if wars are what happen when groups of people can’t help but intervene.
Kids use great language. A kid playing soccer with his brother exclaims “if you kick it with force it goes like a slingshot!”
If someone wants to lose weight ask them what will happen once they have lost the weight. Most of the time we don’t actually think about what will happen once we get the thing we want. We are too busy wanting the thing.
A basic experience of freedom: stop a habit
Quotes
If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live. – Einstein
Even these nihilist guys, they’re trying to provide meaning even if it’s an anti-meaning…they’re enchanting the world with nihilism. – Grant Morrison
True creativity is when you have a sense that your pleasure could be legitimate wherever it lies. – Alain de Botton
We’re all put to the test. But it never comes in the form, or at the point we’d prefer, does it? – The Edge (1997)
One of the best ways to discover what you really believe in… is to watch your own behavior. – Robert A. Johnson
The moment a friendship feels like it’s a sort of tit for tat, it’s no longer a friendship – My mother
Jet lag is your soul being dragged around by your body. – William Gibson
When I am having difficulty getting into a task, when I am writing, repairing something around the house, frustrated by difficulties, or literally breathless from jogging. The phrase will come into my head—“I am just warming up now.” I usually find more energy available after this. – The Teaching Tales Of Milton H Erickson
True science results when (with common sense)… people know what kinds of experiments to conduct. – Rudolph Steiner
They were sending me kids who couldn’t sit still. Well, they could sit still when they were listening to me, because they realized I was giving them something valuable. – John Stokes
“The one thing that our unconscious will not tolerate is evasion of responsibility.” – Robert A. Johnson
To-do lists are a simple tool, invented to get stuff done. You write down the item that needs to be completed and then you tick it off when it’s done.
You can do all sorts of things with your list. You can order the items in priority. You can create sub-tasks. You can set due-dates. But all these things and features are working toward the same goal, getting stuff done. I believe there’s been some books written about this.
Some of us rely on to-do lists because they hold us accountable. Without them, a task might land on someone else’s plate, or somewhere in our own nagging conscience before we realize we’re late or forgotten something.
But like any tool, they can be misused. Just like we can buy excellent, well-constructed gym equipment and leave it to collect dust in the garage. We can misuse a to-do list too.
Misusing a to-do list is when we write down something but we don’t do it. It’s good that you’ve written it down, but then the due-date slips by and it’s still sitting there. You’ll get to it later right? Maybe it got less important or something. That’s fine.
You could also remove it, delete it. This is a bit more subtle. Maybe it’s not important anymore. And now, with a bit of helpful forgetting, or reasoning, your list is looking pretty good. You’ve cherry picked items that are pleasing, easy to complete and there’s only a handful of those left to do.
I call this particular move drawer shoving.
What I’m talking about has nothing to do with a to-do list, or some specific app or workflow. I’m talking about this process of acknowledging something and then hiding it or destroying it. Avoidance. Shoving it away into some drawer.
And what makes this tricky to get a handle on is that so much of it happens outside our awareness. The hypnotist Milton Erickson once pointed out that if someone has been skipping check-ups, they’ll actually speed up when walking past a dental clinic. Or if you’re hungry you’ll automatically slow down when passing a restaurant. You can see a similar phenomenon in body language. Some people will instinctively cover or rub their eyes when they don’t want to look at someone or something.
But we shouldn’t look away.
It’s one thing to be caught off guard by something you couldn’t have known about. You did the regular services on your car, but something weird still happened and now it’s busted. That sucks. It happens to all of us. But it’s another thing entirely to know about a problem and shove it into a drawer. You see that the edge needs taping before you paint, you skip it, and a few days later you’re standing there thinking: Why did I do that?
Excuses don’t help either. I’ve used them all before. I can’t be bothered. No one will notice. It’s good enough. I don’t have time. I talk myself out of it. I’m scared. It’s not my job. Surely it’s unimportant.
No matter what, these shortcuts, hacks, and avoided stuff all tends to come back. Chekhov’s gun is real. Not immediately, not all at once and not always in the ways I expect.
When my junk drawer was getting emptied out on me at work, I’d blame co-workers as overly detail oriented. Or I’d think certain people were out to get me, to specifically point out my flaws and make me look bad. But if I was honest with myself, I already knew what they were going to point out, because I was the one who had consciously avoided it first!
It comes back. It catches my attention somehow and reminds me for the millionth time, that I might be able to wiggle, obfuscate or lie my way out of some things, but it’s never possible to lie to myself.
And even if it doesn’t come back. Even if you get away with it. Why not just assume that it will. Live like it will. Assume that it will bite you. Not in a paranoid, ‘prepper’ frame of mind, just in the spirit of intellectual honesty and the fact that you are always stuck with you.
Assume anything that you know about, has at least the chance to be known by others. And when that inevitably happens, what’s going to be your excuse then?
I first wrote something about to-do lists in March 2014
Imagine you have to get on stage dressed as a giant carrot and get chased around by a guy dressed as a rabbit.
You’ve got a job. You pay the bills. You just don’t do stuff like this. It’s ridiculous. It feels silly and wrong.
But, not only do you need to run around with this rabbit, you’ve got to do it as seriously as possible.
Usually to be serious at something, we try and be good at it, or at least try hard to get it right. We roll up our sleeves, ‘focus’ or might screw up our face in concentration. We take things seriously if they are important to us, or when we care about the result.
It may be easy to think you’re being serious, but being serious is more serious than you think.
Let’s go back to the carrot suit. Have you put it on yet? Great.
It’s going to be difficult to take something this silly and make it serious.
But. What if:
You’ve been doing this carrot – rabbit thing for 50 years. It’s not just a one off stunt. It’s been the career of your lifetime.
It’s been your livelihood too. It’s got your kids through college and made a nest egg for retirement.
It’s also been passed down your family line. Your father did it before you, and his father, and so on, further back than anyone knows.
Over the years it’s helped you through your own struggles. Addictions. Mistakes. It’s taught you things. You might not even be standing here if it wasn’t for this Carrot suit.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, you enjoy it. You see the benefit not only for yourself, but you want to share it with others who might benefit too.
Now, when you think of all those things at once, as you’re dressed as a carrot, I think you’re getting a bit closer to what serious looks and feels like.
And I think we’d all be better off if we did things more seriously.
Like singing, for example.
I’ve always disliked karaoke, because I’m not very good at singing and I feel uncomfortable looking and sounding bad in front of other people.
But I’ve found the more seriously I sing, the better I sound and the less uncomfortable I feel.
To do something seriously, means to do it totally. You can’t have one foot in and one foot out. That carrot guy isn’t hesitating or doing it half-heartedly is he? Why would he?
It’s a bit like a dog chasing a ball. There’s not much inner conflict, umming and erring or hesitation when a dog chases a ball. The dog is not divided. It just does.
Buddha Bike 