I love what I’m doing. I really do. There is honour in my calling, a kind of grace in still being useful after all these years. Purpose and passion are no small things. They keep you alive, awake, and in motion. But motion can be a curse when the soul aches for stillness, because I promised myself—years ago, in some far-off moment of younger certainty—that I would stop. Not slow down. Not consult a few days a week. Stop. I even wrote it down, perhaps in the back of a journal or on a piece of hotel note paper, maybe even a pub coaster: One day, I will do nothing and be happy about it.
And oh, how I would love to do nothing.
To sit in a Northern Thai village market where no one knows my name, where the only expectation is to smile, sip on superbly strong and sweet Chiang Mai coffee and chew slowly on a long-fried piece of pork rind. No pressure. No reliance. No calendar entries. Just the low murmur of Buddha, barter and basil, the hiss of charcoal, and the rhythm of a life untouched by emails or ego.
But I’m not there yet.
Instead, the work bell rings, and I must rise, again, to try and change the world. Really? Who appointed me custodian of the planet’s problems? Some days I can barely remember where I left my keys. Other days I feel like wandering in a dreamscape where time bends and truths shimmer. Wisdom, perhaps. Or exhaustion dressed in spiritual garb.
I should be grateful—and I am. For the won back respect, the rhythm, the relevance. For the magic that still stirs when I find flow. But damn, it gets harder to sit in grace. The body aches. The mind—once sharp and cheeky—sometimes forgets the punchline. The jibe runs dry.
And in the quiet moments, when the screen dims and the phone goes silent, I long for something else.
A long lunch on a forgotten, remote beach with my beautiful wife. Just her, the sea, and time. Time to stretch our stories over lazy bites, to wander off-topic without guilt.
I crave a row of overpriced piccolos at a Bondi café table with my amazing boys or my brilliant recovery friends. Not saving the world, just telling lies, talking footy and laughing. Just laughing.
I am, like the Hoodoo Gurus sang and my mate Rick Grossman strums, “a thousand miles away”—from rest, from release, from the nothing I once promised myself. But I’m also a thousand miles deep into something that matters. That contradiction is my home now.
Maybe, just maybe, the answer lies in learning how to be in both places at once. To hold peace and purpose in the same weathered hands. To keep walking like a pilgrim, not toward achievement, but toward a quiet market stall somewhere in the backstreets of the soul, where the work is done, and the only thing left is to sit, to sip, and to be.
No push. No pull. Just peace.
