You wait months for a ramble and then two rambles come in a row.

More rambles from me.

A friend of mine was recently talking about someone she was worried about. This person was going through a marriage breakdown and veered being vanishing from social media and not replying to messages to posting four times a day and leaving podcast length voice notes.

‘It’s never a good sign,’ said my friend of this erratic social behaviour.

I agreed. And now I am doing the same. No newsletter for a nine months and now two in a week. Oh, well. I just want to keep on the roll and it was so nice to hear from so many of you after Wednesday’s. Thank you for giving a sh*t and for taking the time to get in touch.

A few things that I’ve been reading/thinking about this week.

The first thing I do every morning is the thing you are not meant to do - I reach for my phone and spend half an hour scrolling through social. While doing that yesterday I came across a video from Brene Brown talking about resentment. She explained that she thought that resentment was a form of anger but in fact it isn’t. Resentment is connected to envy and that whenever we are resentful of someone, we are actually quite jealous of something they have/are doing. So if you resent a colleague for clocking off early again, it’s not so much that you are angry with their laziness, you are most likely jealous that they can do that. You wish you could take it easy sometimes and not feel so responsible. A small thing but it made sense.

Lee Harris is an intuitive. Every month he does updates of what he thinks will be going on in the month ahead. I guess it’s a bit like reading you star signs but instead of reading the stars, he is tapping into collective energy. He also talks about channeling wisdom from his guides - which isn’t something I really get - but I relate to a lot of what he shares. This month he talked about learning to receive as well as give, the importance of protecting ourselves from people who may make us feel drained and how the future will belong to people who do things from their heart.

Rest. Rest. Rest. All the new year content I’m seeing seems to be about doing less, resting, enjoying the small things, loving yourself how you are. Etc. I love this. I have not watched it yet but will watch this video on 7 different kinds of rest we all need. (Let’s all become exhausted trying to get our seven rests a day!)

I grew up with a family obsessed with sleep. To me rest means being flat on your back either asleep or watching Netflix. But rest does not just mean sleep. Physical rest can come in the form or yoga or massage. We might also need mental rest, away from thinking and planning. We may need rest from sounds and lights and screens. We need a rest from relationships that exhaust us, or find rest in the safe company of someone we can unburden ourselves with. We may need creative rest, which means allowing ourselves to paint and daydream and doodle and… whatever. We might also need spiritual rest - so to connect with something bigger than ourselves, whether that’s going to a forest and looking at the sky, or praying.

Speaking of TED talks, I did one (well, a Tedx, which is like that less fancy version) a long, long time ago and never shared it because my hair was weird and I felt overexposed at the time. Now I’m underexposed, here it is.

New Gurus by Helen Lewis is meant to be great but I haven’t listened to it yet. It’s about the new gurus telling us how to find how, what to eat etc.

During the workshops people were swapping podcast recommendations and I was copying and pasting them into a document to share with everyone but the doc did not save and now I’ve lost the list. I remember Diary of a CEO being mentioned. I also enjoy Rangan Chatterjee’s conversations and Tim Ferriss is still one of my favourites. I really like falling asleep to Ram Dass and Tara Brach, both funny spiritual types. Ram Dass is the one who said 'if you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family.’

BOOKS

I mentioned The Holistic Psychologist in Wednesday’s post. I read her book How to Do the Work over Christmas and I recommend it. Its a good beginners book to help you understand your behaviour, where it comes from and how to change. She was a classically trained psychologist but found that neither she, nor her patients were getting better by just talking about their problems. Instead the same loops of behaviour kept getting repeated. She started to look at the part that healthy diet, regular exercise, sleep, contact with nature and a spiritual life in mental health…hence the name Holistic Psychologist.

TV

Now for my specialist subject: TV. I wrote a piece about TV addiction for the Telegraph but was too ashamed to share it here but well, here you go. I’m happy to say I’m not in so deep with my viewing these days but I’m still a heavy viewer. One day I want to be the kind of person who says ‘Oh, I don't really watch much telly,’ but that day has not come yet.

Anyway from last year, my favourite shows were: INDUSTRY. A BBC/HBO drama about a group of grads working in a big London stockbrokers. I loved it. The characters were brilliant, the pace super fast, the sex and drugs exciting without ever feeling gratuitous.

THE WHITE LOTUS. You don’t need me to tell you about The White Lotus but if you haven’t watched it you are in for a treat. It’s about guests in fancy hotels and the various dramas between the couples and the staff and there have been clever articles written about how it tackles class and sex and race. It’s also very very funny.

It was written by Mike White who also created a series called Enlightened which was out about fifteen years ago. It’s about a woman (Laura Dern) who goes off on a hippy retreat to find yourself after a monumental breakdown at work. She then comes back to the office job and tries to keep her enlightenment going from the office cubicle.

STATION ELEVEN didn’t seem to get talked about much but I thought it was wonderful. I had never seen anything like it before. It’s set in the future when a virus kills off most of the population. For a while the world is the post-apocolyptic wasteland we see in most movies about the future but then we see this small band of people flourish. The live on the land, putting on Shakespearian plays. Creativity and community are the things that matter. It’s kind of idyllic - apart from the moments where people from other tribes are threatening them.

Last year I interviewed futurists - people who get paid to predict the future but not by looking into a glass ball, by reading huge amounts of research into AI, biomedical research etc. These conversations blew my mind. They painted a picture of a world of self-repairing bricks, remote surgery where a surgeon in India could operate someone in Brighton via robot and machines becoming so sentient they need psychologists to help them with their existential crises. So much of it I didn’t understand. But one thing surprised me. One of the guys - Nickolas Badminton - talked about how he believes creativity will be very important in the future and he sees the return of more live street performance and community plays and performances.

He said our humanness is going to be more important as machines take over many of jobs. I liked that.

And on that note, mum recommended a BBC documentary called The History of Now with historian Simon Schama. I haven’t watched it yet but its about how art and culture has done more to shape the world than politics. ‘Artists change the world,’ said mum. ‘You’re an artist so get on with it.’

She said it in the same way she’d tell me to finish my homework/tidy my room.

I imagine Vivienne Westwood saying much the same thing. The British designer/punk/activist died last week and in all the eulogies I came across this quote from her:

‘You've got to invest in the world, you've got to read, you've got to go to art galleries, you've got to find out the names of plants. You've got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race.’

On it!

xx

ps Thank you again for sticking with me. You have no idea what a difference it makes. We can all be our own worst enemy and I have certainly been mine over the last couple of years. Thanks for setting me a bit straight.

xx