One Crowded Hour

Experiments in Human Thriving #2: how meditation can help us see The Matrix, the Tupperware Lids On Method and a meditation for deep breaths.

Hello, amazing humans 👋🏽

Oh my goodness. I’m so grateful to all of you for your beautiful notes and feedback and juicy shares of my first newsletter! It feels so good to be writing again, and I’m glad it hit home for you, too.

So many of you signed up for paid subscriptions, and I’m so grateful for your support! I’ll be posting some special treats for you very soon, so keep an eye out for those.

This week, I’ve been thinking about time: how to get more of it, use it better, and show up better in the minutes I have.

Back when I was an aspiring foreign correspondent, someone lent me the book One Crowded Hour*, Tim Bowden's biography of the Australian combat cameraman Neil Davis. Davis was a frontline war correspondent for more than a decade in South East Asia, and this book was the inspiration for me choosing the region as my base for many years.

In the flyleaf of all his journals, Neal Davis used to transcribe lines from Thomas Mordaunt’s poem, "The Call":

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
Throughout the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."

Like the dorky aspiring corro I was, I copied these lines into the front of every Moleskine I lugged around the world with me for a decade, and romanticised the drama and excitement of Davis’ life and work. Well, until covering two coups in Thailand, horrendous poverty and violence in Myanmar, and several natural disasters disabused me of the romance.

But the excitement of filling my life so completely, filling it with meaning, always felt captured by that quote. I’ve never been reckless enough for the “live fast, die young” epithet, but I’ve always wanted to cram as much in as I can, have always been impatient to make things happen, to do, do, DO.

It’s part of what has made mindfulness practices such a challenge for me, and such a reward. As a hyperactive human, sitting still was excruciating to start with, and so difficult to be with. All I wanted was to be out in the world, swinging like a monkey from branch to branch, just like my racing mind.

Persevering with a meditation practice has had an enormous effect on my perception of time. When I’m teaching mindfulness, I’ve often likened this experience to that moment in The Matrix when Neo realises he can dodge bullets: that everything starts to slow down and you have “time” to observe what’s really going on.

As my meditation practice has developed, it has made the “internal” bullets slow down, too. Helped me see what I’ve been running from in my life, and helped me to sit with and quietly observe them.

You can control so much of what happens in life — but the rest? Other people’s actions. The stock market. The world. They all fall outside that purview. Wishing it were different can be a source of great suffering.

I want to be clear: learning to be with things you can’t control is NOT the same as standing impassively in the face of injustice, or letting people steamroll you because you just don’t mind anymore. It’s about controlling the things we CAN control, and spending the freed up, less angsty time on the causes we care about.

*Incidentally, Melbourne band, Augie March named their hit tune, One Crowded Hour after the same biography.

🎈Let’s Start Small: The Tupperware Drawer

My friend Tom took one look at my Tupperware drawer and said “I’m worried this means you have OCD.” 😳 For the record, I don’t, but I grew up in a house where we had enough Tupperware for a family of 20, but could never find a lid that matched the containers.

It always drove me crazy, so when I finally stopped being a nomad and started my own collection of containers, I vowed to never create that situation for myself.

Enter “The Lids On Method”.

The Lids On Tupperware Drawer is a hill I will die on: I never have to waste time hunting for a matching lid, from storing leftovers, to popping them in the dishwasher, to putting them away. The lid stays with its buddy.

Now, to those of you who argue this takes up too much room, I counter with a challenge to check how often you use the bottom of your stacks and stacks of mismatched containers. Also, to consider how long it takes you to match them up when you need them.

I’m similarly anal about socks, although my dog, Mose Allison the Jazz Puppy, does his best to ruin that system.

🧪 Excited Adult Quotient

So what do sock hygiene and Tupperware OCD have to do with time? These are both small experiments I started running in the “Things I Can Control” column. Yes, they are silly, small things, but when you’re trying to rush out the door on a Monday morning, they can be the make or break for you getting to your first meeting on time.

I also have a dedicated spot in my house for all my keys, my passports, and most importantly, my AirPods, which always want to run away from me. I’ve also started experimenting with food prep for the work week. More on that as we get more results 😅.

🌬️ One Breath At A Time

With all these experiments, I always have to remind myself to add them thoughtfully. I love to take on all the things, and try and change too much at once. Adding one a week is a good way to test if it’s making a difference, and to prevent myself being overwhelmed by trying to “fix” everything.

And if you’re already feeling overwhelmed enough, may I offer a couple of minutes to breathe?

Photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash

✍🏽 Let’s Do It Together

What tiny time saves have you experimented with? Are you Team Lids On?
What little things annoy you in your immediate vicinity that you could spend a little time repairing, or trialling a new system on?

❤️ Right Now I’m…

📚 Reading Priya Parker’s wonderful The Art of Gathering, a beautiful how-to on creating spaces, curating connection and opening opportunities for dreaming and collaboration. I love the blur between the work and personal worlds, and Parker does a great job addressing connection in both.

📺 Watching this reboot of “Joyful, Joyful” from Sister Act 2 from a recent episode of The View, and then of course, watching the original, because Lauryn Hill Forever 😍

🎵 Listening to Angie McMahon’s wonderful album, Light, Dark, Light Again
and constantly coming back to the anthemic “Exploding.”
The lines “If the alternative is heavy holding//I hope that I’m always exploding” may well be what I transcribe into the front of my new journals.

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🦮 How Can I Help?

As always, you can hear me answering curly work relationship questions at 745am AEST Thursdays on Libbi Gorr’s Enterprise Breakfast show on Disrupt Radio, and on Disrupt’s The Advisory Board.

I run workshops on preventing burnout, mindfulness, clear communication and my personal favourite: “How Not To Be An A$$hole”. If you need a keynote, something to shake up your team, get them working well together, or even a loving, relaxing meditative treat to celebrate a job well done, let me know by replying here, or book me directly through my website.

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