Wherefore International Men’s Day?

November 19, 2025November 19, 2025 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

Good question. There is an argument that, in a world created by men and for men, a world where men hold most of the power, every day is “Men’s Day”. We all know there are more male CEOs than female, but to put that into context the latest data tells us there are more men called John running FTSE 250 companies than there are women. Not women called John, in case you’re wondering. Women. In total. And we all know there are more male heads of government than female, but to follow through and put that into context, just 19 of the 193 member states of the United Nations currently have female head of state. More than two thirds have never had a female head of state in their entire history.

And some of those male heads of state we are subjected to now really are some of the most caricatured examples of toxic masculinity you could ever hope to avoid, building their palaces and breeding their bullshit authoritarianism as a shield to protect their eggshell thin egos. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban, Jong Un, Milei. And many more like them, or hoping to be. I’m not sure what the question is for this bunch of bullies but the answer is “unresolved childhood trauma”. I can’t make up with my father/mother/teacher/first girlfriend so I’ll build up an armour made up of sycophants and wealth and as much power as I can possibly hold in my little hands.

When I took my first steps into my work on diversity, equity and inclusion, there was a shared belief that things were getting better, particularly around gender equality. The dictionary definition of feminism is the belief that women should have the same rights, opportunity and, yes, “power” as men, and that seemed to be shifting, albeit very slowly. But thanks to this lot, and their acolytes, we’ve taken a few big steps backwards over the last couple of years.

[Yeah, I did drop it in there, didn’t I? The dreaded curse of DEI which is now put forward as the reason why society is a so fractious and divided, conveniently and maliciously ignoring the fact that it all stems from wealth inequality which started with ideological free market economics, wandered through the failed experiment of privatisation, jogged past the systematic deindustrialisation of swathes of countries and communities wearing nothing but a flimsy coat of consumerism, skipped into a garden of easy access to credit and slammed right into the greed-fuelled banking bubble of the 2008 financial crisis.
People have been sold the story that the problem is “woke”, forgetting that they were actually there and saw it happen. Don’t you remember? It was the banks! Billions of your taxes went to bail out a bunch of (overwhelmingly male) bankers that had become gorged on greed. You must remember that? It wasn’t giving more opportunity to those who didn’t have as much in an effort to level the playing field. It was the fucking banks! You were there! REMEMBER?
Hmm, this might be a separate blog now I come to think of it. Where was I? Oh yeah “power”]

It’s not just “power” of course. Data from the World Economic Forum tell us that whilst there has been change in the gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity (money, basically) since 2006, if we keep going at the current rate it will take 169 years to close the gender gap completely. [Yeah, I know, that’s such a long time that it almost seems silly counting it doesn’t it?]. A big part of that is because women still do around 60% more unpaid work – cooking, cleaning, childcare, caring – than men, none of which is recognised in the economy but all of which impacts on time and, by extension, the need for more flexible working to fit it all in.

So yeah, it’s a man’s world. Then why on Earth do we need International Men’s Day?

Well, because the day is less about celebrating men in general, and more about recognising the need for positive conversations around manhood and masculinity. And about stripping back some of the baggage, too.

And there is baggage that comes with being a man. I mentioned in these pages a while back a book I’d read called The Mask of Masculinity (you can find it here if you’re interested, it’s very good) by a nice chap called Lewis Howes. In this the empathetic and erudite Mr Howes [no I’m not sure why I’ve suddenly gone all formal and pseudo posh either] explains that there are a whole bunch of masks that men ‘wear’ to function in society.

The Know-It-All Mask where you pretend to know stuff you don’t know because admitting you don’t know shows weakness. Best example of this is me looking at the engine in a car, pretending to understand when the roadside repair man arrives at my broken down vehicle and tells me there’s something wrong with the “crank shaft” or “big end” or something else which, because I’m quite childish sometimes, sounds slightly risqué in a very Carry On film kind of way.
The Joker Mask, which makes light of everything things – particularly things that might be emotionally difficult – to avoid having to deal with them properly. Yeah, I’ve known that one a fair bit.
The Material Mask, where showing off an expensive watch or an expensive car or about an expensive holiday is a demonstration of how successful you are. Money can’t buy me love but it can help me pretend I’m happy and powerful. I’m very fortunate that I’ve never really put this one on. I don’t really care about watches or cars or designer clothes and the idea of ‘conspicuous consumption’ seems kind of pathetic to me. But
The Alpha Mask where you never back down or admit fault, doubling down when challenged and becoming even more Alpha. Think all of those dickhead “leaders” mentioned above. Especially Trump,
The Stoic Mask, where you pretend everything is okay when it’s really not. Hmm, yeah. That one fits me like an old pair of slippers, perfectly moulded from years of use.

There are others, of course. But it all conflates into one big theme…

Pretending.

Pretending things don’t hurt. Pretending you care about stuff that you don’t care about. Pretending you don’t have emotions. Pretending everything is okay when it’s really, really not.

Boys don’t cry, remember?

When I was a young man we never talked about negative emotions. Ever.

Trouble at home? Worried about school? Disappointed about not getting into the sports team? Heartbroken because the girl you liked and who you thought liked you too has started hanging around with a lad from the year above? Grieving over the death of a beloved pet?

Bury it. Deep.

Don’t show weakness or it will be ruthlessly exploited by your own very best friends, not because they want to hurt you but because that’s what boys do because “it’s just a bit of banter, lads”. No need to take it personally mate. Can’t take a joke?

So if you’re the one on the receiving end, you have precisely two choices: suck it up, or give as good as you get. Stoicism or alpha? Your choice.

That’s what we’re conditioned with, and that’s how a lot of men’s relationships with other men stay for ever. Never really get to anything deep. Pretend everything is going great. Give as good as you get.

Suck it up. Man up. Grow a pair.

Let’s leave all that emotional stuff to the ladies, eh lads arf arf wink wink?

Just because men don’t talk about emotions with each other, doesn’t mean they don’t have the emotions of course. It just means they can’t talk about them, or process them, or get advice, or support, or just plain old filial love. An arm round the shoulder.

And the absence of these necessities is killing us.

Suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK. Men make up over three quarters of suicides. There are lots of reasons for this, but many will come back to the way men hide their emotions. From each other, and often from their partners too.

That’s one bloody good reason why International Mens Day is an important time to stop and talk. A moment in a busy year to talk about what modern masculinity should be all about, talking about the expectations society puts on men (and men put on themselves) which can lead to anxiety and depression, and worse. It’s not a celebration. It’s a time to reflect.

I know about this stuff because I’ve been there myself. I’ve not handled all the expectations brilliantly over the years. I’ve worn a lot of the masks mentioned above, some for so long I almost forgot I was wearing them, and thought they were the real me. And I’ve found that constantly pretending to be something you’re not is fucking exhausting, and confusing, and can leave you wracked with anxiety and down from there into depression.

I’m one of the lucky ones, because I’ve never really gone to the darkest of places, but I’ve been close enough that I can have at least a sense of it. Slowly slipping down a muddy bank, scrabbling for a foothold yet picking up speed, then tumbling and clawing and snatching at brambles and branches and bracken that cut the hands to ribbons. A thousand cuts, each of them minor, irrelevant, laughable, as the sky falls away above. Unable to shout for help for the fear that no one will come.

I can’t quite imagine the place that ends up in. Not really. But I know two men who took their own lives in the last couple of years.

One I only knew in passing, but always seemed cheerful and chatty and generally a ‘good bloke’. He’d struggled since leaving the armed forces, as so many do. His wife had no idea he was struggling. Neither did his kids.

The other one I’d known since I was 8 years old, and was one of my best friends for a big chunk of my life. His difficulties were more well known to us all, and horribly complex in a bunch of ways. But in the end he made a decision all on his own.

Most men of my age will know someone who’s gone the same way.

Again, I’m lucky, because along my journey I’ve grown into someone who is a talker. Perhaps that’s because I found my soulmate when I was 20 and she was 19, and so I’ve always had a partner alongside me. Perhaps it’s because I’ve picked up some friends along the way whom I love like family, and who love me too.

As I’ve got older and experienced more of the world and made a million mistakes, I’ve also grown into someone who doesn’t conform to the more “traditional” tropes of masculinity. I’m really open about my emotions and I make a point of talking to my friends, and colleagues [some of whom span those categories, I’m happy to say] and even to relative strangers about my vulnerabilities and struggles, partly because I’m not ashamed of any of it and partly because I want to show that being in a conversation with me is a “safe space” for them. And I’ve found that the more I open up, the more others open up to me. And we all know by now that vulnerability builds trust, right? So my relationships have become much more real and much richer than they would be if I kept my emotions to myself.

So, what’s my message for International Men’s Day? Well, there are a couple.

First, if you’re not a man, please be assured that this isn’t about men just saying how ace men are. It’s much more nuanced than that. In a lot of ways it’s about showing how gender inequality damages everyone, men and women, and that breaking down societal expectations around gender would be good for everyone, too.

It is also a time for empathy, rather than antipathy or even (as sometimes can happen) indignance. Whilst I have no question in my mind that [in a sweepingly simplistic and borderline flippant generalisation] men have it easier than women in a society that was largely created by men, for men, I also know that with all the innumerable pressures and stereotypes and masks and pretending and bottling up, it’s often far from easy being a man in this messy world too.

And if you are a man, then it’s really, really simple. Partly it’s about taking off whatever mask you happen to habitually reach for of course. And then from there I’ll borrow from one of my comic heroes, if I may?

I saw a clip of an interview with Adrian Edmonson (star of The Young Ones, Comic Strip and Bottom) a while back, where he said that whilst he and co-writer and co-star Rik Mayall had showed their love for each other in loads of ways, “the thing we never did was tell each other than we loved each other, and it’s a huge regret”. Regret he can’t do anything about now, as Rik died in 2014 at the tender age of 56. The expressive and eloquent Mr Edmondson [there I go again] then went on to say the following:

“If you’re a man… and you’ve got a best friend: just tell him you love him.”

That’s as good a “call to action” as I’m going to get I think.

Love you mate. Happy International Men’s Day

The letting go

September 12, 2025September 16, 2025 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

My two sons were both born in London. Ben was born just after midnight on a Tuesday in the middle of April, 2010, at St Thomas’ Hospital, right by the River Thames. As my wife and I cradled the chubby, spiky haired little human we’d created, we gazed out of the window and watched the sun come up over the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the dirty old river. I’ll never forget that morning.

As any of you who’ve had more than one child will appreciate, it’s a bit more hazy with the second one. I know Jack was born in Kings Hospital in South East London, at around 11ish, and I think it might have been a Wednesday but don’t quote me on it.

One thing I do remember is texting my dad to say we’d had a another boy [for both children we decided not to find out the sex in advance, simply because there aren’t many times in your life that you get a true, total, life-changing surprise, and we figured finding out if it’s a boy or a girl is one of them] and him texting back to say he already had three grandsons and had ordered a girl and could we take it back and get a refund?

I also remember three-and-a-half-year-old Ben meeting Jack for the very first time, holding him carefully in his lap and then quietly starting to cry. When we asked him what was wrong, he looked up from his little brother and, smiling through the tears, said

“I just love him so much”

Cue additional tears from all the surrounding parents and grandparents. And, I can tell you, cue his old dad reaching for a tissue as he writes this nearly 12 years later, with the sound of those two boys bickering about who’s turn it is on the Playstation just next door to where I’m sitting.

But anyway, this isn’t really about their respective births, believe it or not [although it was a nice excuse to dig out those pictures and show them to you, I’m sure you’ll agree]. It’s not even really about the fact that they were born in London and brought up in London for the first few years of their lives, but we’ll hover here for a bit if you don’t mind? [And even if you do mind, we’re going to need to do it anyway because it’s part of the narrative and so it’s kind of important. Not like this bit. Oh no, this is just a waste of time really – a deliberate detour designed to disrupt. Good bit of alliteration eh? I love the allure of alliteration, don’t you? Anyway this really is getting silly now: I’d skip to the next bit if I were you.]

I don’t know if you’ve ever driven around London, or been driven around London, but it’s pretty hectic. Not Bangkok tuk-tuk hectic, or Paris aggressively maniacal hectic, but hectic nonetheless.

I’m pretty good on a bike but at the time my wife would probably have been considered more of a ‘provisional’ bicycle rider, getting one of those big ‘P’ signs that nervous parents put on the cars of their all-too-confident new drivers in the UK.

Put those together and “family bike ride” was never going to be on the agenda really. So [feeling very guilty about it of course, because guilt and parenthood are such happy bedfellows] we didn’t get round to teaching them how to ride a bike until we moved out into the countryside,

[Isn’t it funny how riding a bike is one of those things that literally everyone is expected to learn how to do? Cycling and swimming, What exalted company bike-riding has been keeping! Not knowing how to swim could result in a tragic death by drowning headline in a local newspaper. Not knowing how to ride a bike could result in… having to walk for a bit? Maybe catching a bus? Yet if I met someone who couldn’t ride a bike, before I could stop myself I’d blurt out “you can’t ride a bike??” in an incredulous and slightly high-pitched voice like they’d told me they’d never learnt to tie their shoelaces or use a knife and fork.]

Do you remember learning how to ride a bike? I do. I remember being on the path at the back of our house with my dad [two mentions in one blog eh Dad? You’ll be feeling all spoilt!] doing that funny bent-over run, holding on to the back of the saddle until I’d picked up speed and then… has he let go?… I think he’s let go… I’m riding a bike!!

And then, of course, I’d probably got for a bit, wobble, then fall off and graze the skin of my knee on the hard gravel of the path.

But with our own boys we never quite got round to it. Always something easier and more relevant to do in old London town, of course. So it wasn’t until we’d got out of the “Big Smoke™️” that we started to think about getting it sorted.

And when we eventually did, bikes and padding and helmets all gleaming in the summer sunshine, I got to experience something I’d not experienced before:

“The letting go”.

Letting go of the back of the saddle with the knowledge [not the “fear”, please note Dear Reader, but the absolute certain knowledge] that whatever son I was holding onto would go for a bit, wobble, then fall off and graze the skin off their knee on the hard ground of the village cricket pitch which we’re fortunate to have just through the little gate at the end of our garden.

And with that, the knowledge our younger son – the same one you remember in the arms of his elder brother all those years ago – will go absolutely ape-shit and say he doesn’t want to ride a stupid bike anyway.

And the knowledge that you’re going to do it again, and again, and again, until he stops the wobble and fall off bit. Might not happen today, but eventually it will.

Cut to the present., and really the actual point of this particular ramble through the brambles on memory lane.

A good few months back now, I was talking to a senior copywriter at work [he’s left now but there’s a chance he might read this so “hello Andy mate!” just in case!], and we were sharing thoughts on the responsibility of managing people, and delegating, and getting the balance right between pushing forward and holding back; between freedom and support.

[Yeah yeah, I know, you’re way ahead of me here. I would expect nothing less from such an astute reader as your good self.]

And of course we ended up talking about parenting in general, and then specifically about that moment: the letting go.

Managing people is really all about that moment, or series of moments. Knowing when to give someone the extra space to work on a project or try something different or do the first draft of a piece of work with the knowledge that what you get back could be totally perfect first time, but the chances are it’ll need a little polishing here and there.

The most important part of this is what happens next, of course.

Let me ask you: what would have happened if, when one of the boys had fallen off, under the guise of protecting them but probably also just thinking it would be a lot quicker and easier, I’d just taken the bike and ridden it myself? I end up with a bad back from riding a bike too small for me, and they end up still unable to ride a bike [and, horror of horrors, having to walk instead. Anyway we’ve covered that haven’t we?].

Managing and delegation aren’t the same thing, but they’re interconnected. If you can’t delegate – really delegate, letting go again and again as people learn – then really you’re not managing. At best you’re stifling. At worst you’re doing what was once described to me as “seagull management”, where you fly around over the top of things and occasionally come down and shit all over everything [and presumably also steal some chips from a chubby kid in a pushchair, but I fear I may be following this particular analogy too far down the road]..

I’ve seen brilliant people who couldn’t get their heads around delegating properly, either out of a “I don’t have the time to explain it to someone else” lack of appreciation of time management, or a “I’ll do it myself because I’ll do it better anyway” lack of understanding of their responsibility in this situation. What happened to them, do you think? That’s right, they got stuck. If you can’t delegate, you can’t progress because you’re the do-er, not the person who gets the doing done.

I may, on occasion, have done this myself over the years. I know it sounds unlikely – I can hardly believe it myself to be honest – but I’ve even got myself stuck in the “I don’t have time to explain it all and only I know what’s going on and honestly it’s just easier if I just crack on and get things done myself” rut in the not-too-distant past. I’ve even managed to convince myself that it’s an act of service for other people, when it’s actually more like an act of performative martyrdom.

And we’ve all seen plenty of those, right?

“No honestly it’s fine. I’ll do it. You don’t need the hassle” etc etc.

So there are a number of things to take from all this, I guess. [Probably three in total, because things tend to end up in threes in these situations, don’t you find? I’ll start with the first and go from there, and we can see at the end if it was three in total after all. Exciting eh?!]

The letting go is a crucial part of learning. Whether we like it or not, failure is always the best way to learn. Retracing your steps till you know. Have no fear, your wounds will heal. [If you’re sitting there thinking “that sounds strangely familiar”, then a) well done you, and b) yes I have just accidentally on purpose drifted into the lyrics of the song “Failure” by the Norwegian folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience off their 2001 album “Quiet Is The New Loud”. If you haven’t you definitely should – Spotify link here. You are, as ever, most welcome.]
If you don’t give people the space for that learning and growth, they will never learn and grow. And you, my friend, will be stuck doing the stuff that they would have learnt to do, if you had let go. Which means you can’t do the other stuff that you want to do so you too can learn and grow.
No matter how experienced you are, the letting go never gets more comfortable, nor less important. In fact, the letting go actually protects you, by allowing perfectly capable others to support you. [It did end being three. I kind of knew it would be, didn’t you?]

That’s what I’ve rediscovered in recent months, like a comfy old jumper that’s fallen to the back of the palatial walk-in wardrobe in the East wing of your country retreat [I’m guessing here, but pretty confident that because you have the foresight and insight to be reading this you’re almost certainly one of the leading lights in your line of work. Or bloody should be, am I right?], that super soft woollen number which of course you haven’t worn for a while, but when you find it you know how comfy it’s going to feel as soon as you pull if over your head and ease your arms through the arm holes [is that the phrase for that part of a jumper? Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?] and so simultaneously you’re a bit annoyed you’d forgotten about it, but more than that you’re excited about its rediscovery and the familiar warmth to come [Sleeves! Of course, knew it’d come back to me eventually].

Funny how the fact that, despite knowing the right way to do all this stuff, you can so easily slip back into old, bad habits you know didn’t help last time.

Funny how you need to remember it all and sometimes learn it all again.

Funny how no matter how many times you’ve done it, it never gets much easier.

[Exactly not like riding a bike, come to think of it…]

And then… when you get it right… wow doesn’t it just feel great? Helping someone else to learn and grow has to be whole point of getting all the experience if you ask me. Passing on your knowledge and [dare I say it?] wisdom [yes I bloody dare!] and then getting to the point where you know and they know the time is now…

And once you’re there, you realise the letting go isn’t the end of the story; it’s the prologue for everything to come.

In celebration of silliness

August 30, 2025September 3, 2025 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 2 Comments

I love being silly. LOVE IT. Always have. I got told off for being silly when I was little, then got told off for it when I got a bit older, which turned into getting into a decent amount of trouble for it when I was in my teens, and then, as I wandered into adulthood like a young gazelle wandering innocently into the open savannah without a care for the pride of lions on the near horizon, I found that my silliness was both a curse and a blessing.

A curse because, yes, it got me into some sticky spots, and made me seem less serious and more childish which, let’s be honest, some people find really, really annoying.

And a blessing because I found that my silliness connected me to other innately silly people in the world, a number of whom became friends for life; connected forever by the ability to lighten the mood by doing or saying something ridiculous. One of them I ended up married to: potentially the silliest decision she ever made.

It’s easy to see where that came from for me. My family was a family of jokes and teasing and fun and silliness, from top to bottom. There was always a joke to be had; a tease to be teased; a daft tale to be told. We didn’t necessarily always get on brilliantly all the time any more than any family do, but there’s no question we laughed, a lot, at things that were daft.

When I was young, whenever someone said “must admit”, we would shout “Pepper Paws”. Because… you know… “Mustard Mitt”… therefore “Pepper Paws”. I know, silly, right? I only found out that this wasn’t something that all families did when I was about 6 or 7 and my teacher said “I must admit” in class and I confidently shouted out “Pepper Paws” at the top of my voice and was sent to sit on the naughty chair for being “silly”

When my big sister [hey Sal!] and I were little we would go and stay with our grandparents (on my Mum’s side) in Richmond (SW London for those not acquainted with our capital’s leafy suburbs) for a couple of weeks in the summer holidays, and Grandpa would pretend to be a tiger and chase us around the house, up and down the stairs, for what felt like hours, with my sister and I screaming with a mixture of delirious joy, uncontrollable excitement and abject terror until Grannie would demand he stopped because it was nearly bedtime and it was all getting very “silly”

One day when I was maybe 10 or so, my mum came home with a cast on her arm, and told us all she’d slipped on some ice outside the hospital where she worked and broken it. All evening we made sure she was comfy and got her cups of tea and looked after her, and at one point I saw tears running down her face. “Don’t worry,” Dad said quietly to me, “she’s just in shock”. A few minutes later she pulled the fake cast off her arm and revealed they were tears of laughter which of course we all agreed was just “silly”.

And then I discovered silliness on the telly, and felt the connection which has continued to this day

Despite what the ever expanding wrinkles and white bits in the hair and beard might suggest, I’m much too young to remember Monty Python’s Flying Circus first time round, but it seemed to be on constant repeat when I was a kid. Popping up here and there is a character called The Colonel, a classic, stuffy British Army officer-type played by Graham Chapman, who would interrupt a sketch if it got “silly”.

My personal favourite appearance was a sketch about gangs of old ladies – Hell’s Grannies – “attacking fit, defenceless young men”. Obviously completely daft from the beginning, it brings in other, ever more “silly” ideas (a group of men dressed as babies kidnapping a 48-year-old man from outside a shop; vicious gangs of ‘keep left’ signs attacking a vicar) until The Colonel feels the need to step in.

Right! Stop that, it’s silly. Very silly indeed. Started off as a nice little idea about old ladies attacking young men, but now it’s just got silly!
The Colonel – Hell’s Grannies sketch by Monty Python

It was the silliness that made Monty Python, of course. You never really had a clue what would happen next, and the anticipation that creates makes the whole thing exciting. The folks from Monty Python didn’t invent silliness, but they took inspiration from radio shows like The Goon Show in the early 1950s [which, lest we forget, was an extremely sensible time in a post-war Britain run by people born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and still reeling from the costs of the war on society and the economy] and broadcast it into every living rooms of the 70s and 80s. giving life to the surrealism of Vic Reeves & Bob Mortimer in the 90s and beyond to the likes of The Mighty Boosh.

[BTW, if you want to see something really, really silly, check out Vic and Bob as Donald and Davey Stott interviewing Sting via the link here – yeah that’s right: tantric, The Police, “Shape Of My Heart” Sting. It’s totally ridiculous]

Over the last couple of years I’ve re-discovered the original radio series of The Mighty Boosh set in a zoo called Bob Fossil’s Funworld and it’s as box fresh streamed today on Spotify [other streaming services were still available at time of writing] as it was when it came out two decades back. It doesn’t age because it always was completely mad.

The Mighty Boosh: Howard, Bollo the talking gorilla, and Vince.

Which is why kids today would still love Monty Python. Because a load of old grannies beating up young people will always be silly. Silly, silly, silly. It’s why my kids love The Mighty Boosh.

It’s all silly. Childish at times. Pointless and annoying to those who don’t like it, I’m sure. But I love it. LOVE IT.

My English teacher told me when I was 11 that “humour is incongruity”: when the thing you least expect happens and you can’t help but be surprised by the “what the hell was that?!” and then be delighted when you ‘get it’. Quite a lot for an 11-year-old but it’s stuck with me, and the idea that humour is incongruity is every joke, every punchline, every laugh you’ve ever had, right there.

Add in a sprinkle of silliness and you get a much deeper flavour to your humour.

Most “jokes” are formulaic really. And the vast majority of stand-up comedy is just a series of observations dressed up in a fairly predictable, never-actually-happened anecdote. It’s obvious. It’s conventional. Yet silliness [you can call it surrealism or absurdity if you want to go a bit more highbrow] is deliberate freedom from any convention; from expectations. There are no rules – apart from incongruity, perhaps.

Which is why silliness has such a strong connection to childhood. You can imagine someone being called a ‘silly boy’ but never a ‘silly man’ (or if they are, there’s a suggestion of childishness, immaturity, a lack of common sense) and that’s because despite there being plenty of rules about what to do when you’re a kid (bedtime, homework) there’s also so much more freedom in how you think.

Kids love being silly, and love it even more when adults are silly with them. You tell a 7-year-old you once jumped up so high you hit your head on the moon and came down with cheese in your hair and you’re in an absurd conversation that will last as long as you both want it to.

My younger son had his last day at primary school a couple of weeks back [I know, I can’t believe it either; another reminder of my ever-increasing age], and as tends to happen towards the end of term towards the end of primary school, it all got a bit loosely goosey in the last few weeks. The learning was all done, and things just became about making sure the kids had a good experience in their final days in the safe, loving bubble of being the oldest in the school before they were sent off to be the youngest in a much bigger, much less structured and much more scary school environment.

It was in one of these final weeks that I dropped him off, and as they were all lined up to go inside their teacher came out and they all started chatting with her and joking and you could tell how much they all really liked her. As I walked out of the playground, another parent and I were talking about that and came to the agreement that it was because whilst she was strict and stern when she needed to be, she also allowed them to be silly sometimes, and did that by being silly herself sometimes too. Allowing herself to play the fool enabled her to connect with the kids on their level, in a way that not all teachers do. In fact, in a way that some of his previous teachers definitely would not do, ever. So much so that you couldn’t really imagine them ever being anything other than strict and stern.

And I was left wondering – why do some adults keep hold of that silliness when others don’t? Why do some people put it away in a box in the attic along with their old school memorabilia, whereas some people just refuse to ever let it be out of arm’s reach?

I’m silly at least once a day I reckon. Just for the hell of it, more often than not. I might tell my wife that my legs are broken so unfortunately unable get the milk out of the fridge, for example. I might tell my kids that I’ve run out of “Cuddle Power”, which they know means I am totally paralysed until they come and give me a hug. If I believe I have been slighted whilst in public by one of my family, I may well stop totally still, put my head down to my chest and say “meh, meh, meh” in a sad voice over and over again until everyone is nice to me. It’s incredibly effective. And yes, you’re right, incredibly silly. Just this morning, as my wife was lying in bed, I stood at the end of the bed, pretended I was an Olympic high diver, went through all the prep and breathing and hands up in the air and then dived onto the bed and her.

A few years ago on a road trip through California I made up a character called Jerry who’s an old guy who used to be in the movies and is still in love with his former wife, Margie (or Marsha – it varies), but also has a crush on my actual wife. To this day, my younger son, Jack, will ask me if he can speak to Jerry, and now and then Jerry will pop out to say hello to the family. Jack once told me that of all the people in the world he knows, Jerry holds the joint gold medal position alongside me, his mum and his big brother. There was a point where Jerry was coming out on top.

Being silly with kids is a joy, because they immediately, instinctively ‘get it’. And with some kids you can find yourself in an impromptu improvisation where the only rule is you have just to build on whatever the last person said, no matter how silly: “yes, and…”

And I love being silly with fellow “grown-ups” too. Sometimes it’s slightly surprising but the incongruity of it – particularly in lives bound by so many societal and social conventions – brings back a childishness and suddenly we’re all kids again. Thinking about it, all my strongest relationships have a foundation of silliness; the comforting certainty that we can be as deliberately idiotic as we like, without judgement or boundaries.

Funnily enough, I find that elderly people enjoy silliness too. Perhaps it’s because, like children, they are more free – from the pressures of work, the worries of looking after their own children. Watch a grandfather (or, if you’re lucky, a great-grandfather) with his young (great-) grandkids and it’s like there’s no adult there at all.

Gramps back on the see-saw for the first time in 60 years

Yet we all know so many “grown-ups” who eschew silliness in all its forms. Hell, I even knew a lot of kids growing up who would sneer at something being “just silly”, without ever getting that was the whole point. People who are always serious and ‘businesslike’ [like business doesn’t actually need freedom to think and humour to raise the spirits?!] and for whom silliness is just… well… silly.

And trust me: I have not a single doubt in my tiny mind that all the above will not only sound “silly” to some people, but actually really annoying. Unbearable, actually. I’ve met some of them over the years. People who find me really, really childish and irritating. That’s okay: I’m aware that I’m not for everyone. But even if I wanted to change to be less silly to keep those people on the Bartlett Train, I’m really not sure I’d be able to. And, as you might have gathered, I don’t want to. I love being silly. LOVE IT.

I believe that people choose to leave silliness behind because they don’t think there’s a place for it in the adult world. But I also believe it’s still in there somewhere, waiting to be found again like that old band t-shirt/stripy dress/straw hat/banana costume [delete as appropriate] you used to wear all the time but had been shoved behind the sham and drudgery of broken dreams in your second drawer down.

It’s still in there because the child you once were is still part of you. In fact, there are even a couple of bits of you that haven’t even grown since you were born – the cornea of the eye and part of the inner ear. So you see and hear with the same exact bits as that kid you used to be. You can be them again, with a little bit of silliness now and then.

So go on, give it a try. You don’t have to start big. Maybe just try out a silly walk, on your own. Pull a silly face in the mirror. Hey, you can just think something silly when you’re in a “grown-up” conversation, and you’re in it.

And you’ll find that silliness is a unique combination of freedom from convention and the incongruity that creates humour.

A generous helping of liberty with a side order of laughter? Tell me you don’t fancy some of that, and I’ll tell you not to be so silly.

To know, or not to know?

May 14, 2025September 3, 2025 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week this week, and so it feels like the right time to come back to a post I started a good few weeks back but didn’t finish. At the time I had a hell of a lot on and ended up focussing more on not letting all the stress become anxiety become overwhelm become… well, something altogether much more difficult… and whilst writing things down is cathartic for me, and helps me organise my thoughts, it’s at times when things are most stressful that I tend to drop the things that I know deep down might actually be important to carry on doing. Knowing what’s good for me and doing that are two different things, unfortunately. To know is one thing… but then what?

There’s a conundrum in there somewhere. On the whole, I’m much more aware of where my head is at these days, having gone as close to “the edge” as I really ever plan on going in the past. Anyone would tell you that’s a “good thing”. It means I can catch myself before I fall into a hole, move back from the edge of said hole, even plan for the upcoming hole/edge of hole situation; all that good stuff. If you know there’s a hole in the road just up ahead, you slow down, right?

The fact that this is the example given here is also not lost on me. The universe has a funny way of giving you a nudge sometimes, doesn’t it?

Well yes, of course that’s right. If you’re in charge of how fast things are moving, that is.

But what if you’re not? What if you’re not in charge of how fast things move and you just have to handle the feeling of going faster than you want to go, knowing that there might be a hole in the road up ahead, but not being able to hit the brake because you’re not the one in the driving seat.

You remember that feeling, just as I do, That night when you were younger and less responsible, with less responsibilities to make you need to be responsible, and you all piled into your friend’s car to make your way from here where you were to over there where everyone was going to be. And it was all fun and laughter, but at a certain point you realised you’d taken that corner too quickly, and even though everything was fine, for a moment everything slowed down and the air between you changed and everyone stopped laughing and for a moment there it was all suddenly very, very real. And no one said anything, but everyone knew.

[My cousin Tanya reminded me of her moment like that when I saw her a while back, and wouldn’t you know, it had been me driving that time. An old car, a back lane, a truck or tractor of some kind round a bend, a skid and several hearts stopping for a few beats. I didn’t remember it clearly, because it wasn’t my moment. But for her, it was like it happened yesterday rather than in the late summer of 1994]

Fast forward back to the here and the now and that feeling can still take your breath away. A tightness in the breath because you know you’re not able to just take your foot off the accelerator a little. Because it’s not your foot on the accelerator, actually, So you’re stuck.

Being stuck doesn’t feel good at all. Any animal is most dangerous when it’s hungry or when it’s cornered, and [as I’ve pointed out before in these pages] you don’t have to decide what animal you would be if you were to be an animal because you are already an animal: a strategically-shaved monkey sharing around 98.7% of your DNA with your nearest monkey cousin, no less. So whilst we may not be starving as such, I think we’re all hungry for something in life. Something of meaning and import; something to believe in. And there’s no question we can find ourselves cornered by a world we’re not designed for in evolutionary terms; constantly in flight or fight mode every day and yet unable to fight because it’s work and that’s really not appropriate [unless you work in a boxing gym, I guess] yet flight is out of the question because it’s work and there are demands and deadlines and damnable duty [ugh duty really is a suck isn’t it – feeling you have to do something you don’t want to do because you’ve decided you should do it. Annoyed with your own brain for forcing you to do things, like you and your brain aren’t actually aligned on really quite a surprising amount of really quite important topics. Did I mention that we’re just not made for the world we’ve created?]

So you carry on. Doesn’t matter if you’re leading the whole organisation or just working on a project. You carry on because you have to carry on

The car keeps going, at the speed the car goes.

Towards the hole that you think might be up ahead.

And so, to our conundrum.

Is it better to know about the hole in the road, or better to bowl along in belligerent yet beautiful blindness ?

If you don’t know it’s there, you might fall in it, sure. But you might glide past it, never really knowing how close you were to disaster. There’s something really appealing about that: the “it’ll be fine” attitude. Even if it’s not actually fine in the end, isn’t it better to think that it’s going to be fine and go about your day feeling fine about things right up until the point that it’s not fine? You can just deal with it then, right? Instead of worrying all the way along?

[As it happens that’s one of the pillars Stoicism, a school of philosophy that originated in Ancient Greece and Rome with dudes like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Seneca, considered one of the most sublime philosophies in Western history, which teaches that worrying about the future is unnecessary and can be harmful to the present moment because the future is uncertain and that we can’t control it, so it’s best to focus on what’s happening right now. Which is easy to say when the hardest decision you had to make was which toga to wear or whether you could be arsed to go and watch the lions rip apart some more Christians at the amphitheatre. They never had to put together a detailed proposal for a bunch of senior people to explain the need for additional headcount in the middle of a hiring freeze, did they? No they bloody well did not. Just sat there getting made into marble statues, with massive beards, eating lark’s tongues or whatever. Anyway sorry where was i?]

Gen AI Marcus Aurelius demands “MORE LARK’S TONGUES!”

The thing is, if you know it’s there, you’re thinking about it from way back; maybe miles before it actually becomes relevant or something to think about. Worrying about whether it’s there or not, or if it’s actually a different road you’re on and you’re just getting a bit confused in all this excitement. Wondering if other people can see that you’re worrying about it. Worrying that they might be judging you for it.

Whilst there is part of me that of course craves the bliss of ignorance, or at least the clarity of thought which comes with knowing and not dramatising [I’m actually quite into some of the Stoic thinking at the moment and was just being deliberately disparaging for dramatic effect] there’s no question that actually you’re much, much more likely to hit that hole if you don’t know it’s there.

Just sitting and worrying about it doesn’t actually make anything better. I know that, our Stoic chums knew it, and I reckon you probably do too.

There are a million different possible outcomes from where you are right now. Of all of those possible outcomes, only one is actually going to happen. And the chances of you being able to guess which of those is going to be the one is really pretty low. If you were any good at predicting the future you wouldn’t be sitting here reading this, you’d be making millions on the stock market betting on the price of frozen concentrated orange juice based on your knowledge of this year’s orange harvest, [Yes, all of my knowledge of the stock market does come from the 80’s film Trading Places – well spotted]

So what can we do?

One thing is dead simple: you can talk about it.

We’re not good about talking about mental health, or stress, or insecurity. We’re hard-wired to seek out connection and we fear awkwardness almost more than anything because if it’s all got awkward then people won’t want to connect and we think it’s super awkward to actually get into things rather than give the “yeah, fine thanks” that shuts down the conversation but yes, also shuts down the potential for connection. And on top of that, societal stigma (or our perception of it) means that we think mental health or stress or insecurity all sounds like weakness and, particularly for people in positions of leadership, that’s not something that feels at all comfortable. No one wants a “weak leader”, right?

Except, of course, you know as well as I do that there’s actually nothing stronger than being authentic, and vulnerable, and honest, and open, and compassionate, and thoughtful. That letting people in is how we connect, and it’s those connections that makes us stronger still: less likely to simply suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; more likely to rely on each other and work together and perhaps even enjoy the ride.

I’ll be very honest here – I’ve had a tough few months. I’ve “had quite a lot on” [as my mum might have said in her typical understated way] and it’s been… well… “a lot”. I’ve been overusing my ADHD ability to have all possible tabs open all the time, and just opening one more and one more again when something else comes along, and it’s left me stretched pretty thin. I’m thinking about everything, all the time. From the macro of war and famine and societal division to the big picture of work strategy and operations to the micro of a leak in the roof and an upcoming deadline and where the fuck I’ve left my keys for the third time in a day [and everything in between, of course: it’s the otherwise inconsequential in between things that can wear us down, just like a drip drip drip of water will, in time, wear away the rock beneath] the lines can become a little blurred between what I’m handling and what I’m pretending (to myself, as much as anyone) that I’m handling.

But rather than shutting my eyes and pretending the hole wasn’t up ahead, I’ve recognised the potential for hole-based opened up and talked like I’ve not done before. My awareness of the hole ahead means I’ve I’ve told people I’m struggling. I’ve explained that I’ve been overusing my ADHD; using the ability I have to keep all the mental tabs open, all the time, just to get things done and that it’s leaving me exhausted. I’ve acknowledge that it’s not sustainable for me.

I’ve asked for help.

And do you know what? People have listened, people have made an effort to understand, and people have helped.

[I don’t know why but it’s always slightly shocking when that happens, don’t you think? That people will even go out of their way to help out when they see the need? And yet you would do the same, I’m sure. Perhaps we’re just never as sure about our own worth as we are about other people’s?]

That’s what knowing has given me: a moment to get my people around me. Friends, colleagues. Some who cross that unnecessary linguistic divide. People who care. For different reasons perhaps, but all with the same end in mind. Perhaps even the same mind in mind. My mind.

Mental Health Awareness Week will come and go. But for all of us, the challenges of managing a mental load that is greater than any group of people in the history of the world goes on every day.

And it’s in that context that I’ll encourage you to do two things:

First, be kind to yourself. You’ve had a long day and worked hard and actually done bloody well under the circumstances and the last thing you need is your own brain not being kind to your own self. Give yourself a break. You honestly deserve it, and if you’re not going to give yourself a break, who is?

And second, if you’re struggling then I implore you, please, ask for help. You’ll find that “happy to help” isn’t just a throwaway phrase, it’s real. People around you will actually be happy if they are able to help you. It makes them feel good, and it’s good for you. It’s how we connect.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it more than you can imagine. Take care. Speak soon I hope.

Sorry (again)

November 23, 2024September 3, 2025 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago I wrote some words around the idea of saying sorry; or more specifically the incredible power that the word “sorry” has to take the wind out of the sails of indignation, and deflate the balloon of conflict. Used judiciously it can be the one and only perfect word right at the best possible time. Over the years I’ve learnt the fact that actually saying “I’m sorry” (whether verbally or in writing) can be all that’s needed. It’s a chance to move on.

But I’ve got some bad news for you, I’m afraid. I haven’t been judicious with my use of this most valuable of words. No, I’ve been scattering sweet sorry around like popcorn in a cinema, not minding if it drops on the floor or hits the mark or just sticks to my jumper like a limpet on an old boat, waiting to be spotted as I walk out into the brighter light of the foyer, and only then being popped into my mouth as though nothing more normal could have happened.

[Is popcorn the only food you happily eat off your own clothing? I reckon it is. If you can think of anything else please send me a postcard about it…]

Sometimes a week at work can sound like an endless stream of apology, regret and self-flaggelation.

Sorry.

Sorry I don’t understand.

Sorry I have to jump to my next meeting.

Sorry I’m late, my last meeting ran over.

Sorry I didn’t see your message.

Sorry I didn’t reply to your message.

Sorry I didn’t have a chance to reply to your message sooner.

Sorry I can’t make that time, I’ve got a conflict.

Sorry I don’t have that information.

I am so utterly and completely sorry I’m not sure I deserve the gracious response you’re going to give. I have let you down, and I have let myself down. I am bereft.

A couple of weeks ago I caught myself saying sorry for not having been able to watch the recording of a meeting that I’d already said sorry for not having been able to make because I was already in another meeting.

[Who decided this was okay, by the way? “Can’t make a meeting because you’re too busy? Don’t worry, you can catch up with everything (without being able to input, of course) by watching the video of the meeting in your own time”. Time, remember, that you didn’t have to attend in the first place. A meeting, remember, for which you were deemed relevant enough to be asked, but not so relevant that the meeting gets rescheduled to get your input. I guess if the meeting can go on without your input… you actually weren’t really all that needed in the first place? Anyway, I digress. Sorry]

My excuse for such horror? Such abject degradation? Why, pray tell, had I failed so completey?

Because I had taken a couple of days off to spend time with my family over school holidays. At the time at which the meeting had been scheduled, I was probably on a beach in West Wales, hand-in-hand with my beloved wife, lazily kicking a football back to one of my incredible sons, throwing sticks into the surf for the amazing Ruby [Ruby is a dog, in case you’re wondering].

And yet I’m sorry. Really?

In the midst of a busy life within, let’s be honest, a pretty busy world right now, it’s not just my working week which is awash with woe: it’s my personal life too.

Sorry I missed your call.

Sorry I haven’t got back to you.

Sorry I can’t do that date.

Sorry I can’t make the gym tomorrow.

Sorry for the radio silence.

Sorry I’ve not been a bit grumpy recently.

Sorry.

Ring any bells?

I wonder how many times a day you say sorry? I bet if you counted it you’d be shocked.

And the most shocking thing about all of these?

Very few of the times we say sorry is there anything we could possibly have done to avoid the situation. Saying sorry, time and again, for things that aren’t actually our fault,

I get that some of this is politeness and manners. We’re showing that someone else might, in some way, have been inconvenienced, or worse for those who love us and whom we love, might have been concerned in some ways: for our wellbeing, or even worse for the health of the relationship.

And, of course there’s the added social anxiety of simply being British: us Brits already say sorry if someone bumps into us, for crying out loud; now we’re sorry for not having had a chance to read the pre-read before the prep meeting before the actual meeting…

So yes, there’s an element of awareness of the situation and potential impact it may have had on others.

But I wonder, in vast majority of these situations does anyone actually need a full blown “sorry“?

As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, on a Friday morning before work I try to go for a walk in the woods just over the road from my front door, accompanied by my good friend Joe from down the road [Hello Dr B!] and the aforementioned Ruby.

We try [a broad brushstroke of a word, with wide-reaching edges from active to passive, insincere to heartfelt] to do this every week, but we’re both busy boys and so it doesn’t happen as often as we’d both like it to. And for a couple of months this year, it dropped off completely. Every time, one or other of us would say sorry we couldn’t make it for some reason or other.

When next we met, we set off on one of the many routes we can take, and started to talk as we usually do.

And as we walked and talked, we both found ourselves apologising for not having done this sooner.

Which caught my friend’s attention. He pointed out that the things that had meant we couldn’t go on a walk together – something we both enjoy and look forward to – weren’t actually our fault at all. It had been because of the demands of working life, or the responsibilities of home life, or actually because one of us had been ill. Apologising on behalf of a bloody virus. Sorry but that’s ridiculous isn’t it? [See what I did there? Another pernicious little sorry, this time with the magic “but” which actually means you’re not sorry at all, yet still it pops out almost as a reflex…]

So we pledged that we wouldn’t say sorry to each other for not being able to walk together any more. Neither of us were to blame, and we both recognised it.

That communal commitment has stuck with me, And damn it if it hasn’t actually made it from a theoretical “that would be a good thing to do” into the more intentional, and more definite “I am doing this.”

[That’s actually quite an important shift; particularly, perhaps, for someone with a brain like mine. Someone like me. Me, basically. Part of the discipline I’m trying to bring into my life is acting on my ideas and instinct and ideology, and training myself to actually do what I say. So instead of “I’m thinking of writing a book about how someone can hack ADHD to fulfill their leadership potential”, I’ve switched to saying “I’m writing a book on Hacking ADHD for Leadership”. True story, Bit scary to make that shift, but it’s almost like that itself is a little hack. Oh, I’m writing a book am I? Best crack on with it. Don’t worry I’ll make sure you get a mention in the acknowledgements.]

And so I’ve stopped saying sorry as a default, for things that aren’t my fault. To to bring sorry back from the brink of being totally meaningless.

Sorry needs to mean something, or it means nothing.

And most of the time we say “sorry”, we’re actually not sorry at all really.

I read something recently that suggested replacing “sorry” with “thank you” in the work instances…

Thanks for waiting.

Thank you for your patience.

Thanks for the reminder.

I reckon those would do nicely for a whole load of those times when you overuse “sorry” in work, right? Not a massive shift in politeness, but a shift in energy for sure.

Okay, it might not be as as appropriate with friends you’ve not been in touch with [“thanks for your patience, I would now like to go for that aforementioned coffee”], but if you just tell them the reason you dropped off the radar a bit is because you’ve been been totally overwhelmed recently so the idea of making contact hasn’t managed to move from a vague idea to something more active, despite the fact that speaking to them might have been the best possible thing [true story], I’m pretty sure they’ll get it. They don’t need a “sorry” from you.

Why don’t you try to do the same? Reserve “sorry”, with all its truth and power, for the moments when you need its truth and power? For when it was your fault, and you want to make amends?

Because when it’s not your fault, it’s not really your place to be sorry, and it’s so desperately draining to be sorry all the time, right? Politeness be damned: a world of contrition is no place to live.

For what it’s worth, I think you’re actually doing bloody well under the circumstances, with that deadline and that target and those responsibilities and that tricky relationship and those thoughts you have sometimes and these difficult times and that bloody orange bloke back again.

You’re showing up as you need to, and being who you need to be for whomever’s in front of you.

You’re making the right decisions based on the information you have at the time, as you always have.

You’ve given the love you can to the people who deserve it.

So please, don’t go around being sorry for the little things that weren’t your fault. Be proud of the important little things you’re doing, every day,

And as I leave you here, I will simply say sorry that this was perhaps a little long, and sorry I didn’t finish writing it last week when I planned to, and sorry that I didn’t put my clothes away before I had to leave to take Jack to his football match this morning like I promised I would.

This last one is really only relevant for one specific reader to be honest, and I’m not sure she always reads this. Sorry to have wasted your time reading it.

Until next time. Thanks for your patience.

The Oak Tree

May 24, 2024May 24, 2024 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

I planted an oak tree a couple of weeks ago. I’ll come on to why I had an oak tree to plant in a bit, but I was surprised how interesting the planting turned out to be. Because quite unexpectedly, the very act of kneeling down out at the front of my house on the edge of a little village in the South East corner of our little country and planting a little 6-inch tree in the soil attracted more attention than usual from the usual stream of passers-by.

To give you a bit of context, I live right on the edge of a big forest, and the path into said forest is right over the road from my front door, and on a sunny Sunday like we had that particular weekend, there are always a fair few people who park up in the village to wander into the woods, perhaps walking their dog, perhaps walking their kids [we all know that kids need the energy running out of them just as much as any dog], or perhaps just walking themselves with their friends, and they all go past the front of my house.

And so when I’m out there of a weekend doing classic middle-aged man things like tidying the hedge or putting stuff in the back of the car to take to the tip [our British word for the local recycling centre, and a mainstay of classic weekend activity for those of you who aren’t Brits and are wondering what I’m on about] or taking Jack [10-year old human male] to football training or Ben [14-year-old human male] to rugby training or Ruby [3-year-old canine female] for a walk [yes, this is the rock-n-roll lifestyle I lead] I often end up in a lot of smalltalk chitchat “lovely weather we’re having” conversations with strangers.

More than I’d ideally like, if I’m honest, because in my heart of hearts I’m not really quite as outgoing and gregarious and social as I might seem. [I’ve discovered over the years that I’m what can be described as an “extroverted introvert”, in that I’ll happily talk to anyone and everyone but I’ll also resent the fact that I have to and will be exhausted from the energy the interaction requires. But that feels like another blog…]

This time, though, it was different.

For a start, virtually everyone who came past felt the urge to point out to me what I was doing, mostly with a mixture of surprise and delight in their voice:

Oh, you’re planting an oak tree!

[Which actually doesn’t happen that often, when you think about it. It’s not often complete strangers totally succumb to the urge to tell you what you’re doing at the time. Imagine how odd the world would be if they did. “You’re walking down the street”. “You’re sitting on a train”. It would end up feeling like you were in some weird kids’ TV show where adults dressed in primary colours point out the blindingly obvious to an audience of tiny, no-nothing humans.]

And then, as a follow-up, virtually everyone would say something about how long it would take to grow, often with a bit of low level comedy in there:

I’ll have to come back in 30 years to see how it’s going.

That’ll look lovely in 100 years!

Quite a few people talked about their own mortality…

I won’t be around to see that fully grown…

Or indeed, about mine:

That’ll be one for your grandchildren to enjoy!

When the first person stopped and pointed out that I was, indeed, planting an oak tree and that yes, it would be a long time until it was fully grown, I said something along the lines of…

“They say that the best time to plant an oak tree is 100 years ago, and the second best time is today!”

…which got a great reaction, and so I basically recycled versions of that same line over and over with everyone who came past, honing my delivery each time, every new set of people blissfully unaware that they had unknowingly wandered into my perfectly curated and planned out set-piece interaction where I knew what they would say and what I would say before anyone said anything, all people playing their parts perfectly, my supporting actors never knowing that they weren’t the first to point out what I was doing, or experience the seemingly off-the-cuff remembering of an old quotation.

I knew I’d picked that line up from somewhere, but because I couldn’t remember where and because the people I was talking to probably wouldn’t know either, by the end I was making out it was a famous quotation which I knew and making up who had said it. Thomas Jefferson sounded realistic, as did Benjamin Franklin [not sure why the American forefathers leapt to mind, but I vaguely remember something about one of them chopping down a tree and then lying about it… or not lying about it… or some such thing; if you’re from that side of the ocean perhaps you can enlighten me!], and Lord Byron, for some reason, and then of course you can always drop in Churchill because all quotations sound like they come from him.

[As it happens, having put an appropriate amount of effort into researching this, it turns out it’s none of them: it’s actually (as far as I can ascertain, anyway) from an old Chinese proverb, and it’s not about an oak tree specifically, it’s about trees in general, and it’s not 100 years, it’s 30 or 20, depending on where you look. But as Mark Twain/Ernest Hemingway/Jonathan Swift/etc might or might not have once said: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”.]

And so, as the sky started to bruise and late afternoon made its lazy way towards early evening, I kept myself occupied with making up new attributions for this “quotation” and had a bunch of very small, but very enjoyable and (for me, at least) playful little interactions, all ending with an “enjoy your walk” from me and a variation on “enjoy your tree!” from them.

[I tell a lie: there was one more negative exception which proved the rule: a very prim and proper woman who took the time to point out that because of where I’d planted it, in 50 years time “that tree” would be getting in the way of the electricity and telephone wires criss-crossing above and I should perhaps plant it somewhere else. Knowing me as you do, dear reader, you will be most proud and a little surprised to hear that I didn’t simply say “oh sod off you grumpy old bag”, but instead said that in 50 years the tech would have moved on and there probably wouldn’t be wires above and anyway I’d be long dead by then and it wouldn’t be my problem to worry about. Which, considering she was maybe 25 years older than me, probably gave her a little jolting reminder of her own mortality and, perhaps, made her consider whether being such a naysayer was really how she wanted to spend her Autumn years. But we didn’t get into that next conversation because by that point it was clear we weren’t going to be friends anyway.]

And as I stood back, brushing the soil from my hands and admiring my handiwork – this funny little baby tree in the middle of a patch of grass, containing every piece of genetic information it needed to become a huge oak towering over the house – I had quite a deep feeling of accomplishment, and even a little pride.

I’m someone who plants an oak tree, with the knowledge that I won’t be here to see its majesty. It felt like a pure act of altruism, of outward-looking connection to the future. To people I’d never know, who would never know that I planted this tree, all those years ago.

Perhaps, in 60 or 70 years’ time, my own sons might visit the village in which they grew up, perhaps bringing their own grandchildren, or great-grandchildren even, and say “I remember when my dad planted that tree”. And they could all point out that as it turned out it had really got in the way of all the electricity cables and made a right mess of things, and remember how the great power cut of 2078 that had all been traced back to me planting that very tree back in 2024…

Last Sunday, I have to say, they were both pretty underwhelmed. But they could see I was chuffed to bits with it so they kept their lack of enthusiasm to grunts of “it’s not very big” and “is that it?” and we left it at that.

So why, I hear you cry? Why was I planting an oak tree, of all things?

Good question. Well done you. There are a few reasons, and they probably make the most sense if I explain them in reverse order…

This little oak tree had actually been living in my house for a few weeks by the time it eventually got to experience the wild wonders of the world, but had arrived just before the twentieth day of the third month of this year which I’m sure you will have spotted is indeed my birthday.

If you’re also wondering why it took so long to plant it, well that’s symbolic of how my brain works – an often constant cycle between “I must do that important thing” followed by a gap, followed by a reminder and “shit I forgot to do that important thing” and then a gap and then repeat. A cycle between frustration and guilt and self flaggelation which is only broken by actually just doing the important thing which often doesn’t even take that long once I get down to it.

This is how it was with our oak tree. When it arrived it was just a little twig with roots in a bit of soil in a little plastic bag within a little hessian draw-string bag, and it sat on the windowsill in the kitchen [you know, the one behind the kitchen sink, by the window]. Every time I noticed it again, perhaps once a week or maybe a little more often, I’d go through the cycle of self flagelation above and give it a little drink from the kitchen tap, and think “definitely this weekend”. Then I’d forget all about it until the next time.

But this is an oak tree, remember? These things last for hundreds of years, and a few weeks being forgotten about by some bloke with a fuzzy brain wasn’t going to stand in the way of that.

So it grew leaves anyway. Beautiful, perfect little oak tree leaves like the ones you’d get if you googled “oak tree leaves”. Leaves of life, and determination. Leaves that demonstrated that this was a living thing, demanding to be planted so the roots living in a hessian draw-string bag could dive down deep into the earth to find their own water source.

Putting together all this information, and if you’re not only observant but also somewhat sleuth-like, you may well have worked out that this little oak tree friend of ours was indeed a birthday present.

The next question your inquisitive mind might ask could be “why on earth would someone buy you an oak tree sapling as a birthday present?”

Well, this particular oak tree was a surprise present from the person who’s been coaching me for the last couple of years, another Sarah in my life [alongside my wife and my big sis], who lives on the the other side of the world in Australia. And when she sent me an oak tree, she knew that I would know the meaning behind that gift.

Which takes me right back to the chronological start of this (surprisingly long) tale.

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I’ve had my struggles with mental health over the years, and you’ll also know that I’m now thinking that some of those struggles could well be connected to undiagnosed and untreated ADHD, which I had diagnosed and then treated from last year.

So over the years I’ve occasionally found myself right in the middle of the deep dark forest [you can jump into the Ted Lasso story around that idea here if you feel the need], where everything seems tough and scary and you don’t know which way to turn. You know how that feels too, I’m sure. I hope you’re not in there right now.

But as Coach Lasso pointed out, fairy tales do not begin, nor do they end, in the deep dark forest. “That son-of-a-gun always shows up smack-dab in the middle of a story”. Things do get better, and things do work out.

What I’ve found is that it’s not until you start to find your way out, coming out into the open air, seeing the sky and the clouds and the sunlight, that things start to get some context.

I’ve also found that there is a huge temptation, at that point of being able to look back, to curse the forest for all its darkness and danger and discomfort.

And that’s where the oak tree changed things for me, and why it’s become such a theme for me, and why Sarah gave me an oak tree for my birthday, and why planting it meant more to me than it would have if I had planted a beech, or ash, or horse chestnut.

Because the oak tree doesn’t represent the forest. The oak tree isn’t the forest, or part of the forest. The Oak Tree is a poem.

[Listen, if you’re sitting there reading this and thinking “oh for crying out loud, what is he banging on about”, or possibly words with the same meaning but with more expletives, then I get it. I wouldn’t blame you if you decided that you’ve had enough of this story which started with some amateur horticulture and has ended up here, talking poetry. It’s been quite a journey to this point, I grant you. But going through the forest often means you need to take some strange turns along the way, right? So stick with me. It’s worth it, I promise.]

It’s a poem that my yoga teacher, Lucy, read out during one of our yoga therapy sessions just as I was coming out of a deep dark forest of my own. It’s called, simply, The Oak Tree, and it goes like this:

The Oak Tree

A mighty wind blew night and day
It stole the oak tree’s leaves away
Then snapped its boughs and pulled its bark
Until the oak was tired and stark

But still the oak tree held its ground
While other trees fell all around
The weary wind gave up and spoke,
“How can you still be standing Oak?”

The oak tree said, “I know that you
Can break each branch of mine in two,
Carry every leaf away,
Shake my limbs, and make me sway.”

But I have roots stretched in the earth
Growing stronger since my birth
You’ll never touch them, for you see
They are the deepest part of me.

Until today, I wasn’t sure
Of just how much I could endure
But now I have found, with thanks to you
I’m stronger than I ever knew.”

It’s that last verse that got me. The idea that I could look back not with horror of what I’d come through, but with gratitude for what it showed me about myself, was brand new to me.

I’m sure that you, like me, have the tendency to look back at difficult times and revile them. Perhaps you’ve even put a whole calendar year in a box marked “CRAP” and now you talk about it like it something real and evil rather than just the social construct that it was. 2023 sucked, right?

Whatever the situation you experienced [the one you’re thinking about right now, for example], whether it was a difficult friendship, or a toxic work environment, or a bereavement, or a break-up, or just the end of an era, the urge is there to put it in a neat little box and then burn that box in the eternal fires of Hades because the wind was battering you and your branches were breaking and your leaves got carried away and you were swaying all over the place and you just want to forget about it.

But here you are. You made it from then, which seemed so huge and impassable and desperate, to now. And like it or not, you learnt something along the way.

About your values.

About your friends.

About what’s really important to you.

About yourself, and what you can endure.

It feels a bit unfair perhaps, but you don’t get to learn those things when you’re wandering carefree through the meadows. You only get to learn those things when you’re being tested. So whilst you may not feel like it now, perhaps one day you might even look back with a kind of gratitude, for showing you those things.

For showing you just how deep your roots go.

I’m not saying that’s an easy shift. But once made, it’s a shift that can release some of the tension you’ve built up around those more difficult times. It certainly allowed me to shift the way I look at the bad things that happen. Bad things will always happen. Of that there can, I’m sorry to say, be no doubt. But how you look back on them? That, dear reader, is always up to you. You didn’t get to decide what happened. But you do get to decide what place these things occupy in your mind, and what energy you give them. You do have choices now.

Me? I chose to plant an oak tree, to symbolise all these things. Time moving inexorably on from a made-up, one-sided story we tell ourselves about the past, through the reality of right now, towards another fantasy which we call the future. My own mortality within that. Friendship and support. Trials and tribulations. Resilience, and choices. My own roots. Stronger than I ever knew.

Not bad for a 6-inch high twig with a dozen or so leaves.

Love with nowhere to go

March 19, 2024March 19, 2024 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 2 Comments

Someone once said that grief is just love with nowhere to go. I like that idea. But it does leave me wondering: if someone has died, do you continue to love them as much, forever, or even add to that love in the same way as you do with someone who you’re still with? After all, I have new experiences with my wife and kids and friends where the love I have for them is topped up all the time because of something they say or do, an experience we share. Another warm glow of dopamine connection that comes from connection – a smile, a hug, a burst of laughter. Whereas all my moments of connection with my mum happened almost a decade ago…

Oh shit, he’s going to talk about his mum dying, isn’t he?

Well yes, sort of. I am going to talk a bit about death. I’m not going to go into details but, you can take this as your ”trigger warning”: this contains bad language (probably), flashing images (unlikely actually but just in case), alcohol use (I might have a beer at some point during the writing of this so I’ll check that in too) and yes, I am going to acknowledge the existence (or non-existence??) of death.

In my experience, we’re crap about talking about death, or indeed the dead. I don’t think that’s because of the platitude that it “reminds us of our own mortality”: it’s more basic than that. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, it’s simply that we are hard-wired to fear awkwardness – ours, or other people’s on our account – because in evolutionary terms we’re simple, social animals who want to be accepted by the tribe so we can get close enough to the campfire to keep warm and perhaps get some food, and if we’re the awkward one (or worse, the one who makes others feel awkward) we’ll find ourselves cast adrift in the deep, dark forest to fend for ourselves.

But those instincts that were designed to protect us back then, leave us feeling all alone now. Despite the fact that “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes” (you can thank Benjamin Franklin for that blunt assessment of our fragile existence), we just don’t have the societal structure to handle it. Our language allows us to talk in euphemisms of people having “passed away”, or having been “lost”, or “left us”. And because no one talks about death… well, no one knows how to talk about death. A cycle of avoidance, which leaves those feeling the loss of death also feeling ever more isolated.

It just seems like poor planning to me. All of our neurological and psycho-social development over hundreds of thousands of years has been painstakingly designed by the trial and error of natural selection to give us the very best chance of staying alive long enough to get our genetic information into the next generation. And yet the inevitability of that we will, without any doubt, experience death and grief doesn’t stop us from getting hit like a bloody train.

[By the way, sorry to boil it down but if you ever have one of those “why am I here” moments in an existential mist, “to get your genes into the next generation” is pretty much it same as every single living thing there has ever been and will ever be. But don’t you dare feel in any way disillusioned or depressed about that. The fact that you are here at all shows that you are the ultimate organism your personal gene pool could have produced. The chances of you being alive at all, let alone at a time when I can write this sitting on a boat on holiday and you can read it wherever you are on a little computer in your hand are so infinitesimally small as to be close to zero.
So, sincerely, congratulations. From an evolutionary perspective, you are absolutely rocking it. The fact that you put on a jacket this morning when you left the house and now you probably won’t need it does not negate the achievements of all your various ancestors in surviving wars, famine, disease, the Dark Ages generally, subjugation, invasion, starvation, attack by bears or, possibly, the odd sabre-toothed tiger. Let’s face it, if your 8-times great grandfather had fallen off that cocoa-trading ship rather than banging his head and falling on the deck, you wouldn’t be here. I’m not saying “be grateful to be alive” because that’s trite and dismissive, and you’re allowed to feel shitty if you’ve got a headache or had an argument or didn’t get the call back you were hoping for. But you are unique, and you are very, very special. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean you are actually entitled to anything without a starter of skill or talent, a big chunk of hard graft as a main and a side order of good fortune. Oh, and bread and olives “for the table” of course.]

One of the reasons we don’t talk about it is because we think that other people don’t want us to. Only a matter of weeks after my mum died, the idea of mentioning her or the fact she had died or (even more ridiculous) that I still felt sad about that, seemed almost absurd. I mean, nobody wants to hear someone banging on about their dead relative for weeks on end, right? I mean, booooring!

I thought like that, as many do. Until someone pointed out to me a little inconsistency, which I will now pass on to you, dear reader…

If someone you cared about came to you a couple of months after someone close to them had died, and wanted to talk about it, or at least not not talk about it and pretend it hadn’t happened, what would you do?

Of course, you’d be open and empathetic and kind and thoughtful and show them that you cared about them and you’d probably tell them that if they wanted to talk in the future they knew where you were, and you’d probably go away from the conversation feeling pleased that you were able to support them, and actually perhaps a little proud that they felt they could open up to you like that.

So if you would do this, what would make you think they wouldn’t too? It’s not like you’re way nicer than other people, right?

[Don’t worry, I know you’re actually nicer than other people because you’re reading this and I have used AI to ensure that this is exclusively to be read by really, really nice people. But you get the point.]

From this point on, I started mentioning my mum when she popped into my mind. In fact, whenever I talked about the values of the agency I was leading, when I got to “Grace” I’d often say “This was the one my mum liked”… the past tense hanging there, making the point. It brought her into the room with me, and that felt nice.

I don’t mean “into the room” in any ghost kind of way. Although for someone who’s not at all religious, I happily dance along the knife edge of spirituality quite happily, picking and choosing what I believe and what I don’t to create my own unique little belief system. Personally, I don’t believe that there’s some all-knowing, all-seeing something up somewhere looking over us, or that there’s a place we go after we die. I don’t believe in reincarnation, or ghosts, or fate.

But I do believe that, in a certain way, we all live forever. Not in the sense of reincarnation, but in the way that our memory endures, in the people whom we’ve known and loved and who know and love us in return, and then by extension by the people they know and love and so on. We pass through the generations like our own genetic fingerprint, a little piece of us all traveling on into a time we will never know.

As time moves inexorably on, of course, the memory of us will be diluted by every passing day, until there are only homeopathic levels of us still around. But just as a single drop of water doesn’t change the sea, it’s still part of the sea.

That’s how I feel like my mum is still around, I guess. My memory of her is dimming over time – sometimes I can’t quite remember her face anymore and rely on more recent memories of pictures we have around when I envisage her. [Interesting (to me at least) that “envisage” contains comes from the French en- meaning in, and -visage meaning face. Perhaps envisage originally came from the idea of imagining a face? I can’t find anything to confirm or deny that, so please enlighten me if you happen to know].

I can hear her voice, though, very clearly. I was always able to do a decent impression of her, largely to wind her up when she was with me – a favourite being whenever I gave her a bearhug and she would exclaim “my glasses” in her slightly annoyed but amused way because she thought they would get squashed and I’d repeat it back to her to tease her. So now whenever someone says ‘my glasses’ (with the long ‘a’ of “well-spoken” English, of course, making it rhyme with “arses” rather than “asses”) I repeat it to myself in my head, saying it just as Mum would have,.

And in a much more concrete way, I can actually hear her actual voice whenever I want. Because I’ve got a recording of her actual voice.

That might be an obvious thing to say now in a time where we all have a thousand videos of everyone we know on our phones all the time. But filming everything wasn’t quite such a thing 10 years back, and in any case, I wonder how many vids you have of your mum or your dad? They don’t tend to be the people. we capture on video really, do they? So whilst I think I might have a couple of vids in which my mum is in the background, this is pretty much the only place where I’ve got her actual voice.

It was the last answerphone message she left me, and I was so paranoid about losing it I’ve now got it saved all over the place, in various clouds and on laptops and memory sticks. It’s not long, and it’s not that enlightening, but it’s still her voice and because we’re not designed to understand death really, every time I hear it it’s like she’s saying it right now. Like she’s just left it a few minutes ago. Like she’s still alive, I guess.

In the message, she says:

Phil, it’s Mum calling. I’m on my mobile, and it is important that you phone me back, soon as you can. Erm, I’m at Christie’s here, and I need to speak to you. Erm, so… and I guess just be somewhere where perhaps you’re a bit private, darling. Okay, speak when we can. Bye.

There’s a lot to unpack in there. You can’t read the tone of voice, but she’s quiet, and subdued. Doesn’t sound like good news, right?

But before we get there, I’d like to unpack some of the different elements, because in that 31-second recording you can get at least a small sense of my mum, actually.

First of all, I know it’s you calling, Mum, because I saw your number as a missed call. And even if I hadn’t seen your number, I’d know it’s you because I’ve known your voice for my entire life. And let’s be honest, I don’t think the word “calling” is really necessary at all. So from that, you can get that my mum was frustratingly just like your mum and every mum really. Endearingly crap at anything to do with tech, and never really got the hang of mobile communication.

Oh, and by the way, the next phrase: “I’m on my mobile” is also completely unnecessary. You could argue that the instruction to “phone me back” is perhaps a little extraneous, but I’ll give her that. “Soon as you can”, particularly in the tone of voice I mentioned, makes the stomach drop a bit.

And then we get to “I’m at Christie’s”. If you’re unlucky enough to know much about the Christie hospital in Manchester, you’ll know it’s a specialist cancer hospital. Brilliant place, but not somewhere you want to spend as much time as I or my sister have. Ugh.

And then “I need to speak to you” which, let’s be honest, is pretty obvious because that’s why you called me in the first place isn’t it Mum? No one calls because they don’t need to speak to someone. But where were we…?

Oh yeah. “Be somewhere where perhaps you’re a bit private”. Fuck. That’s the bit that gets me, even now. That and the addition of “darling”. A thoughtful, considerate woman, full of love, even at the most difficult of times.

That message was left at 11:31 on the 24^th of April, 2014. 4 days after my elder son Ben’s fourth birthday, on Easter Sunday that year. To raise the mood a little, here’s a pointless pic that I took of him and his little brother on his birthday.

I’m not sure why I didn’t answer her call at the time. I’d started about a month earlier at the advertising agency I’ve been running since, and so I was probably in a meeting with my old Finance Director, the inimitable Manoj, where he was telling me about how we were losing money every month and it was now my problem to solve. I do remember a lot of those kind of conversations at that time.

I don’t remember the specifics of the call when I phoned her back either really, but I do know it was the call when she told me the doctors weren’t giving her any more treatment, because it wouldn’t make any difference. From her first round of chemo on April 5^th (my sixth wedding anniversary, as it happens), my mum died just 10 days after she left that message, on May 4^th, 2014. What started slowly with a cough around the turn of the year accelerated fast and then it was just bad news every time.

I read somewhere that we have societal and social coping mechanisms for death, built into our emotions, but that these only really work for the sudden, unexpected but immediate death (the “massive heart attack” or “tragic car accident”) and the long, prolonged death from a terminal illness. Whether or not that theory holds water [what an odd phrase that one it – sounds like someone who needs to go to the loo] or not I’m not sure, but the fact is that the situation with my mum fell between these two – not so quick as to be in a state of shock; not slow enough to come to terms with things. Just bad news every time.

Your experience of death will be different from mine, of course. Where you were, who you were with. Who told you, if you weren’t there, yourself, and how you reacted. But whilst those moments are right there with you as they are with me, and were so, so visceral at the time, I’ve found that those aren’t the times I remember when I think of Mum, because really those are about me, and my feelings, and my reactions, not actually about her. How I think of her has changed as the time between now and then has grown, so that now I miss her in a much more general way: less about specifics of experiences we shared, or about her absence at those key dates around the calendar, but more the idea of Mum, in all her “Mumness”, that I often think about. Let me explain…

Mum would quite often come down to visit my wife and me in South Eash London, and use us as a base for going to galleries or museums in the city centre. She was on her own in her little terrace in Nantwich, Cheshire, and so she’d get the train down from Crewe to Euston and then, as a confident user of London’s public transport system (she was brought up in Richmond in London’s leafy South West) would make her way to The National Gallery (most likely) before heading on down to us in Crystal Palace where she’d just turn up on the doorstep. Without any real idea of when to expect her, the doorbell would ring, and I’d say “That’ll be Mum” and go to answer the door and she’d be standing there with her little wheelie suitcase wearing that dark purple coat that I bought for her one Christmas (I think??). Just “Mum”. All hugs and smiles and stories of the exhibition and her journey.

The feeling of opening the door and seeing her there is one that I miss with all my heart, but also one that I can feel today as strongly as I ever could. And one that always brings a thoughtful smile because that’s what keeps her with me. Not the pictures, or the voicemail, or the recipe for marmalade she wrote out for me because she could never remember that I hate marmalade. It’s the feeling of “Mum”. Still with me, whenever I want it.

The person you’re thinking of now, that you miss so dearly… they’re with you, too, in whatever way you choose to believe or experience that. They’re part of your experience and, by extension, they’re part of how people experience you. Celebrate them. Miss them. Raise a smile for them too.

We’ve all experienced grief in some way. A grandparent, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a colleague. Even a relationship. The end of something we didn’t want to end. It’s all the same feeling, really, and we’ve all felt it. So don’t push it away, and please don’t worry about talking about it. I promise you that you’ll find that the vulnerability of grief can actually be a wonderful way of connecting with someone who already cares about you.

I’ve just found the slightly longer quote from which I’ve taken the title of this piece, and it’s worth sharing…

Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.

Except, of course, love always has somewhere to go, doesn’t it? Love that was for someone else, but now goes into the people who are still with you.

Thanks for sticking with me today, I really appreciate it. Love to you and yours.

Not giving a f*ck

December 11, 2023July 11, 2024 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ Leave a comment

Contrary to what the title of this piece might suggest, this actually isn’t about not giving a f*ck in the traditional sense at all. In fact, it’s about choosing to. We’ll get there in a few minutes. But first, let me take you on a little journey I went on recently…

Like me, you may have noticed that there’s a certain genre of book title which… SHOCK HORROR… has a swear word in it. I’ve always thought it’s a bit disingenuous to be honest, designed to capture the attention and titillate and shock and be all rebellious when in actual fact it’s just a plain old gimmick.

If you ask me [and I know you haven’t asked me as such but I have to assume you are reading this by choice and part of the deal is that I get to say what I want and you have to just carry on reading it, so let’s just agree that it’s okay and crack on] there’s nothing clever about putting a swear word on the front cover of a book, especially if you’re going to cop out and put “f*ck” rather than having the strength of your convictions and writing the word “fuck” properly, as God intended. I know that’s because otherwise people might be shocked and appalled, but the idea that somebody may be offended by accidentally being exposed to such utter, deplorable filth and feel so aghast that they have to forego their plans for the day and lie in a darkened room with a cold compress upon their fevered brow is, frankly, a bit self-indulgent in a world where there are much more important things to be offended by. Things we will, in time, get to.

[For the record, from here on in I’m using the correct spelling, so if for whatever reason you don’t fancy reading the word “fuck” (without the magical * that somehow makes it acceptable) quite a few more times, now would be the perfect time to carefully back away from the particular high horse I seem to have found myself on, without going round the back of course because we all know that horses can kick.]

It’s with this context that whilst I’d heard of a book that came out a few years back entitled The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, I hadn’t bothered to check it out.

Part of it was the whole ‘swear word on a book cover’ schtick which just gets on my nerves [in case you hadn’t noticed], and part of it was an assumption that, because the author was American, and male, and white, it could just be a whole book of someone saying how cool they were because they didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone, in some kind of pseudo macho, ego-heavy, try-hard monstrosity. That’s right, I judged the book by its cover.

[You know people say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover? I think that’s true of pretty much most things… except books. If I’m in a bookshop (remember them?) and I’m browsing for something to buy and then leave in a pile with all the other books I’ve bought but not read, then what the hell else do I have to go on? If it’s a black cover with a silver dagger on it and big blocky writing, it’s going to be a murder-mystery type thing. If it’s a light brown cover with a tasteful etching or painting and/or a discerning old-fashioned typeface, it’s probably going to be a historical feast with a side order of love story. If it’s white and has a rose on it, it’s a romance. 99% of the time the reason I pick up this book instead of that one will have something to do with the cover. And anyway, if it wasn’t important books wouldn’t have different covers, am I right?? Anyway sorry, where were we?]

Fast forward to this summer, and someone whose opinion I respect told me that the book had recently been made into a documentary with the author (a chap by the name of Mark Manson) talking through it, and that it was really good and I should watch it. I figured that if I could give up 90 minutes or so and get the jist then that was probably worth it. So I downloaded it and watched it on a flight on my way off on holiday.

First thing to tell you is that it is indeed “really good”. It’s charming and thoughtful and engaging, and bit sad at the end too which made me shed a few tears whilst looking out at the clouds below. Admittedly I was in quite an emotional place at the time [in my head: the plane was no more emotional than any other as far as I remember] but on the whole if I feel like crying I’ll go with it and, as ever, it was quite cathartic.

I won’t go through the whole thing because you can find 90 minutes or so too and watch it yourself on one of the streaming subscriptions you’ve forgotten about [and really should probably cancel because you don’t really use it as much as you thought you would but honestly who has the brain space for rationalising subscriptions when they can just think “ah well, it’s only £6.99” and forget about it for another 6 months? Not me!] but there were a few things I took away from it which I will share with you.

Overall, it’s less about ‘not giving a fuck’ and more about being more deliberate about what you decide to give a fuck about. I guess that’s the “subtle art” bit, as I think about it now. You only have so many fucks to give, so don’t go chucking them around willy nilly over things that don’t deserve your fuck-giving.

I was introduced to this way of thinking a few years back by a Zen taxi driver – the idea that you shouldn’t allow every agressive Audi driver [used to be BMW drivers but now it feels Audi have risen to the challenge] full and unfettered access to your emotions. I wrote a whole blog about this guy which you can read here in your own time. But for now, stick with me…

The other concept I picked up was a bit more nuanced, and gets us towards where we’re going with this whole story. It went something like this: if you choose the problem, you can’t also give a fuck about how hard it is.

The best analogy that leaps to mind for me is around running a marathon. You decide to do it, knowing that there is no moment between that decision and the end of the marathon that will be anything other than largely awful. Nobody enjoys training to run a marathon, building up to running a marathon, and the majority of the marathon itself. In fact, the only part of the marathon that is actually enjoyable is the actual end of the marathon when you can stop running the marathon and not have to think about the bloody marathon ever again.

But if you choose to do a marathon, you can’t then go around giving a fuck about how ridiculously hard it is. You can’t give a fuck about the cold dark morning runs. You can’t give a fuck about the blisters, and the shin splints, and the bad knees. You can’t give a fuck about the anxiety in the week running up to it, or the fact you need a wee after a few miles, or the feeling near the end when you want to stop or, failing that, simply die.

How apt!
Pic courtesy of https://ilovetorun.org/

If you choose, then you can’t also give a fuck about the difficulties that go with that choice.

So, think for a moment: what have you chosen? Are you stuck in the mud of also giving a fuck about all the stuff that goes with it?

I have chosen to be a “good father”. Maybe even a great father. I want my sons to look back at their time growing up with the certainty that their father loved them, and respected them, and protected them. That their father was always there to support them when they needed support and push them when they needed a push. A father that was honest, and fair, and clear on expectations. A father that they themselves might aspire to be, if they so choose.

Me being a perfect dad with my happy, well-adjusted children

Because that is my choice, I can’t give a fuck about how hard it is sometimes to be that guy. I can’t choose to aim for fatherly greatness and then give a fuck when I can’t dismiss their questions with “because I say so” like I want to. I can’t make that choice then give a fuck about how hard it is to be consistent. I can’t choose to be a supportive and encouraging and attentive father and then give a fuck when it means I have to coach a load of 9- and 10-year-olds football on a Saturday morning and then coach a load of 13- and 14-year olds rugby on a Sunday morning all through the autumn, winter and spring so every single weekend morning from September through to May instead of having a well-earned lie in I have to get up early and find all the relevant kit which they didn’t bother to sort out the night before LIKE WE HAVE DISCUSSED, AT LENGTH, ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS [true story].

I can’t choose to be a father who respects them and their questions and then give a fuck when they ask about what’s happening in Gaza. I can’t give a fuck that I owe them a considered, balanced view because it’s on every news report, every day, and they see and hear everything and it’s fucking heartbreaking.

Not giving a fuck isn’t not caring. It’s the opposite, in fact: caring so much about your goals that you don’t care about any adversity that may stand in the way of your goals. Not giving a fuck is a commitment; a determination, even when it’s hard.

I never really chose to be a leader in my working life. It just kind of happened because wherever I worked, if I had an idea on how things could be better I’d talk to people about it, and I’m good at having ideas and bad at not talking to people, and if you carry on having ideas about how things could be better, people tend to give you more responsibility. I guess along the way I did choose to carry on up the career ladder I was on, driven by ideas and by a good chunk of ego, so it’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing. But the real choice came after, once I was in a position where I could decide what kind of leader I was going to be

I chose to be a “good boss”. Maybe even a great boss. I wanted my people to look back at their time working for me with the certainty that their boss loved them, and respected them, and protected them. That their boss was always there to support them when they needed support and push them when they needed a push. A boss that was honest, and fair, and clear on expectations. A boss that they themselves might aspire to be, if they so choose.

[Hmm yes that does sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A nagging sense of deja vu… almost like I did it on purpose, right? Something for another time, perhaps?]

That choice has given me huge amounts of satisfaction and joy, and it’s been so tough that I’ve balanced on the border of burnout and breakdown. It’s made me friends for life, and broken my heart a couple of times, too. More than once it’s been bad for my mental health, bad for my relationships, even bad for my career.

But I chose to lead with vulnerability and values, with love and loyalty, with trust and truth.

So I can’t give a fuck when that road has bumps in it. Even sizeable bumps that make your stomach flip a bit like those times when you were little and your dad was driving down a country lane [always your dad driving back in those days, never your mum] and went over a narrow brick humpback bridge over a stream and everyone went “woooo” as the momentum of their upward trajectory then the sudden drag down of gravity sent their internal organs all squiffy.

As ever in these situations, I find myself coming back to the words of Brené Brown.

[I won’t apologise for the preponderance of BB in these pages, because I’ve learnt a lot from listening to her and reading her words and I reckon you probably would too, if you haven’t already. But just for the record, I am aware BB does come up a lot. Let’s just say that I’m passing it on to you to save you time and effort in finding it all yourself. You are, as ever, most welcome]

The words she would use for this kind of leadership are “Strong back, soft front, wild heart.”

Strong back because shit is going to be tough sometimes and, as an authentic and open leader, you need to be able to take some of that. You need to have a back flexible but sturdy, like the oak tree that I see in the woods when I’m walking my dog, Ruby [that’s my dog’s name, not the oak tree, which we have given a name but that’s also for another time], which gets whacked by the wind year after year, branches stripped of leaves and boughs broken, but has roots deep in the earth which mean that it buds again in the spring and sows acorns across the clearing for the squirrels to squirrel away into holes that they forget about in the Autumn…

Soft front because that’s how people can find their way in. I won’t go into yet another treatise on the power of vulnerability to build trust, but it really is the only way. Soft front is the way in. In my experience, a closed, hard front is there to protect a brittle back; a shield to defend a lack of confidence, a lack of strong roots in the ground.

Wild heart? Well I’ll leave that up to Brené because I’d just be paraphrasing her anyway:

it means that once we’ve braved it on our own… once you’ve stood up for what you believe in, once you’ve said, “look, I’m going to belong to myself first and betray myself last”, that’s the mark of the wild heart, and we become painfully aware of when our choices stray from that.
Brene Brown, “Unlocking Us”” podcast, November 2020
Available onf Spotify and probably other places

Two months back I left the company I’d been leading for the best part of a decade; the company I’d put my heart and soul into since I was a mere whippersnapper in my 30s. Leaving was such sweet sorrow, for lots of reasons that I won’t go into here. But for the last 2 months I’ve been unemployed, and I’ve been working hard to change that. It’s going well [thanks for asking!] and in the not-too-distant future I’ll have something new to put my wild heart and soul into.

And I’ll do that with the wildest of hearts. Once you’ve chosen to stand up for what you believe in and committed to it, you really have no other choice but to go again.

And you can’t give a fuck about how hard that might make it.

So, dear reader, I now ask you to think again about the choices you’ve made. Not what you had for breakfast this morning or what you’re going to watch with a glass of red once the kids are in bed [true story], but the ones where you’ve had to stick to your guns a bit, and dig deep.

The choice to be in a profession that maybe doesn’t pay as much as some others but really, really means something to you.

The choice to stay in the relationship and work at fixing it.

The choice to be a working mum and commit to both aspects of that dual existence.

The choice to put in the extra hours because you have pride in your work even though it probably won’t get noticed.

The choice to open yourself up again with the knowledge that yes, you might get hurt again, but “what if” it all works out?

You’ve made choices because of who you are and what you stand for. You’ve chosen what to care about. Be proud of that, and be clear on what that means.

Because not giving a fuck, is all about choosing what to care about and what not to care about. The choice not to care about anything that gets in your way because you know you’re on the right road, on a quest that is noble, and important, and fucking worth it.

I reckon that is something we could all try not giving a fuck about.

[In case you’re wondering, I have peppered this piece with the word “fuck” a total of 28 times. In the famous last words of Dylan Thomas: “I believe that’s a record”. I also popped a “shit” in there for those of you who like a little variation.]

The Four Agreements

October 11, 2023January 20, 2025 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

I don’t know about you, but whenever I give someone a book, particularly one very specific to them, I write a little note in the front along with the date. I do it partly because I really appreciate it when someone does it for me, and also perhaps partly because I like the idea of marking the moment in time so that in the future it’ll pop up again.

Perhaps it’ll be read by the person to whom I gave the book, a single tear of reminiscence rolling involuntarily down their face as they recall the thoughtful gesture and how lovely I was. Or perhaps it’ll be read by someone decades from now who’s picked up the book for next to nothing at a charity shop and will never know how lovely I was except to know I’m the kind of person who writes a note in the front of a book. And maybe, just maybe, they will decide that is something they will do from that point on… thereby making the world a slightly better place, forever and ever into the future.

Yes, I do overthink things sometimes, I’ll give you that.

Anyway, it just so happens that in the middle of last year, right in the middle of a very challenging time for me personally (which, if you’re interested in such things, you can read about here), someone I didn’t really know very well came up to me holding a book, and then handed me that book. Their personal copy of a book they carried with them at all times, a book wherein they had highlighted passages, and made the odd note. Handed over now to me, for me toread and to keep.

And yes, they had written inside:

Underneath, they’d written their name, and their personal contact details

First off, it struck me then and still does today as an incredibly kind, thoughtful, open gesture. Let me give you something that’s helped me, in the hope that it may help you too.

But just as much as that, I was fascinated as to what the book might be. What is the kind of book that someone carries with them, at all times, and highlights passages and makes little notes in pencil in the margin, and is then moved to inscribe and hand to someone else? It must be a book with such wisdom, such guidance, to drive someone to feel they simply must pass on to someone else in their time of need.

What book holds that kind of potential impact?

The book in question is called The Four Agreements, written by a chap by the name of Don Miguel Ruiz. I’ll be honest, the first time I started into it I liked the thinking but struggled a little with the way it’s written. That’s because Don Miguel Ruiz is a shamanic teacher and healer, and he writes in a very unconventional, conversational style about teachings from the ancient Toltec culture in central Mexico. It’s not written like a classic business or “self-help*” book because it’s not written by a classic business or “self-help” author, and as you can see below it’s not either of those things anyway, it’s a much more than that: a Practical Guide To Personal Freedom. So you have to get into the way it’s written, or you have to get past the way it’s written. But you can’t ignore the way it’s written.

[I hate that I feel the need to put “self-help” in “” but I do so because it’s been hijacked to be used pejoratively by people who think that “self-help” is the sort of thing that those awful woke snowflake Remoaner lefties need and which any hard-working normal person knows is a load of bloody nonsense and anyway who needs introspection when you can just judge other people from a position of blithe, dismissive self-ignorance? From being a positive, it’s become a negative, despite the fact that every single thing I’ve read with the intention of helping myself has, in some way, actually helped my actual self. But anyway, it’s in “” so we can leave it there and crack on…]

Whether you get into or get past, the idea of a Practical Guide to Personal Freedom is immediately something that appeals, right?. I mean, who doesn’t want Personal Freedom, and what better than a Practical Guide to get there? I’ve been following the Massively Impractical Guide to Personal Angst in my own brain for years and that’s been a bit of a chore at times, to say the least.

And once you’re in, the simplicity of The Four Agreements sing out as a sort of rulebook for a life which doesn’t fall into all the pitfalls we all fall into, all the bloody time. So simple that it’s a bit annoying no one mentioned them before, really.

So to avoid you having to find all this stuff out yourself, I’ll outline them here, with my take on what they’re all about, and you can save yourself a lot of future angst. Sounds like a plan, right? Great, let’s roll.

This is the front cover. You can’t miss it.

1) Be impeccable with your word

Don’t talk shit, basically. Don’t lie, don’t make stuff up, don’t brag, gossip, don’t collude, don’t say unkind things, don’t talk about people behind their backs. Actually, don’t say any of that shit to yourself either. Tell the truth to yourself and to others. As good ole’ Brené Brown would say “Clear is kind, unclear is unkind”.

Am I good at this? Only in parts. I’m not one for collusion and I don’t brag, but I do gossip sometimes and on a bad day I can be quite cutting about people, particularly when I feel I’ve been “wronged” in some way. I can also talk shit about myself, to myself. So this is one I have to come back to, and remind myself of, to keep it fresh and real. This much I do know: nothing good comes of speaking ill.

2) Don’t take anything personally.

Self-explanatory this one. But damn – how can you not take things personally when you are about you? If something happens to you, or someone does something to you, it’s you, right? It’s personal to me because it’s happening to me!

Except, of course, it really isn’t. This is one I’ve kept really close to me since I first read it – the idea that whatever someone does or says, howsoever it may affect you… it’s not about you. It’s about them.

It’s about how they see the world, and themselves in the world; about the pressures they have put on them and the pressures they put on themselves. It may affect you in horrible ways, but even then, it’s not personal. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

If someone treats you badly, it’s because in their mind they are under pressure or under attack somehow. If someone puts you down, it’s because of how they experience themselves when they are with you. If they really, really seem to just hate you for no reason you can work out, then don’t bother trying to work it out because the answer to “what have I done?” is quite possibly “nothing”. Because they don’t actually hate you – the you that you know and know to be fundementally good – they have negative feelings towards the “you” they have created in their mind because of their own issues. It really isn’t about you.

I know this is difficult. Believe me when I say that even with this agreement not to take anything personally sitting happily in your head in all its logical, sensible splendour, it’s still really, really difficult. I’m not saying you should just brush it off or, even worse, get thick-skinned to protect yourself. Those people who claim not to give a fuck about anything people say or do to them are lying to you and to themselves. I’m not saying you can’t be upset. Be upset. Just don’t take it personally. Because it’s not about you, it’s about them.

Oh and by the way, unfortunately, it works both ways. So it’s also true that If someone talks you up or lauds your every minute action and deed, it’s really not about you, it’s about what they think or hope for or need in the relationship. I know you’re brilliant, but just don’t take it personally.

Trust me: this one is a keeper. Don’t take anything personally. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

3) Don’t make assumptions

You know what they say: “Assume” makes an ass out of u and me. That trite little saying doesn’t stop us from doing it though, does it?

We make assumptions because we’re trying to make sense of the world without all the information to hand. Our brains don’t like stories without an ending. We seek reasons and endings, and so without a reason or an ending we just go and make up our own.

Assumptions are the basis of pretty much every conflict you’ve ever had – the story you’ve made up in your head about what someone else is thinking, which you then judge them for without them even knowing. They become the loser in a game they didn’t know they were playing. And let’s be honest, we don’t often cast ourselves as the villains in the piece.

Assumptions leave you wide open to be disappointed, or surprised, or shocked and appalled when things don’t turn out as we guessed they would. Assume it’s in the bag and you’ll find that someone who assumed otherwise put in more effort than you and walked away with the prize. Assume they won’t want to talk to you and you’ll never know what might have been. Assume there’s no point in applying for that job, and I promise you that you 100% will not get that job.

This is my biggest Achilles Heel. I love a good story, and I can’t help telling myself all the stories I’ve created about my assumptions. I know that this is how my brain works, though, so I’m trying to be disciplined in checking those stories as I go and removing the assumptions that may be driving action, inaction, or reaction.

4) Always do your best.

I love this. So simple. The kind of thing we were told as kids and now tell our kids because that’s what you tell kids… without really listening to what we’re saying and taking our own instruction.

If you always, always simply do your very, very best, you can end the day knowing that you couldn’t have done anything more. It’s the drive to get up in the morning and the solace to sleep soundly through the night. Just do your best. Personal to you, and only you know what your best is. Don’t worry about what other people are doing. Don’t cut corners.

And be okay with the idea that your best varies, too. Your best when you’ve had the elusive straight eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and woken to the birdsong and the sun is coming up and the day ahead looks challenging but manageable isn’t the same as your best when you’ve been awake through the night with your mind racing because you know you’ve got that difficult conversation you have to have later and there’s no milk for your morning cuppa and the dog just slobbered on your black jeans so it looks like you’ve had a giant snail crawling. up your leg. But just do your best, no more and no less, every time, in everything, and you simply cannot go far wrong. It’s actually quite freeing.

So there you have it. The Four Agreements, which I was given by a very kind man who felt I needed them at a difficult time in my life. Again, what a lovely gesture.

And what simple agreements they are. I can’t tell you that I stick to them all the time, but I can tell you that whenever I lose my way, it’s because I’ve not done one or more of these.

Maybe just make a note of them somewhere and consider in all honesty, where you’re strongest. on these and where you’re not. Perhaps consider that difficult thing that’s on your mind at the moment and see if there’s a chance that one of these agreements might have avoided it – or might even get you out of it. Be impeccable with your word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions.

And whatever you do today, just do your best. No more, no less. I reckon that’ll be more than enough for whatever today has in store for you,

[If you’re interested in getting a copy of said book for yourself, then you can find it here or at all good remaining physical book shops. I’d give you mine but I’m not quite ready to give it up yet.]

Despair, and Courage

August 18, 2023October 30, 2023 ~ Phil Bartlett ~ 1 Comment

I’ve always been interested in words – where they come from, how they develop and change over time, and how we use them. I love the way that the English language is this crazy melting pot made of Old English, Danish, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Dutch and Spanish, and a bunch of others in various amounts and we all just use it like it ain’t no thing.

[For your information, our vocabulary includes words from around 350 other languages according to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. I know, I thought that was an unrealistically large number too, but apparently, there are 7,117 distinct languages spoken in the world today… although 23 of those cover more than half the world’s population. You’re welcome].

I love how we play with language and how language plays with us, too. The alluring alignment of alliteration. The way words like “imagine” trigger the imagination parts of the brain whether you like it or not. The way that we know that there are rules around how we use our language that we all know but don’t even know that we know…

So when I say that we have a cute little old yellow French wooden ladder in our kitchen, it sounds perfectly fine… but if I said we have a French cute wooden old yellow little ladder, you’d think I had lost my mind.

That’s because there’s an unwritten rule that we do adjectives in a certain order to make it sound right, which [as I know you’re wondering] goes, in order: Opinion; Size; Age; Shape; Colour; Origin; Material; Purpose.

[Don’t take my word for it – there’s a whole book about this and other pleasing peculiarities you can find here]

I didn’t even add in the shape in my ladder example above. But you know that an old round wooden table sounds right, whereas a wooden round old table sounds odd.

[If you’re reading this as a non-native English speaker this may all sound like nonsense of course, but it’s stuff like this that makes the language such fun to learn, I’m sure! Idiosyncrasies that we wouldn’t be able to tell you, but will know if you get wrong. If it makes you feel better it even happens between English-speaking countries – so as Brits, we would happily say “hello mate” to an individual, but when our American cousins greet a group of us with “hello, mates!” we quietly smirk into our cup of tea.]

So yeah, I’m fascinated by words. They’re interesting.

Oh yeah, and I guess they can be incredibly powerful too. In case you thought this was going to be a lazy wander around our language. We’re going in hot, folks. Hold on tight.

Words can bring comfort, give direction, even show a way towards freedom. And they can close us in too, forcing division and leaving marks on our souls.

[Remember that old kids’ rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me? Bull, and I can’t stress this enough, shit. I’ve broken a few bones over the years and they heal over time, but the phrase “crushingly dismissive” from some anonymous 360 feedback about a decade back will stay with me until my dying day, believe me.]

Understanding how we use words now versus how they were intended originally can sometimes change the way you think about them too – and here’s this whimsical pootle through the highways and byways of my mind turns onto the slipway and accelerates onto the main carriageway of this little story…

I stumbled across the word despair recently whilst reading a book [an actual book with pages made of wood pulp – remember those??] and once I’d dusted myself down I looked at the word again and did a bit of a think in my head (which is where most of my thinks happen, I find).

As you’ll know if you’ve read these pages over the last couple of years, I’ve had some dalliances with the darkness of despair in my time – never quite giving in to it, but sometimes viewing it carefully from a safe distance, knowing not to go too close. So for me, despair is a word that conjures up a world that is very gloomy and quite final: something hard to come back from. When all hope is gone…

Which is where a tiny little bell somewhere in the back of my mind gave a tiny little ring…

With the knowledge that English is an amalgamation of all those different languages that have come together, I know that there’s a fair bit of French knocking around for all to see. And as it happens, I remember enough A-Level French to know that “I hope” is “j’espère”. And we all get that ‘de-’ basically means the opposite of what follows it – deconstruct, deodorant – or, more classically, the idea of “away from”.

So there we have it: despair is the lack of hope. Or, even more meaningfully: moving away from hope.

But hope is something within us. All hope cannot simply be “lost” if we created it in the first place. Of course, nobody chooses despair. But is there a moment when we decide to move away from hope and into despair?

And if that’s the case, then surely there’s a decision we can make to do the opposite? To refuse to let hope move away. To hold on to hope and bring it closer, especially at our most difficult times.

What do we need to make that decision? Great question. And like any rhetorical question, you’ll be pleased to know I have the answer:

Courage.

Let’s be clear here: courage isn’t bravery – at least not in the ‘running into a burning building’ kind of bravery that my Dad did once, or my little bit of it you can read about here – and it isn’t about just pretending everything is fine and persevering when actually it isn’t. It’s a word with much more to it than daring and valour. The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard Of Oz was lacking bravery; courage is broader than that.

Again I find myself back in A-Level French lessons and recall that “cœur” is the French for ‘heart’. A quick trip down an internet rabbit hole and I find that cœur comes from the Latin word for heart, cor, which connects to the second part of the word which comes from the Latin word ‘agere’, meaning ‘to be’… or ‘to lead’.

So…

Courage isn’t about being bold or daring. Courage is leading from the heart. Putting the head to one side and just letting the heart lead the way.

This, my friends, is where the magic lies. Courage is how we do the thing that logic tells us is impossible. Courage is a decision

Courage is choosing to forgive.

Courage is being the first to say “I love you”.

Courage is holding on to hope.

And here’s where I question whether we create our language or our language somehow guides us through. Because whether or not you already knew that despair means that you actively go away from hope, you definitely will have had the feeling that despair was at the end of the line. When all hope is gone.

And perhaps now you may consider that there’s another choice; another decision: that when all rational hope is gone, it’s time for the emotional hope to endure. To choose courage. To lead with the heart. To know that whatever you are going through, you are still going, and today, that’s enough.

Courage doesn’t need to turn up with a sword and a shield; to smash the door in. Sometimes courage is just picking yourself up and dusting yourself down, and making the decision to go again, even when you know that you may fall once again; the heart taking the lead, because the head is weary.

Whatever happens, however difficult or uncomfortable or unfair you think it may be, however hurt or lonely or lost you may feel, remember you always, always get to decide how you handle it. As the Zen Taxi Driver I once met noted: don’t be so keen to give up control of your mood or feelings to whatever’s happening. No matter how hard things are, or how close you may be to despair, you get to decide what you will allow to affect you and what you will not. I know it’s not easy, but believe me: you are not at the mercy of external influences. You get to choose.

So just take a moment. Let go of whatever expectations you might have about what might happen, because last time I checked you’ve never actually that good at reading the future anyway, right?

And choose courage. Go again. You’ve got this.