Thoughts on staying level headed
I told myself I'd stop reading the news in bed.
...I have not.
Most nights the phone still ends up in my hand, the room dark, the screen too bright. Headlines stacking up. A war that is but then isn't. Petrol up again. Rates up again. Then holding. Somewhere, another job quietly handed to a piece of software.
It washes over you. Not as one big thing. As a hundred small ones, layered, until you're not really reading anymore. Just absorbing. This conjecture that never ends; whether it will be good or bad, often biased, always sensationalised for the click, and never really deserving of the bandwidth you've got leftover.
Then you put the phone down and lie there.
Heart going a little faster than it should.
Even though none of it's mine to fix.
I can read every update on the Strait of Hormuz from now until morning, and the Strait of Hormuz will ....not notice. Not one cent moves because I lost sleep over it.
The weight of it is certainly real.
Mortgages, rent, bills that don't flinch when the news gets worse.
The last thing I want to do is tie a bow on it.
Some of this is just hard, and a sometimes it's a little bit shit.
But there's a difference between caring about something and carrying it, and lately I've found myself carrying things that were never mine to lift.
Opinions about machines that can perform the appearance of reason, a shipping channel that none of us knew existed twelve months ago, and concering circular financing in big tech that shows no one really learned from the dot com era.
More and more I find myself thinking back to before all of this. My early days in real estate, all the way back to when I was a plasterer.
I can't believe I'm saying this, and my daughter will remind me how I old I am if I say it out loud. But times really were simpler back then.
The world has changed a lot, and so have I, as much as I assume you have too.
And versions of us back then probably thought the same things.
If I really think about it, it's not nostalgia in the form of I want to go back. I don't.
But there are parts I'm trying to hold onto, or to better remember. To bring them forward with me, and with the world I'm in now.
After years in plastering and construction, I still think with my hands more than I'd like to admit. It teaches you something about control.
Half the job is conditions you didn't choose.
Weather. Surface conditions.
The four thirty seven decision change from a client who you really need to pay an invoice.
But you can control the mix. The prep.
Whether the surface underneath is true.
You've got one tool that doesn't care at all about the rest of it, too.
And I can't help but take the piss out of myself a little even as I write this, because compared to the scale of concepts we're all asked to deal with today, it's one of the most uninteresting things you could turn your attention to.
But I'm talking about a spirit level.
Just a bit of alloy with a little window in it, a bubble of air sitting in green liquid.
You lay it against the work. If the bubble drifts, you're off.
Adjust. Bring it back to the middle. When it sits dead centre, you're good.
You don't get a wall straight by staring at the whole house.
You watch the bubble. This section. The metre in front of you.
These days there are fancy digital versions, astoundingly accurate and almost always better. But I've got muscle memory the old fashioned way, and I've never found that green liquid or bubble whinge that it needs charging right when you need it.
It'd also break my point, which is that I've been trying to live a bit more like that lately.
Not because I've cracked it. The bubble drifts on me constantly.
I'm not often writing from the far side of anything, and that's all true here.
This is more me telling you what I'm reaching for, on the days I remember to reach for it.
The metre in front of me is real.
And it's mine.
The people in my house. The call I said I'd return.
The work I can actually do well today.
The walk I keep putting off.
The night I cook instead of scroll.
The mate I check on.
All of these things are still inside our hands.
None of that fixes the news. There isn't a fix.
But it's the difference between being steady and being swept.
Steady isn't the same as calm. The chirpy version of this makes me cringe; the one that tells you to count your blessings and go for a walk. And I suspect it makes you cringe too.
I think we're allowed to find this hard. And be tired. Most of us are running closer to the last reserve than we'd let on. It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling like it's weakness, until you realise that it's all of us.
So steady isn't a solve. It only means you've stopped trying to level the horizon. You've gone back to the bubble. To the bit of wall you can actually reach.
So if it's all feeling like a lot right now, whether it's the world, the money, the machines, the exhaustion none of us seem able to put down?
Same, I guess.
And with a career that has me sitting in a lot of lounge rooms, seeing a lot of lives outside my own circles, I can assure you that it's not just you, and it's not just me.
You're not failing. You're not behind.
You're probably just standing too far back, trying to straighten a whole house at once.
The fix I’m trying to practice right now?
Put the phone down.
Find the metre in front of you.
Watch the bubble.
Bring it back to the middle.
And then do the next bit.
I'm writing that for me as much as for you.