A very full life

My years have been very full. I’ve had a career as a health professional and researcher, while at the same time building agricultural fences, shearing sheep, and living in the remote north of Australia helping to manage a landscape half the size of Denmark. As one friend kindly put it, this has led to a combined life experience of 108 years.

Not really “doing nothing”, as I have suggested previously.

Looking back, I see that I am motivated by the extremely high value I place on the unknown duration of my consciousness. This motivates me to fill my moments with a high density of experiences that explore the widest possible bandwidth of human potential.

Paradoxically, I am aware that by placing such a high value on experience, I deny myself access to an entire domain of it. That is, by placing a high value on doing something, I rarely explore the experience of doing nothing.

Doing nothing emerged as a solution to the fixation I have with fullness. In my brief encounters with this space, I have found that doing nothing is in fact full of novelty, and surprisingly energetic. By denying interruptions and protecting my attention, I have allowed a new form of motivation to emerge. Through a more natural bubbling up of ideas and inspirations, I am finding ideas that feel softer and yet seemingly more useful.