Photo via twistedvintage.blogspot.com

Christmas is like cheap pizza – all cheesy, intoxicating promise, but somehow (so disappointingly!) winds up tasting like cardboard.

Actually, correction. Christmas is like cheap pizza to the violently lactose and gluten-intolerant – something everyone else seems to enjoy, while you get…tofu.

Why all the bah humbuggery? At the core of my festive deflation is the mass, crass, exhausting, relationship-compromising ritual of buying presents. Did you see that Black Friday footage from the US? The whole notion of massly, crassly buying up stuff for “loved ones” seems to send human nature to its most depraved base. And the fact that it’s such a far cry from the original premise of festive giving just deepens my malaise. As, I think, it does for so many.

Admittedly my family as a whole is particularly and notoriously awkward with the ritual of gift-giving. We always keep our receipts; invariably our Kris Kringle recipient feels guilty accepting anything isn’t wholly functional and necessary. Um, I just don’t think I’ll get maximum salad-making use out of the hand-carved bowl you paddled three days through shark-infested waters to some Solomon archipelago to purchase. I know, why don’t you just keep it?

Over the years, we’ve tried all kinds of consumerist-dodging approaches, but none have really hit the right tone. We’ve done Kris Kringle with an upper price limit of $20 (which pretty much gets you a Led Zeppelin CD from the discount bin). We went through a giving-a-goat-to-a-third-world-village phase. We spent lunch wondering whether said village ever got said goat, which was a bit of a cracker fizzler.  One year we all got a boxing bag from Mum and Dad. Not each. One to share between six. The next year it was one-sixth of a ping-pong table. The idea was to generate less “stuff”, a commons approach. Which would have been sound if we weren’t all adults living in different states.

So what’s the nourishing, satisfying, happy way to navigate one’s way through this? The thing is we humans actually do like giving. A bunch of studies show that one of the most effective way to get a happiness hit is to give away your money, which certainly suggests donating to charity – unconditionally – is a great route. I’ve previously written about how giving to consequential strangers brings us joy – giving a jar of chutney to the garbage man and the guy who makes you coffee each day is a lovely angle.

This week I stumbled on the Center for a New American Dream’s How to Simplify the Holidays guide. Their aim is to reduce mass, crass consumption and up the connection and care factor. They suggest giving “experience vouchers” (“This entitles you to three home-cooked meals at my place”), re-gifting parties (everyone brings in their waffle makers and $20 CDs from last year, whacks in a pile and swaps; so wrong and yet somehow so right!) and they suggest actually giving young kids just the box and wrapping the present came in.

Festive giving, by the way, is a crude reenactment of the time three wise blokes showed gratitude to God with some myrrh and so on. Which is why I like this suggestion: hold a gratitude ceremony on Christmas morning where everyone writes down what they’re most grateful for from the year that was. The notes go in a hat and are read out; if you guess who wrote it, your Kris Kringle goes to them. A little complex, but nicely mindful.

For Grandparents: get the grandkids to write down the best thing gramps taught them and turn it into a book….I like the e-program Blurb for this).

Another study I encountered this year: making stuff by hand makes us happy. The Simplify Your Holiday guide suggests having a cooking day with friends (instead of Christmas drinks), the results of which you give as gifts. To this end I’ve just invited some friends around to make some fermented pickles. You may laugh, but they were all keen.

Other studies say experiences make us happier than stuff ever will. To this end, in the time-honoured Wilson family tradition of getting Christmas just a little bit off tone and awkward, we’re all chipping in to go… bob-sledding. Think of us when you do your gratitude ceremony Christmas morning.

Are you going simple this year? How so? I reckon EVERYONE is craving less this Christmas….even if we haven’t quite finessed the technique for achieving it. Or not achieving it…

Straight up, I’ll be filing my final Sunday Life column this week.

Almost 130 experiments in how to make life better…you’d hope I’d have found an answer, hey?? I kinda have, but that’s for another time.

A publisher once said to me, “Never do a column for more than two years. The first year you find your feet, the second you find your voice and after that you repeat what you said in the first two years.” I tend to agree.

And as many of you who read this blog know, I’m not one to hang on to things. I like to move where my voice keeps fresh.

Photo by Elizaveta Porodina

So, from the New Year, I’ll be working on a bunch of new projects (TV and print), as well as ebooks.

Yes, ebooks.

I’ve been really rather thrilled with how rewarding ebook publishing is.

[For those new here, my ebook I Quit Sugar ebook went on sale about 8 weeks ago and has been hitting good spots around traps.]

Ebooks are a direct conversation. They help directly. They share authentically. They deliver what I want to share straight to where I want to connect.

Ebooks are new – according to Darren at Problogger, who is something of an international expert in this kind of thing, there are only about 20 or so bloggers making a living from ebooks here. So no one really knows where it will wind up. I’m the first “traditional” journalist to enter into it…I’ve been told.

Some general thoughts:

Media – and life in general – is moving faster than ever. Everything is speeding up. Flux is our permanent state now. I find this exciting.

They call my generation the bridging generation. We Gen Xers…we’ve had to bend and straddle and dance back and forth as we adjust from the ways of yore to, well, this new multifaceted, layered, messy, instant, constant, technology-based way.

I hand wrote my law essays at uni, but was the Tech Head in my office when the internet arrived while I was doing my newspaper cadetship at News Ltd. Throughout my career, as it has been for so many Gen Xers, I’ve been there, grappling, straddling, bending, learning, adapting – in the fray of it all – as media, and life in general, has gone through impossible-to-pin-down, technology-driven changes  over the past 15 years or so. We didn’t study this stuff at uni. We had to learn on the job, faking it to our Boomer bosses ’till we made it.

I was editing Cosmopolitan as the internet came and savaged advertising revenue and readership. I was a TV host when Twitter was finding its feet and experienced firsthand how snark unleashed works. (Prior to that I was in the US, before Twitter hit Australia, and wrote a feature for Good Weekend on these new online hustlers; I thought it was a brief fad.)

Now, after 15 years in journalism and 12 years writing columns in various newspapers and magazines, I’m here again, ensconced in the fray witnessing what’s happening to print media – mags, newspapers etc. I don’t use words like “collapse” or “death of”. Good reporting, conversations, research and opinion will always be important. We’ll just consume and interact with (this being the more future-oriented term) them differently.

And just as an aside…good journalism and writing is becoming MORE coveted during this time of flux. Populism is becoming more…heartening.

Watch how we “unfollow” people on Twitter or blogs who don’t share well researched, considered stuff. And journalists like Annabel Crabb, Mark Colvin and Leigh Sales have huge “fan” bases.

But how we interact has shifted. And it’s all, to my mind, about opportunity.

If you have something to say, you can do so more authentically, more helpfully than ever before.

There is room and appreciation of all kinds of voices. So long as they’re real and authentic. We don’t have to worry about frauds or the “death of” information. Faccid journalism and pretenders are sniffed out – and torn down – immediately in this online arena. Aren’t they?

Finally, I say above we’re in a time of flux, as though the balls in the air will one day land, nicely, solidly. No they won’t!!! This is it. Communication is a 100% flux-y thing now. We just move with it…taking our content, knowledge and care with us.

Which is a mild meandering.

Regardless. For me, ebooks and blogging have become opportunities to do and be what I want and to connect in a way that thrills me.

There’s a nice timing to this end of a chapter. A lot of changes are going to play out in the lifestyle media arena in the next few months…more sections and magazines closing, new ventures starting, new media operators appearing. We’ve seen Wendy Harmer’s The Hoopla take hold. And Mamamia has been striding forth, making lots of waves and is rumoured to be undergoing some big, bold, exciting shifts. Hoorah to that (and the chick factor going on here!).

THIS IS WHAT IS EXCITING: those with something worth sharing will win out.

The way media and technology works now, chaff is sorted, naturally.

People who don’t have “big names” can rise to the top. Nastiness and vapidity and ignorance doesn’t last. We share. We share things for free. We’re more open.

For some extra background reading:

As of May this year, Amazon now sells more ebooks than print books and has just started publishing books as well – cutting out not just the bookshops, but the publisher and agent, too. As one Amazon exec in the feature said,

“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader.”

What do you think of this?

Amazon has started giving its authors direct access to highly coveted Nielsen BookScan sales data. Authors, then, can steer things, work out where they need to go for book “signings” and so on. More contact, more open, more sharing.

Seth Godin is the trailblazer in this field and is all about offerings direct to readers or fans. His interview here is interesting…his thoughts on giving your “art” generously have possibly been the most influential in my time writing 130-odd columns.

Mumbrella has also posted an announcement on his industry site.

Here’s to 2012 and fresh voices!

Of all the self-imposed guinea pig antics I’ve subjected myself to for this column, this week’s might be regarded as my bravest. For it entailed eating, oh-glory-be-yes, fat.

In a fat-fearful world, my no holds barred consumption of chicken skin, the crackling and the 3cm of subcutaneous tissue on my pork belly, several teaspoons of butter on my veggies, whole cups of full cream milk, chunks of ghee and avocado each day has freaked the innards out of most in my culinary orbit. And yet (boldly! fearlessly!) I’ve persevered with this particular experiment for three whole months.

Turn to the person to your left, and the one to your right. I’m betting one of you is making friends with your egg yolks right now, having picked up on what’s been dubbed the “paleo” or “caveman” diet. Images of loin clothes and bone gnawing aside, the diet boils down to something pretty innocuous: not eating anything fiddled with.

So, no grains, no additives, no sugar, no grain-fed meat, no mucked-around-with fat-reduced dairy.

And instead the unadulterated foods of our ice-age forebears. The subsequent claim is that doing so makes us healthier, thinner and live longer, a claim I had to test for myself.

For the bulk of our 2.6 million years on the planet our diet consisted of fat, meat and fibrous vegetables. Put simply, fat determined our survival. Ten thousand short years ago we started eating grains, gradually changing from fat-burning creatures to sugar and starch-burning ones. Which would be fine. Except our bodies have never adjusted – 99.9 per cent of our genes are the same as our caveman ancestors.

Grains by nature contain toxins in their husks (their only defense in the evolutionary chain) that we struggle to digest (ergo, bloating, gluten sensitivity, etc). Further, a grain-based diet signals “famine” to our primitive bodies – why else would we be resorting to the most energy inefficient, toxic food possible? Which is said to set off a domino of “coping mechanisms”, such as insulin, cholesterol and triglyceride spikes, as our bodies try to deal with a substance it has not evolved to ingest. The spiraling consequences of living grain-based lives is extensive, and backed by a fast-growing number of studies that show it’s making us fat and sick.

Now. I know, I know. All this turns the pyramid and the way you eat your cornflakes on its head. And it makes people angry. What do you mean we’ve been eating all wrong? We’re not meant to eat fat! Really? Who says?

On Saturday night I found myself at dinner with a bunch of paleos – two dentists, two farmers, a GP, some academics and the pin-up girl of paleo Nora Gedgaudas (at 50, she’s as toned and glowy as a young bride) whose authoritative and hyper-referenced tome Primal Body Primal Mind was my first introduction to the topic.

[Listen to my earlier podcast with Nora here.]

We ate the fish or the duck, poured oil over our asparagus and said no to the bread. We all drilled Gedgaudus, in Australia to speak at a series of Nourishing Australia conferences, on the guff all paleos tend to get drilled on. But didn’t cavemen only live to 30 – how can their diet be good? That was the average age, skewed by high infant mortality and death-by-charging-rhino, not diet. But don’t we need carbs for energy? No, it’s in fact the only food molecule that’s unnecessary for survival. Geez, all that saturated fat – it causes heart disease and high cholesterol! Again, no. The original study in the 1950s by scientist Ancel Keys that claimed as such was seriously flawed.

[To watch a video that explains this, click here.]

Since then studies have shown in just two weeks a saturated fat/paleo diet reduced cholesterol and triglycerides 30 points (equivalent to taking statins for six months).

My cholesterol dropped and I lost 2 kilos “going paleo”. But the most remarkable benefit has been its stickability. Once I’d escaped my sugar rollercoaster of yore and started eating 2-3 meals a day (fat satiates and so I now eat less) it just didn’t occur to me to “relapse” (carbs are addictive, so without them my cravings disappeared). Indeed, everyone around the table on Saturday had been grain-free for years, effortlessly. Which, to me, makes this whole caper less a diet and simply, innocuously, something that just makes sense.

This is a massive topic to cover in one column. I’ll be writing more about it in weeks to come, so feel free to post any questions or suggestions on the whole paleo thing below. I’ll also post a directory of doctors, dentists, farmers etc who support this way of living.

I know some of you might find it a little contentious…share! It’s a good discussion to have.

Also, stay tuned tomorrow. I’m making a big announcement…

If you ever find yourself in the laundry at a party skewered against the tub of stubbies by some eye-glazing, go-nowhere conversation, try this tactic. Ask everyone’s thoughts on The Notebook. In my experience everyone has a take on this 1996 novel, turned into a film in 2006. And it’s always pleasantly diverting.

I mean, most of us admit to only having half-watched the movie, and only to witness Ryan Gosling work his magic. Right? Blokes will say their wife made them do it. But in the next breath they’ll confess it made them cry. I know an ex-world number one light heavyweight boxer who’s watched it 14 times and a burly fireman who’s seen it nine. Both cried every time. Which is a phenomenon in itself.

But what I find interesting when I spike party small talk with such a conver-bomb is that invariably women say they love the film because the female protagonist Allie – who’s faced with choosing between first love Noah and her posh, sweater-n-chinos fiancé – eventually goes with her heart. Chicks love this.

Blokes, however, say they get all prickly-eyed because the dude who sticks to his belief that he’d found his girl (and built a house in readiness for her return) wins the day. The nobleness entailed in this and the fact he stands by Allie through all kinds of calamities hits a waterworks nerve for men. Chicks also love this.

Choosing to go with your heart, and determined, stoic nobleness – it’s fundamental Venus vs Mars stuff. But at the core of both takes is the same principle, I think. A “good” decision was made. And committed to. Simple! Phew!

Since seeing the film myself, I’ve always wanted to know author Nicholas Sparks’ take on love. Is he a romantic? A cynic? This week I got my opportunity during his visit promoting his seventeenth novel The Best of Me. Sparks, who’s sold more than 55 million books, is an Anthony Robbins-type figure in zeal, gum-chewing ability and all-American jock-like stature. He also doesn’t mince his thinking.

I ask him for his personal formula for noble, heart-led happiness. “It’s about wanting the same kind of life,” he says without hesitating. “Do you both want to get married? A church wedding? How many kids? Shared finances? Private schools? Sit-down dinners?” Stunningly, he discussed all this with wife Cathy on their second date, aged 23. Thus, a “good” decision was made and they both committed to marriage six months later.

I left our meeting a little overwhelmed. But it all kind of clarified the mass-appealing vibe of his work – he simplifies love in a world where we’ve made it terribly complicated. As Sparks says, it’s the “what ifs” that plague us, and are thus the predominant theme in all his books. What if we married the wrong girl? What if we waited longer for The One? Today, many of us are bogged down with these what ifs, adding more and more options to the to-ing and fro-ing – What if he holds me back from my career? What if I can find better? – which often stalls our happiness.

It’s become a theme of this column: options drive us mental.  Author of the wonderful book The Art of Choosing Sheena Iyengar makes this argument eloquently. She cites an Indian study comparing arranged marriages with love marriages. In the first year, love marriage couples cited more satisfying unions, but after ten years those in arranged marriages – where partners were chosen according to pragmatic qualities – were far more satisfied. The explainer: the latter were confronted with a “good” decision (albeit made by others) and then they simply committed (albeit in a culture where this is supported). Love grew from the decision and the commitment.  Simple! Or at least simpler. Iyengar makes one of my favourite sociological points: marrying for love is a modern concept, only about 400-500 years old. Prior to that we all married to get a job done. Then love grew.

I’ve talked to hundreds of people about this theme. It’s fun, fundamental stuff. I’m certainly not about to let Mum hunt me down a husband. I like the fact deciding to not marry is a great option. I also like to be reminded that simpler is better. And that sometimes what matters – and what piques our tear ducts with relief – is a bit of pragmatism, nobleness and making things work.

What do you reckon? Do we lack an ability to just decide and commit? Is it the times? Do we allow too many what ifs? Do we let “romantic love” rule things too much?

“It’s like we’re programmed to make life hard for ourselves.” The woman in front at the supermarket on Tuesday was apologizing for the complex plans she’d just made with her three boys to call when they got to the skate shop or text if they needed more time, but not at 4.45 when she was expecting a conference call, and not on her Blackberry number because it was flat. I was privy to the lot.

photo via lucky mag

“Whatever happened to ‘meet me outside the Post Office at five or I’m going without you’,” she said offloading her diet frozen meals and family-size bottles of multi-vitamins (no judgment!).

“I know,” I laughed. “I know.”

Overcomplicating life is what we do. And brilliantly so. Look what we’ve done to the simple act of eating – we follow more rules than ever. And yet we’re only getting pudgier. Me, I overcomplicate my weekends, my hand washing, my afternoon cup of tea. I’ll swirl a simple plan to meet a friend for a walk into a maelstrom of extra considerations and tasks.

I was chatting about this recently with a journalist. She pointed to our chaotic way of life and asked for my antidote. I was blunt. “Back the f*ck off,” I told her. Which was not a threat, but my uncomplicated answer. (Prefer a more palatable version? Do less. Get your grubby hands off it. Step back…)

This week I applied my BTFO thinking to an issue I reckon causes an overcomplicated amount of angst among us all: inbox organising. There’s only one thing more stressful than being bludgeoned with emails and that’s not having a system for filing and saving said emails. The fear we’ll need a record of a correspondence in the future sees our inboxes bulge and our heart rates rise.

Which is a fair fear. We are in fact expected to retrieve the commission rate agreed to in June 2009 and our Foxtel installation code from two apartments ago – and preferably in 30 seconds or less. Was it always like this? Can anyone remember how we disputed the price increase on the carpet cleaner’s invoice before the internet? Did it take weeks? Did we have immaculate filing? Did this kind of data retrieval fill us with dread?

I think it did. Which is why we’re now so paranoid about inbox organizing now. Folders is where the angst bottlenecks. David Allen has become one of the world’s best known productivity gurus off the back of his site Getting Things Done and his New York Times bestseller of the same name, both premised on attending to our fear of folder chaos. Ditto, the very popular business blog 43 Folders.

But working to my BTFO mantra, I’m here to proffer an easier way: don’t file, don’t save. Because technology is here to (finally) save us.

Yep, after years of adding rocket fuel to our overcomplicating tendencies, the web has evolved to back us. Literally. Windows 7 and Mac’s Spotlight now have such sophisticated search functions we can find anything that was ever typed on our computer without pain. Or folders.

Same with the internet. Have you noticed how Google can now guess what you’re looking for from just one or two key words? Or will find anything you’ve ever mentioned on Facebook or Twitter? No need to document who you dined with in August last financial year – it’s out there somewhere.

The upshot? You can – yes, deep breath – BTFO. Keep a bulging inbox. Or delete the lot. Be messy and disorganised. It’ll be OK.

Forget updating your address book, too. Instead, embrace the chaos of an unfoldered inbox as a searchable database. The bonus being you’ll always be digging up the most up-to-date details. Try it. I did this week and I felt an instant expansiveness.

You know, my favourite life-bettering theme is this idea of embracing chaos. Our efforts to order it fair, and exhaust us; far better to step into it and flow in the same direction. Also, technology is evolving to our chaos. It’s simply up to us, then, to let it back us more. Everything is already there, somewhere.

Which is a lot like life, really. And a lot like something a Zen philosopher would say. Do less. Get your grubby hands off it. Step back. (So long as you don’t forget to back up.)

You agree…we just need to BTFO?

Illustration by Lottie Frank

Poor Sreejesh got me so very wrong. During the week the charming and enthusiastic IT specialist from some outpost in India contacted me, trying to win some online business. He was doing well. Until he got to his sign-off. There, it was, alongside his name: “<3333333”.

First, the kid mistook me for someone who cared to know what his little flurry of key strokes meant. I Googled it and found it’s emoticon-speak for “lots of hearts” (turn your head on its side if you’re still stumped). Second, he signed off with hearts?!  We’ve never met, not even virtually.

We all know by now by now that technology is meant to be making us fat, dumb and boring. But I mostly think the rapidly shifting electronic world is making us confused, and so we do awkward things, like bag out our boss on Twitter etc, as we adjust.

It’s like the nascent stages of a sexual dalliance – we’re awkward and cringy until we get the hang of things. Which would make the fraught issue of electronic sign-offs the bra unhook – something we seem unable to ever master, despite the fact we’ve been on email for decades now.

The issue prompted me this week to have a good look at my own sign-off style. For years I’ve run an automatic signature at the bottom of my emails with the sign-off, “Be well, Sarah”. Which was highly efficient – if a little worthy – in that it saved me 12 whole characters every email. However it came unstuck the time I sent it to a work colleague dying of cancer. It was suddenly a terribly inappropriate command.

Worthy is wrong. So is whacky. I got hit with a “Be Fabulous, Annie” from someone (not called Annie) recently. My response was an immediate, no thanks, I’m not in the mood. “Best fishes” from someone who works in the aquatics business and “Zenfully” from the pushy dude wanting to sell me his 20-CD life changing program for $29.95 ***, also struck me as, well, insincere.

Ditto those coloured, blinking emoticons. The New York Times this month went to town on the growing use of the winking face in high-end business transactions.  Personally, the one with the sticking out tongue gets my goat. The point was made by one overuser interviewed for the article that emoticons soften the blow of her hurried, terse interactions. She tacks one on for good measure. Which is like spanking a kid as you hand them a lollypop.

And this is the point, isn’t it. If we’re awkward about our sign-offs, it’s because we’re awkward about how hurried and terse we’ve become with our interactions. A simple “Best, John” becomes the abrupt wrapping on a cranky offering. We fire off dozens – if not hundreds – of e-interactions a day and it hovers over us like Catholic guilt that we are not truly connecting or offering our warmth as we do. We’re giving too much of our time, but enough of our hearts (<333333).

So, how are we meant to sign-off? I think we can start by sending less, but more heart-felt (not heart emoticon-ed) missives. So that the tone is right – clear, mindful and careful – from the start. I’d hazard a guess: 33% of replies aren’t necessary and 66% of us would prefer no email at all to a flaccid, tongue-pokey (:-b) one.

Sometimes, though, we have to be perfunctory, right? In such cases, I have to say, I’m a fan of the “x” – just the one, and definitely not accompanied by an “o” (we kiss a colleague’s cheek, but we don’t cuddle, right?).

I’d been awkward about this “x” business, too, for some time. But it’s one of  those things – once you start, there’s no going back. An “x”-less sign-off seems cold.

Plus, I learned this week that the “x” is now largely acceptable. It’s so commonplace, even in the business community, that it hardly seems inappropriate, even when mailing strangers. Norman Mailer’s widow Norris recently shared that she always uses an “x”, but as a “placeholder”. Which is where the tradition stemmed from – an “x” was used in medieval times by the illiterate to signify where they’d “kissed” to seal the document in the absence of a signature.

But for now, think I’ll work with “Warmly, Sarah”. If only as a reminder to keep things that way, don’t you think? (“¯\_(ツ)_/¯”).

Am I on my own here? Have you struggled to be sincere and authentic in your frantic email correspondence? What do you go with?

photo via katespade.com

My life is often overlaid with a certain degree of mistimed chaos. Which means, from time to time, I’m forced to hitchhike.

Take Thursday. I was due at a meeting at 7.30am, but in timing my morning I failed to factor in that I’d sold my car the day before. Readers of this column might recall I often run as a form of transport. So off I set in my sneakers. However, halfway into town, I realized there was not a chance in a blue fit of making my meeting in time.

So I hitched. Some lovely old blokes – on their way in to town for a swim – stopped. They cracked retiree-like jokes about my being the best thing they’d picked up all morning, and I laughed. Because it was fun. And so I hitched home again.

The last time I hitchhiked I was running (literally, again) late for a ferry in Cronulla. Two pimply teens in a circa-1990 Holden Commodore picked me up. Much to my delight, the back seat was upholstered in the Union Jack and the entire cabin interior had been lined in the Southern Cross motif. The boys, apprentice boilermakers, had handstitched the vinyl stars on themselves. And they stopped to buy me an icecream because they thought I might be hungry.

Ensconced on my Australiana throne I was treated to the most enlightening insight into the Aussie male predicament. They were so likeable and open, I wanted to take them home with me, which, admittedly, is a little Ivan Milat-creepy.

You just don’t see so many hitchhikers these days. Which is something a few commentators have been lamenting of late. The nerdy commentators behind the  blog phenomenon Freakonomics outlined reasons for the decline earlier this month. The affordability of cars is one factor – even students no longer need to bum a lift. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a bit to do with it, too. Here, the Milat legacy really poured water on the thumbing of one’s ride.

Whenever I mention that I hitchhike, I’m met with the same response: “Don’t you worry about being murdered?” Nope. I don’t. I always have my phone with me and I just don’t meet that many murderers in the street. Do you?

I looked for stats on the matter – Australian Institute of Criminology researchers who compile the National Homicide Monitoring Report told me they have no record of deaths by hitching since 2008 (as far back as they were able to share records with me). You have a much higher chance of death by pretzel choke…or pretty much anything else.

Freakonomic’s Stephen Dubner echoes my thinking: what we fear most, he says, isn’t being macheted to death by a hitchhiker (or a hitchhiker picker-upperer). It’s strangers, period.

I find this sad. Because, really, strangers aren’t that scary (the Wall Street Journal reported recently that of the 20,309 children missing last year in the US, only one was taken by a stranger). Further, we crave contact with strangers. I’ve written before of the value of “consequential strangers” – we thrive on contact with our local barista, the scanner at IGA and the woman behind us in the bank queue, because we often learn from them and get excited about life in the randomness of the connection. I think we also crave strangers because of the dynamic of trust, and raw connection that this reaching out entails.

To keep my parents on their toes, when I was 23 I rode solo on a bike from Brisbane to Cairns. Again, sometimes I mistimed the distance to the next pub (where I’d sleep the night) and so I’d approach truckies at truckstops for a lift. Every time I was greeted with overflowing respect. Mostly, I think, because they liked being trusted, just as I liked giving them the gift of my trust (if that doesn’t sound too sappy).  Oh, the beaut blokes I met!

The hitchhiking legacy is all about stories that emerge from these trusted connections – Jack Kerouac, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin and Pearl Jam have all been inspired. Roald Dahl used hitchhiking to introduce eccentric characters into his fiction.

There are so few opportunities these days to connect like this, to penetrate a bit of fear and in doing so present others with the gift of our trust. I’m not selling hitchhiking to your daughters. But I do encourage a bit of diving into fear so we can emerge with more connected stories.

Do you hitch? Any fun stories of connection??

Photo by klaus pichler

It always surprises me when I come back as a “glass half full” type in aptitude tests because there are few people more down on positive thinking than me. I blame it on vision boards. Seriously, those silly craft projects geared at manifesting husbands and mansions really sullied the whole movement.

But there’s also this, and it’s something the psychology fraternity is coming around to: shape-shifting our thoughts – turning frowns upside down and all that jazz – takes too much energy. And seems pointless, in the wash of it all.

Recently in this magazine New York writer Sara Eckel wrote about her time in the single wilderness bombarded with those messages about sunnier-fying your outlook to attract the bloke. Eventually she found her bloke. Not because she shape-shifted, but because she simply met the right bloke, the one who loved her for her sometimes cloudy outlook.

Sure, it’s no fun dragging around a ball and chain. But nor is trying to turn said ball into a bunch of bouncy pink balloons.

What about simply mustering strength, picking up the damn ball and continuing forward, carrying it close to your chest?  Yes! Continuing forward!

Crudely, this is the gist of the “new wave”of behavioural therapy. Called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), it goes beyond the positive psychology model and gets us to accept (rather than challenge) our emotions via mindfulness exercises, and to commit to life by identifying and following our values. Dozens of controlled studies show ACT to be more effective than other form of therapy for everything from eating disorders to schizophrenia.

I’ve been following the literature on the movement for a while. I like its “let’s just get on with it” vibe and the way it acknowledges that our brains are hardwired not to change and that finding a more realistic “it is what it is” path is more fruitful. Ironically, leaning towards what counts, rather than getting bogged down in challenging emotions, seems so much more, well, positive. Or let’s say, enriched. Don’t you reckon?

But how do you find your values? Abraham Maslow said, it’s part of the human condition to not know what we truly want. I know I struggle. I get into that “safe” rut of being steered by what’s expected of me. My commitments call me and my addiction to my busy-ness fuel my actions and my values get sidelined.

So this week I got me some ACT therapy. I’ve been meaning to for a while. Australian psychotherapist Russ Harris and author of The Happiness Trap talked me through techniques to drill down to what really steers my compass.

I liked his Sweet Spot exercise:

“Conjure a moment where life felt great, where you were in your sweet spot.” For me it was a random moment during a solo mountain bike trip in the Blue Mountains. Sweaty, my bike shorts sagging in the chamois gusset, I’d lain down in a hot patch of gravel overlooking a valley. I can’t think of a moment where I felt more enriched. Harris got me to reflect on what mattered and what personal qualities I possessed in that moment. I was up high, away from the busy-ness of the city; I had perspective and wasn’t “sucked in”. I was dusty and boldly being myself.  In an impassioned babble I outlined succinctly what my values were:

authenticity, boldness.

Another set of exercises exposed several more:

giving a shit and “being my message”.

It surprised me how clearly they emerged. It also surprised me how much better – and enriched – I felt afterwards and how effortlessly my values guided my decisions the rest of the week. Did blogging about throw cushions adhere to my values? Did haggling for a better price on my car take me to that sweet, un-sucked-in-by-it-all spot?  This connection with my values saw me bound out of bed in the morning, fired up to do and contribute stuff that counted.

And to my mind that is what does count: contributing and continuing forward. I come back to this so often: We only have 85 years or so on this planet; let’s get on with living it.

Happiness is a meaningful, “leaning forward”  life, not one bogged down with being bouncy.

I know I tend to spark debate when I say I’m not such a big fan of happiness…are you a fan? Or do value matters more? How do you get in touch with yours? I’d love to know. These ACT exercises were really quite effective…

By mind on fire

So lately I’ve become increasingly distrustful of the overly certain.

When someone puffs out their chest at the head of a dinner table to emphatically declare climate change isn’t happening or that their son will grow up to follow Collingwood or that the only smoked small goods worth buying are from such-and-such-purveyor-of-such-things, it sets off alarm bells. Because nothing is certain any more. No one knows anything for sure.

We can’t be certain we’ll knock off work at 5 tomorrow or that we’ll be having Irish stew on Wednesday night or that our plane will turn up. The only certainty, beyond death, is uncertainty. Oh, and the fact that uncertainty in the world is on the up and up.

So when a leader or some blinkered commentator issues a black or white pronouncement these days I immediately think, “Hmmm, you’re sooo struggling with the inevitable anxiety of these doubtful times”. Far from giving them credibility, their surety comes across as cringefully out of step. As evolutionary epistemologist Jeremy Sherman wrote recently, today “self-certainty is weakly correlated with veracity.”

Uncertainty is the new fear. Twenty years ago we felt fear and did it anyway.

Now we accept we don’t know, and use this to humbly grow ourselves forward. 

Or at least we do if we know what’s good for us. The research shows, over and over, that uncertainty – or an ability to flow with it – goes hand in hand with true creative success. It’s the very act of being in the unknown that sees us strive to know more, and thus stumble upon fresh ideas.

What distinguishes the new entrepreneurs from the rest of us who sit back waiting for our “moment” is an appreciation that we can no longer wait for a perfect understanding of a situation before acting. As Jonathan Fields, author of new book Uncertainty, reasons, “The only time we have perfect understanding before launching into something is when it’s already been done before”.

I spoke to Fields this week. He became so fascinated by this new not-knowing that he studied hundreds of successful creatives to determine what they were doing differently, culminating in his book, published this month. What did he find? “Happy, successful entrepreneurs ritualize everything in their lives but their creative work.”

That is, they eat the same breakfast every day, at the same time, they wear the same clothes, they do their emails at the same (finite) time of the day and buy the same laundry powder. At every turn, they banalise the minutiae of their lives, taking out as much unpredictability as possible.

Which is to say, they dropped as many “certainty anchors” around them as possible. These myriad little kite strings of certainty form a “psychic bedrock”, says Fields, holding us firm so we can then fly creatively and take exciting, brave risks in our work. “We can work comfortably with uncertainty when we know we’re grounded and safe in the basic parts of our lives.”

It’s like Mr Squiggle – he can only do his crazy squiggles when he has Miss Jane there to grab his ankle and steadily drag him back to earth from one of his jangly space walks. “Oh Miss Jane, Miss Jane, thank you Miss Jane!”.

I come across this phenomenon repeatedly in this weekly journey to make life better. I mean, it was only the other week I observed that successful people eat boring breakfasts. And every single productivity guru I’ve met has told me they follow a strict morning routine. And I can now see why. These rituals serve as a Miss Jane to their inner Mr Squiggles. And they enable them to prioritise the important, productive uncertainties.

Chatting to Fields I became aware of how often my anxiety around uncertainty stalls me from creating freely. I also became aware of how much banal uncertainty I surround myself with – I’m always running late for flights, I chop and change my morning routine and can never get to bed at a regular hour. The two tendencies are clearly connected. I think I actively seek uncertainty because routine somehow seems boring. But Field’s angle on the issue shifts this. I can see now the worth of keeping the unimportant stuff safe and predictable and, ok, boring. It’s so my kite can soar high.

What are you like with fueling uncertainty in your life? Do it too much? Is it make everything less certain and less anchored?

Sometimes, in the course of writing this column, I come across a breed of self-helper I can only describe as disenchantingly full of it. Edward de Bono is one such (sorry to be so frank, Lateral Thinking fans). Then there are those who, well, I just can’t seem to put a finger on them – are they the real deal or do they simply have a book/webcast /workshop to flog?

Deepak Chopra, possibly the most well known mind-body and spirituality guru in the world, is one such.

I met Chopra during his recent Australian visit. He was running ludicrously on time. In fact two minutes early. And so, as I stood waiting to be greeted, he filled the 120 seconds tap-tapping wildly on his phone. When done, he immediately pointed out we’d spoken before. We had 18 months ago. How the hell did he remember? And what a bugger he did. Because back then I also struggled to get a grip of the guy, and so never wrote up the interview. I got the feeling he knew this, too.

I’d followed Chopra on Twitter, but had to unfollow him after a week – his updates were relentless and mind-boggling frenetic, passionate sprays at critics interspersed with conscious-raising inspira-bombs. Which, to my mind, jarred with his calm, centred, non-attached Perfect Health messages that I’ve always found so compelling in his books.

And I guess this is at the knobby kernel of my un-ease: how can the dude preach one thing and seem to live by another? Time magazine refers to Chopra as “a magnet for criticism” and he’s been embroiled in a swag of litigation cases with journalists, and countless barnies with scientists, most notably Richard Dawkins. In addition to the 60-plus books he’s published, the dozens of weekly videos, podcasts and articles he produces, he’s also run a (now folded) comic book line with Sir Richard Branson, and appeared in Mike Myer’s dire The Love Guru, a spoof of Chopra himself.

He toggles and travels and tweets and tends to be more attached to the outside world than any other identity I’ve come across.

See why I’m struggling here?

His most recent project is an interactive video game called Leela, launching November. It uses Kinect’s depth sensor technology to measure breathing to connect your mind and body and to guide gamers through their seven chakras. I experience Leela when we meet and I’m mesmerized. It’s a game, sure. But there’s no winning; you must chill, not kill to progress. It’s play as it should be – playing with your intuition and energy to go deeper into yourself. As you guide yourself down chakra tunnels you simply can’t use your mind – you have to use mindfulness instead – and I feel myself drop into my heartspace just watching on. “Why video games,” I ask. He tells me his mission is to accelerate our biological evolution. And he says this is done by a collective “muscle building” of our minds. Quite a claim! But something about the calm and certain way he says it has me trust his intent.

Then I have to ask it. I blurt it: “How do you do it all?” As in all the frenetic activity. He issues this wisdom, with a wry smile: “My body travels. I never leave home.”

This week I reflected on Chopra’s words. I’m sure you take them as I did: he fleets and frazzles, but keeps his consciousness firmly grounded. He can take part in a Mike Myer’s movie and respond personally to hundreds of followers a week on Twitter without feeling sucked in by the vampirish energy of it.

I like the idea. Becoming more conscious and grounded doesn’t have to mean removing yourself from the general frazzle-ness of life. You can do both. It’s not a revolutionary concept, but Chopra’s particular slant hits home for me. On Friday I head off on a business trip, which I’m resenting because I know it will tire me. But seeing it as a suffering that only my material body will endure makes it more approachable. Ditto the tedious task of responding to a bunch of emails that sit before me. My material self goes there, I don’t.

To my mind, though, living a non-attached life is about reducing stressors, not fueling them. I suggest this to Chopra as I leave. But he’s already back to his phone.

Do you agree about reducing stressors? Yasmin Boland had some thoughts on this…she felt that it’s about accepting the stressors. I think we need to do both. Actively and consciously and responsibly. There are simply too many to sit back and do a whole lotta accepting.