Sarah Wilson

This week I meet Edward de Bono, the world’s most well-known thinker.

So, it’s arranged we meet at an outdoor swimming pool on Friday morning. Which is a little odd. Edward De Bono, the world’s greatest thinker, is 75 and arrives with his aide, wearing a full suit and a superbly garish tie. He’s not here to swim. Odder still, he kicks off by grabbing my hand, leaning in close and telling me a really, really terrible… penis joke. The kind your Uncle Kevin tells at Christmas. He then suggests I marry a 6’4” Ugandan basketball player. Which, according to his aide, is what he tells all the girls.

Admittedly the penis joke loosely segued to the theme of happiness. Which is why we’re sitting poolside on a Friday. De Bono’s in Australia to talk at the Happiness & It’s Causes conference this week about how thinking makes life better. Me, I’m enduring penis jokes to ask, how so?

This week I don’t drink bottled water (actually, I haven’t drunk the stuff for several years, but I’m kinda ensconced in this “look what I happened upon this week” theme…so let’s just ride it for now).

Recently I aborted a liaison with a guy because he didn’t recycle. To be fair (to me?), it wasn’t that he didn’t recycle per se. It was the reasoning he gave for why he felt entitled to leave the carrying out of one’s tuna tins to the communal bins to everyone else. “If I start,” he moaned. “Then where do I stop?“ What he meant was, if I give a shit about my cans, won’t it just open a Pandora’s box of care from which there’s no turning back? A life of cutting plastic windows from envelopes, keeping a bucket in the shower and hypermilling? Won’t it set in train the collapse of the whole merry house of cards? Yes, yes, my friend, it will.

All of which is a loose segue to a subject I’ve been busting to cover: bottled water, and how quitting it makes life better.

Drinking bottled water complicates life. It clutters flow with needless stuff.

This week I embrace my “consequential strangers”

Down the road from my place is one of those cheap nail bars with the vibrating vinyl chairs and wall-mounted TVs that’s always screening Dr Phil. I’m not a fancy nail person; I tear or chew mine. But one of my Favourite Things To Do In The Whole World is to go in for a $25 pedi, merely to take part in the funny human vibe of this place.

I love it. There you have Lena and her extended family from Vietnam buzzing with the efficiency of drone bees and bossing around the well-heeled, alpha-female PR executives and eastern suburbs wives who frequent the joint, telling them to choose their polish colour faster and berating them for putting their shoes on too early.

Gorgeously, it’s a social contract that suits everyone.

This week I unitask (albeit unsuccessfully)

Dear Reader, I think it’s time I stepped down from the lofty stead upon which I’m often perched on this page. And be honest with you. As I write I have nine screens open on my computer, which I’ve been toggling between incessantly as I research this column, as well as email and Skype. I’ve just ridden into my office while listening to lectures on my ipod from the nutrition course I’m studying by correspondence. This was after I returned three calls while hanging out my washing. I only ever seem to return calls on washing day.

In short, I have not been unitasking.  Which, given the scope of this column, makes me a tedious fraud. Lump me, if you will, in the same basket where I like to put snooty hippies and spiritual materialists.

Worse, as I share my ludicrous multi-tasking ways with you I find myself feeling superior. Which women of my generation tend to do when it comes to multitasking. We brag we can find the butter in the fridge. And define ourselves by our ability to juggle kids’ breakfast bickerings and Blackberrys and oversized Starbuck coffees. While men – the poor things – struggle to tie their shoelaces and stick their tongue out at the same time.

But my failure this week in testing a life-bettering technique shouldn’t stop me from sharing with you the virtues of unitasking (as researched across eight screens). By way of an abstract, multitasking doesn’t work. Full. Stop. 

This week I share how I take Thursdays off. I call it a Clear Day. A day for floating…

If you were to put your ear to the ground and listen carefully, this is what the Zeitgeist would rumble back at you: right now, in 2010, we’re feeling like little canoes thundering down a gorge. Every iota of us wants to paddle over to one of the placid little pools that we glimpse in our flurry downstream. So we can get our breath and check we’re heading down the right river. But we keep getting swooped into the current (nagging emails, to-do detritus), don’t we. Or thrown a series of rapids (late parking fees to pay, kids’ tuba lessons). And so the calm pool of reflection eludes us.

You know, it’s not so much that we yearn less work or less responsibilities. Self-help types often get this wrong. Mostly, if you listen to the hum and drum of the collective, we yearn more space between the work and responsibilities, from which to prioritise and appreciate.

This week I find my “right reason”…and get a little faith.

On Tuesday I sat with Mitch Albom. Which is lovely and fitting, really, because Mitch wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, a book about how he spent Tuesdays sitting with a bloke called Morrie. Not read it? Well, Morrie is Mitch’s former teacher and is dying. Mitch is a sports journo from Detroit. Each week Mitch visits Morrie who, as he faces death, shares his compassionate insights with Mitch. The end. Or thereabouts.

Much like when I look at a Splade or a pair of Crocs, I’ve often wondered what possesses someone to spend years of their life creatively and myopically dedicated to something that, on paper, isn’t exactly a commercial shoo-in. I mean a book of wisdoms by a dying teacher and a sports hack…who was he kidding? Indeed, countless publishers knocked the book back.

But perhaps you know what comes next. Tuesdays with Morrie was finally published in 2000 for a modest fee. It became the biggest selling memoir in history. And Mitch has sold a whopping 28 million books since.

So the question I put to Mitch: what kept him writing?

This week I hire a Virtual Assistant in India (and, no, the picture below has nothing to do with Virtual Assistants, or India, but is an image of what I’d like to have more time for once I’ve successfully delegated stuff I hate doing ).

I tell you, VAs are the PTs of the new millennium. Ten years ago we took to delegating our weight loss to personal trainers. Soon enough they became part of the fabric of life, popping up at clients’ dinner parties and dating their friends. Now it’s all about delegating our administrative clutter to a remote assistant. Or so I’m learning.

Every productivity guru and self-help blog I encounter advocates hiring one of these faceless helpers to coordinate travel itineraries, answer emails and organise the kids’ swimming lessons…all from a cubicle in Bangalore.

Admittedly I don’t know anyone in Australia who uses a VA. I think it’s because we feel quite puncy offloading our detritus to others. I mean, who admits to having a pool cleaner?

This week I “Be Sarah” (which may or may not involve rolling around in bed in luxurious knits)

I have this problem. I’m a really bad party-goer. I can’t seem to stay at them, and my personality grinds to a glazed-over halt whenever I’m forced to. Standing in restrictive going-out garb on a Friday or Saturday night, being shouted at in my left ear by booze-addled, distracted people is my idea of purgatory.

Over the years I’ve developed some unique tricks to circumvent them.  I ride my pushbike to nightclubs – in heels and the full regalia – so I can make easy, and early, getaways. Or I arrange to meet friends beforehand for dinner and then rack off at ten to leave everyone to whoop their way into the night without me.

I’ve always wished I could party. I’ve persisted at them for years. But recently – and it took years of rubbing the cat’s fur the wrong way to get to this juncture – I’ve worked out that parties and me, well, we’re a square peg and a big round hole.

It’s funny. I’ve been on this search for “a better life” for some time and it’s involved slaying through all manner of gnarly resistance and ego-protecting armour.  It’s been exhausting. But, frankly, not as exhausting as living with the resistance, as many of us do. We do stuff daily that grates with our true selves – go to gyms, meet the same toxic friends for brunch each month and remain in cul-de-sacd careers – often for decades. Such sustained disconnect eventually renders us unable to access our true selves, to know what we really like.

But this week I stumbled upon advice that addresses this pervasive issue head-on. American writer Gretchen Rubin started a “Happiness Project” blog two years ago and it’s now a New York Times bestselling book. I got an advance copy this week and leaping from page 10 was this salient lesson: “Be Gretchen”. As in, “Be [insert your own name here]’”.

Gretchen worked out she didn’t like doing stuff everyone else found “fun”, and that happiness was about embracing her Gretchen-ness and doing what she liked doing, such as reading kids’ books and collecting bluebirds. She won’t ever be the kind of crazy cad to jet off to Paris or go to a jazz club at midnight. Which makes her sad. But it’s just not her.

As she laments, “you can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do”. Which is just so damn true; I think I’ll make it my email signature.

walking up mountains and wearing beanies is very ME

Sure, but how do you work out what you like doing so you can then go about doing it? The gazillion-dollar question, right? Gretchen advises thinking back to what you liked doing as a kid. Which is very Jungian and fine if you can recall a time when you weren’t trying to fit in to the collective’s idea of fun.

Me, I thought the challenge could be tackled by signing on to a dating site. Not to date, but to go through the process of filling out the questionnaires that ask you what you like to read, how you like spending weekends and what kind of person you’d like to love you. Yep, odd, but I figured it was a nifty way to be forced to consider what it is that makes me me. There’s nothing like knowing you’re about to be judged by thousands of strangers to hone your attention. And to ensure you get the sales pitch right.

So this is what I came up with. I don’t like drinking pina coladas, hen’s days, going to malls on weekends, taking photos when travelling (it disrupts the flow; I punished myself for years trying to capture my holidays because “that’s what you’re meant to do”), organized sports, car chase movies or lying by pools. I like dinner parties, grilled figs, adrenalin-fuelled solo sports and talking in tents. When I got stuck on a question (what do you prefer, adventure or DVD nights?) I visualized myself doing the activity. If it appeared in colour it was “me”, in black and white it wasn’t, and indicated resistance.

The final chapter in this experiment, of course, is to start living out your preferences. Which takes practice, and fighting the urge to revert to work or “duty” when it gets a bit hard. As Gretchen says, you have to schedule time for fun. Me, I generally find Friday and Saturday these days pretty free.

This week I travel lightly

In the next two weeks I have to travel to Africa, Perth, the Gold Coast and Melbourne for work and a wedding. My feet are already puffy and my olfactory bulb awash with the carby stench of inflight fruit buns in dreaded anticipation.

I hate travelling. Years ago I loved the world of complimentary acrylic travel socks and miniature soaps. And I once cited “playing Tetris on long-haul flights” as one of my favourite pastimes. But novelty fades. And now I find being in transit unnerving; my whole system (my bowels, my sleep) grinds to a halt in protest. However, given this is a travel issue and my brief with this column is to come up with better ways to do life, I was compelled this week to find a cheery slant to the caper.

Making travel as efficient as possible is one approach. In blogland, countless sites are dedicated to this pursuit. Onebag.com shares tips on the best way to pack a Samsonite.  Airlinemeals.net meal-spots plane food so you can plan your airborne dining. You’ll never be caught off guard by creamy cauliflower again! Tripit.com gets most travel pundits totally frothing. Email through all your pesky flight, hotel and car hire confirmations and – whoosh! – Tripit magically consolidates them into one itinerary.

This week I reclaim my Sunday

Sundays are sad. So says a Swedish study just out. It found the Sabbath the most depressing day of the week because (and I just love how big, important studies have an uncanny knack for pointing out the bleeding obvious) it’s the day before school and work starts. It also found the mood plunge is particularly profound among married couples and East Germans. (I could venture a theory on this, but I fear it’d only make things bleaker.)

Me, I’ve often found Sundays mood-sinky. When I was a kid, they were Dickensian-grim. As the sun set and the dam snap-froze over for the night, Dad would haul me and my brothers out to the back paddocks to chop wood for the week. Then Mum would line us up on the verandah to scrub knees and cut toenails. We’d catch the last bit of The Wonderful World of Disney before dinner. Then bed, the dread of first period clinging to us, prickly and restrictive like a Fair-Isle jumper in the rain.

As adults, you’d think we’d find a way to address this. To make Sundays sunnier. I know some people head to the pub on Sunday nights by way of a final hoorah to the weekend. This was a fad for a while and I hear it put off the inevitable quite effectively.

But I’ve noticed more recently that Sundays have taken on a panicky, catch-up quality. There’s not enough time in the week to get everything done. Certain tasks – wading through long emails, finishing that advisory report, filling out health insurance forms  – can’t get done in the Monday-Friday flurry. So we set aside “just a few hours” on Sunday afternoon to “get on top of things”.