This week in Sunday Life I use my hands (which, admittedly, when coupled with this picture below, reads a little wrong!)

As kids, my brothers and I had a ritual. In the school holidays we’d sit on the back step with an ice cream bucket full of kero, a few rags and an old toothbrush and clean our bikes. We’d pull apart the hub and crank set and clean out our BMXs and mountain bikes right down to the ball bearings. Crud. There is little more satisfying than sitting in the sun picking crud from a rear cluster, I tell you.

When done we’d go for a test ride. Oh, the smoothness! It was joy on two wheels. We’d revel in our handiwork for days. Poor Mum. She must’ve turned inside out with the tedium of our post-mortem gloating.

Nowadays I get a similar kick from making my own mung bean sprouts. The soaking and sprouting takes three days. I become a helicopter parent, fussing over the sweet little things, perfecting technique, trying new approaches. Sometimes I just stare at them as they sleep. When done I’m so damn proud and, can I tell you, they taste unfathomably better than the packaged versions. I tell everyone. I post the results on Twitter. Look what I made! (Don’t get me started on my recent fire lighting efforts.)

Since no experience these days is left unphenomenon-ised I wasn’t surprised to learn this week my crud-scraping and bean-sprouting passion has a name. Harvard Business Review has dubbed the phenomena The IKEA Effect.

This week in Sunday Life I break the Catch-22 bind

Back when I used to work stupidly long hours in a normal office job I would spy people on my way to meetings sitting at cafes – on a Tuesday, at 11am – and I’d think, “How do they have the time? What have they got right that I haven’t?”.

Your sun-basking, Sudoku-doodling café lingerer might be the neighbour who gets to a 5pm yoga class each week, or the friend who can spontaneously take a long weekend when the weather turns nice.

“How do they have time?” you cry out, half in envy, half in contempt. How come they got their life so sorted?

Recently I was invited on a meditation retreat. The idea of withdrawing from life – from email, laptops and planning dinner each night – for five days is something I fantasise about. I have an image: people who go on meditation retreats have interiors magazine-ready homes and organised spice racks and cherubic blonde children and wear leather-soled shoes. You see (my logic goes), they have their life sorted.

So they’re able to.

Personally, I don’t know that my life will ever be sorted. And I’ll never have blonde kids. So this week I took the plunge, left my iphone at home, and signed up to the retreat. Regardless.

Goodness. You’d think I was heading off to Siberia. Or whatever other outpost where Vodafone doesn’t have coverage. Of course, it coincided with my busiest period all year. Sitting in the hall with a dozen others, I fretted as my brain slowed to a blunt, foggy stop. It rained outside. I clung with white knuckles. But eventually I had to give in to the atrophy.

On day three the following occurred to me. Have you read Catch-22? I haven’t. I think it was a real early “70s thing when people had time for holidays and dense reads. But I know the gist. A bomber pilot wants to quit his job due to the inherent dangers. But he’s denied because the fact he understands the danger means he’s sane, and only mad pilots can be relieved. So he has to keep flying, even though it’s insane to do so.

This week in Sunday Life I get deliberately vulnerable

Illo by Erik Marinovich

I love the number three. It’s a thing (as they say on Twitter, preceded by a “hashtag”). When things come in threes – three knock-backs, three mentions of the same person in a week – I’ve learned to take note. And something always comes of it. There’s nothing particularly woo-woo about this predilection. I’m a wary, hesitant person – it takes three strikes, generally, for me to notice and trust something, and then to act.

This week University of Houston scientist Brene Brown told me she’s a three kind of a kid, too. Of course, I got around to watching Brown on TED.com only after three people mentioned her to me. Her talk on vulnerability has since become one of the most popular TED presentations ever. And so I contacted her to see if I could interview her for this column on Skype. And whattayaknow, she replied immediately to say she was due in Sydney the very day I was also going to be in town.

Woo-woo? Or just weird? Whatever. We met.

Can I just say, I was more excited about meeting Brown than anyone I’ve encountered in my weekly journey for this column. Three hands down. Brown’s spent eight years studying thousands of people to determine how best to live a wholehearted life.

It drills down to this:

This week in Sunday Life I quit arguing

via powrightbetweentheeyes

If I had my time again I wouldn’t have asked Dad’s permission to see Nightmare on Elm Street 4 when I was 15, thus spending the next five weeks arguing why he was wrong to say no. I would’ve just gone, like my friends did.

At a guess, I spent approximately 11/15ths of my teenage years arguing My Point to my parents. Which handed my five younger siblings incredible unscrutinsed freedom to do what they liked. They – wisely – took the line, that I only learned much later in life while working for Kerry Packer, “Don’t ask for permission, know how to beg for forgiveness”.

It’s an interesting point to explore right now. Because, frankly, everyone seems to be arguing to flaccid effect. If you’re not throwing the remote at journalist Andrew Bolt’s head on the telly, you’re throwing it at Dick Smith’s or Gwyneth Paltrow’s or Lord Monckton. And Federal politics has descended into a My Point-scoring scrum. One where the ball was lost long ago. It’s like we’re all standing in front of my dad. I say this, because my dad was supreme at not relenting to Another Point.

A Gen Zer asked me at a Coal Seam Gas rally the other day if there was any point to arguing. A Gen Yer wouldn’t have asked such a question. They’re the quintessential younger sibling in the equation (with Gen Zers a sort of second-rounds eldest child). I took on his question quite seriously (as Gen Xers do; we also still attend rallies) and this week explored it further.

Dispiritingly, a lot of the research dedicated to the topic finds arguing a point doesn’t work. Worse, it leads to what has been dubbed “The Backfire Effect” by US researchers.

This week in Sunday Life I smile

Recently reader Richard wrote to say he didn’t like that in the photos of me as a kid (I believe he’d been Facebook-stalking my family albums) I’m always scowling. Well, thank you Dick for noticing such a detail. And, heck, you’re right! I’ve always hated having my picture taken. I’m sure, Dick, you know what I mean when I say, it just feels so dumb smiling at a camera.

you'd frown too...

But then, lo, smiling at cameras became an occupational hazard (see below). Which was how I learned something quite interesting about smiling.

This week in Sunday Life I try “infinite altruism”

There’s something special about His Holiness the Dalai Lama, if I can be permitted such an obviousism. Something disarming. It’s the way he answers questions like, Is being gay OK? His response to a journalist once makes me smile: “I will ask ‘What is your companion’s opinion?’. If you both agree…then it is okay’”.  It’s the way he quietly takes off his shoes while presenting to 3000 people and sits with his brown fluffy-socked feet tucked under him, as he did during his recent visit.

On Friday I met His Holiness for the third time. Each visit I’ve expected it to be a bit like Christmas – all build-up, then more of the same.

But he gets me every time.

This visit I asked if it’s better to pursue happiness or altruism. He wagged a finger at me: “Altruism! Because altruism is the easiest, fastest way to be happy.” Infinite altruism, he said was his life goal. Every morning after waking at 3.30am he consciously offers his “body and mind to the purpose of others”.

“This is what brings me my joyfulness,” he said rather significantly.

This week in Sunday Life I’m strategically incompetent

by Kyle Alexander

Confession: I get off on productivity porn.

I’m only a recreational voyeur, mind.  Late at night, in the lonely privacy of my bedroom, I like to peruse sites like 43Folders and Getting Things Done (GTD) e-courses, you know, to see how other people “File Tax Receipts in 5 Easy Steps” or “Focus like Steve Jobs, Now!”. But, I’m not a full subscriber. I mean, I’m no productivity pervert. Some of that Extreme Colour-Coding Your To-Do List stuff can get pretty gonzo!

Anyway, as a “productivity connoisseur”, I’ve noticed the biggest issue in this murky neck of the interweb right now is “waiting for” items. If you’re a productive list-making type you’ll know the list system comes unstuck once a task requires follow-up from a second party. For example, to get your report completed you need a statistic from a colleague. You email them requesting the data and delete this task off your to-do list. Done! Because you trust the item is now headed for the other person’s to-do list. BUT – oh dear – if said colleague isn’t a list person and doesn’t follow up, then the task disappears into the unproductive ether, un-accounted for Un-ticked!

“Waiting for” items drive me to distraction. They leave me in a permanent state of “there’s something I’ve forgotten”-ness. Only to interrupt me in the middle of a shower (and I have to bolt out, dripping wet, to my to-do list: “chase bloody Roger about that invoicing issue”). It’s frustrating. Doubly so because the fact the other party feels completely entitled to let a task slip so easily, while we remain vigilant, is …unfair.

So this week I set out to find a salve to such a quandary. I scrolled my favourite sites and found two ways out.

In Sunday Life this week I confront my racism

If you’re not born of a racial minority, are comfortably middle-class and you catch taxis then you might identify with this scenario. On Monday I climbed into a Melbourne taxi. “Airport please.” The Sudanese driver was playing Middle Eastern music and spoke basic English. He grunted in reply.

Now, you might class me a small-L liberal (latte-sipping, bike-lane hogging, broadsheet-toting) multiculturalist. Which means I probably wouldn’t admit to having a particular “take” on this gentleman. Or his culture. Of course not.

Which is why at the lights when he unwinds his window and yells excitedly in Arabic with his African mate in the next taxi I’m only mildly put out. I ask him what they were discussing. “Football!” he says with a massive grin. “I’m Western Bulldogs, my little sons Western Bulldogs fans. He’s Hawthorn.” He punches the air and cackles happily.

Immediately my heart swelled. And I was flooded with all kinds of sappy jingoism – isn’t Australia incredible! He can barely speak English, but he’s adopted one of our passions. How wonderful! A reaction that served to blatantly expose the – ughhh! – prejudiced, threatened “take” I’d had when I first jumped in his taxi.

This week in Sunday Life I make peace with annoyances

by Neil Stewart

I’m a very annoy-able person.  A lot of things annoy me. Here’s a small sample: sniffing, loud chewing (the type Americans do in sitcoms when in heated discussions at diners), mid-90s ozonic perfumes, when the person sitting next to me on the plane keeps brushing my elbow, people who don’t reuse their paper cup at water fountains and slow walkers on narrow paths.

And that’s just the scab on the wound. I have a deep gash worth of stuff that gives me the irits.

Actually, the word “irits” gives me the irits. In the same way “I’ll do it in a mini” does.

But the most annoying thing of all is that I’m so annoy-able. Such things really shouldn’t annoy me. And this annoys me further. And so down the spiral we tumble.

During the week I chatted with Flora Lichtman, coauthor of the new book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us. Her pet annoyance is people clipping their nails on the subway (who knew!?). Indeed, having a guy next to her do so one morning prompted the book.

Lichtman identifies three factors that make something annoying. It’s unpleasant. It’s also unpredictable.

This week in Sunday Life: I try the “wilderness effect”

On Thursday I woke up antsy. Sometimes we just do, don’t we. It’s the wind, the moon….the half bottle of wine we drank the night before. Whatever.

by RJ Shaughnessy

I’d had a cold for days and I felt as stale as a pair of pyjamas that have been slept in too long.  And just to add to the blah-ness I had to go buy eggs. So I fired myself up, tied on my hiking shoes, grabbed $5 and headed bush. I decided to travel the 5km into town (for the eggs) cross-country – through two farms and a national park, which Google Maps indicated has no walking trails or roads.

Which sounds quaintly Famous Five in theory. But things wound up with me stuck in a quagmire. Literally. The trail-less park turned out to be a swamp and about 2km in I was up to my knees in it, lost and stuck. I sunk back on a mangrove tree in a little sunny patch, picked off a few leeches and thought, Sarah, what are you doing?

I can only say I was trying to de-blah.