A week is a funny time.

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“We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.”

— Solvej Balle

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Sunday night, I arrived back in Berlin from a few days in Athens. It had been an unusual few days, hard to summarise beyond having been at a kind of conference for organisations and businesses seeking to make the world a better place, that left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed and - perhaps - deepened my cynicism about the systemic issues in the world.

I’d had a lovely few days, though, mainly because one of my closest friends was a speaker there and hosted an event involving fifteen respected philosophers. He’d kindly given me his free guest ticket too, which meant I felt a little churlish grumbling about the event.

We had several long and unencumbered stretches of time together, the kind that is rare amongst middle-aged adults, even rarer amongst fathers. We did nothing in particular other than walking around the city and chatting, covering a wide range of high and low brow territory that amused us both. This, I think we are both aware, is a great joy and one that our friendship is built upon.

I’d missed my wife and son while I was away, too, feeling their absence more acutely after an extended trip in the UK to see family, and that invited an unfamiliar short-term loneliness in me. So I was arriving home with several kinds of dissonance.

On Monday, I was unusually delighted to get up early with my son, who sprinted and clung to me when I opened his bedroom door. However hackneyed it may seem, it’s a special kind of joy to receive that unbridled love. I made some toast for him, coffee for me, and we read books, cuddled up together until Lucy, my wife, woke and came into the kitchen.

After she took our son to kita, I realised I was quite exhausted and I did little for the rest of the day, except some exercise and replying to a few messages that needed my attention. I fell into a familiar trap of choosing to have a slower working day, yet not properly taking time to rest or for leisure, so found myself frustrated at having idly sat at my desk for most of the day, caught between two worlds and not committed to either of them.

Later in the day, Lucy noted that I had come back from my trip with a renewed openness and sense of relaxation, which I felt to be true whilst also feeling a lingering and general despondency.

By Tuesday, I felt the openness fading, and I was in a tussle with my inertia. I was up early with my son again and greedily pleased to receive a similar sort of excited welcome in the morning.

I replied to a few more messages, including one informing me of the postponement of a talk I was due to deliver next week. An artistic project that I’ve been collaborating on for a few months reached an exciting point, with the arrival of actual physical artefacts from the printers.

In the afternoon, I had a good call with someone about running a men’s retreat later this year. I’d promised myself a nap afterwards, but ended up going for a run instead.

I spent a fair amount of time reading long-form analysis of El Niño and the conflict in the Middle East, which only deepened my certainty that very tough times lie ahead. For a brief period, how to actually respond to it all felt somewhat clear to me.

Once again, I found myself exhausted at the end of the day. The novel I’m currently reading reached a very sad point, one I knew was coming but nonetheless caught me off guard.

Wednesday felt the hardest. Despite sleeping well, I woke feeling physically tired and needed to muster some motivation. There was a less enthusiastic morning greeting from my son, to which I felt a trace of disappointment and then needy and ungrateful.

In the morning, Lucy and I had a great call with someone from a well-known and interesting cultural organisation about doing a workshop for them, with quite an exciting brief. We went to our local cafe for coffee afterwards, which ended with a short argument about our approach to the work, and that itself led to what felt like some important clarity.

At lunchtime, I was part of a small group gathered by a philosopher friend of mine for a dialogue about our response to the world, which felt incredibly timely. We shared deeply personal stories and perspectives, eventually coalescing around a theme for our inquiry together over the next few weeks. It felt easy and needed, offering some slightly different provocations for me.

Just after that, I had a call with a potential coaching client, which felt quite choppy. I had a sense the person wanted support with their current predicament, but was resistant to what coaching actually entailed, although I was pleased to actually name this quite clearly.

By the end of the afternoon, I felt in quite a funk, drained in all senses. The clarity I’d felt the day before about responding to world events felt precarious and uncertain. Between various other things, my wife and I messed up dinner plans, and although we always have leftovers in the freezer for easy midweek dinners, I left it too late to eat before joining a group call, the current men’s Circle I’m co-facilitating, so I joined feeling quite grumpy and hungry.

I also arrived feeling heavy and a little flustered, although grateful that it was exactly the sort of space I could be open about that. An hour and a half later, I left, as I often do, feeling a great sense of lightness from the intimate and honest conversation we shared as a group of men.

The theme of friendship had thrown up an unexpected memory of a childhood friend, Daniel, who I first met in primary school. Our very first encounter was him using a racial slur towards me, and yet we somehow became best friends for a couple of years.

He had a troubled family situation, was obviously fiercely intelligent even at that age, and had a sense of danger about him that I was drawn to. We eventually drifted apart, and then he moved away. Years later, I heard from someone else that he’d ended up sleeping rough in London and had died of a drug overdose.

I hadn’t thought about Daniel for a very long time, maybe a decade or more. After our call ended, I spent a little while searching online trying to find some trace of him but just as the last time I’d thought of him, my search yielded nothing. If his life had ended back then, it was a few years before widespread internet, online news and social media.

I slept heavily and woke this morning to my son pulling my eyelids open. Although I really didn’t want to get up, I couldn’t suppress a smile at his antics, which made him laugh and pull my eyes open even more, so any prospect of a lie-in vanished then. As we headed into the kitchen, Lucy was whispering at him to give me an envelope, which he did whilst simultaneously trying to open it.

I was still sleepy and quite confused when I finally opened the card, which was a mock-up of our family as my son’s favourite book characters (my face appeared on the head of a yak). It was a Father’s Day card which caught me off guard as I had no idea it was today in Germany.

After my morning essentials (meditation and coffee), Lucy went to a yoga class, and my son and I found ourselves alternating between Lego and rolling around on the floor. When Lucy returned, we headed out to a surprise destination which turned out to be a charming restaurant in a villa, next to a picturesque park, that had the feeling of an old British pub (complete with heavy rain outside).

Perhaps still in a state of fatigue, I merely shrugged and agreed when my wife noted how strange it was that we’d been given a table for six. Five minutes later, her cousin, who we consider part of our family, arrived, which was a welcome surprise. Five minutes after that, two close friends and their baby daughter arrived too, and it dawned on me that we were having a Father’s Day lunch, which felt somewhat new and very nice at the same time.

The rain had stopped by the time we finished lunch so we spent the rest of the afternoon ambling around the park. My son climbed rocks and trees, and I enjoyed holding our friends’ baby and helping her to clamber onto a small boulder.

We headed home, weary but full in every sense, and after dinner I replied to a couple of messages that had some urgency to them. Tomorrow, we may or may not go to an art gallery. For now, my sense of needing to prepare for impending doom has dissipated, but no doubt it will return at some point.

It’s been quite a week, but in reality, no different to any other week.

How’s yours been?

“I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.”

— Parker Palmer

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

[main image from my morning run towards the Acropolis in Athens]