What your wild heart needs.

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“Death is no longer as imminent as it was in medieval times: we scarcely see its face or talk about it, and we imagine living long into our distant eighties or nineties. As a result our awareness of the rare value of existence has been diminished, and with it the ability to immerse ourselves in the present and suck all the marrow from life. We busy our brains with future plans and anxieties and find ourselves tolerating tedious jobs and watching hours of television. It is as if we are waiting around for the moment when our real lives will begin. The prospect of death no longer drives us to savour the human adventure.”

— Roman Krnazic

After my son was born three years ago, sleep became a rare and precious commodity. It is so valuable that my wife and I began to guard it jealously, including from each other. Most of the arguments we had in that first year revolved around sleep, one way or another.

Our lives have been reconfigured around sleep without us knowing it. Dinnertimes for us as a family, bedtimes for our son, choices about whether to go out in the evening, planning when and how we travel. We don’t watch much TV, but when we do, the choice is often determined by how long something is - anything over half an hour makes me suck my teeth.

Sleep has become a kind of religion in our household, our worship true yet erratic, and our lapses in reverence regularly punished by the angry gods of sleep. We are rarely fully rested and never at the same time as each other. The sleep gods keep us in desperation and need.

So to willingly give up sleep whilst feeling chronically under-rested requires something extraordinary, something that occupies the rare space of being entirely optional yet feels urgent. I found just that thing on a fly poster opposite our local park.

It was promoting an annual midsummer 10k run that takes place in a park in north-west Berlin, timed to coincide with sunrise. A vague memory floated back to me, of a friend who had mentioned this to me a few years ago, before my son was born, and sleep became a perennial obsession. The way she’d described it sounded like a lot of fun.

I looked at the poster again. The run started at 4.42 am. Allowing enough time to brush my teeth and an hour to travel there and drop off my bag, I’d need to get out of bed at around 3 am.

Something tugged at me, some deep appeal to be outdoors, moving as the sun rose over my shoulder, witnessing dawn give way to day.

On the other hand, it sounded absurd given I was so fatigued that I’d sometimes lie on the floor of my home office for ten minutes in the middle of the morning.

I went back and forth like this for a couple of days, all the while knowing I’d sign up eventually. So I did. I paid my entry fee, put it in the calendar and told my wife. She smiled in a way that said: “Good for you, you mad fool.”

I began to look forward to it, a familiar old anticipation of adventure, however small a sliver it might be. A challenge, a test, a break from something that I didn’t know I needed.

Then, a few days before the run, the event was postponed due to an infestation of poisonous moths in that particular park. The risk too great, apparently. I was crestfallen - until it occurred to me that I didn’t need an organised event to do this.

I thought about the best places in Berlin to watch the sun rise, and the answer was quite obvious: Drachenberg, an artificial hill in the west of Berlin that overlooks the city, and sits next to Teufelsberg (Devil’s Hill) with its iconic abandoned CIA listening station. It is about an hour’s cycle from home, meaning I could be there for sunrise and back before Lucy and Ren woke up.

“What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”

— George Mallory

So last Sunday, I slept in our spare room, set my alarm for 3.15 am, overslept slightly and then found myself strangely alert, albeit dizzy once I was up. I’d prepared my clothes and bike the night before, so I was ready and out with ease, embracing the unusual summer chill from our recent cold spell.

Oversleeping by ten minutes meant I was running late for sunrise. I raced west on deserted city roads as the dawn gloom began to brighten. The only people I encountered were a few handfuls of clubbers, crawling home from a night out, oblivious to my presence as I tried to cover the 20km as quickly as I could with creaking legs, still sleep stiff and tired. All the while, the sun rose behind me, the very air seemingly beginning to glow.

I arrived at the top of Drachenberg, a plateau of scruffy scrubland, five minutes after sunrise. It didn’t really matter, as that particular morning, the city was partially blanketed by cloud, and the sun wasn’t visible.

The skyline and the view over the whole city, west to east, were grubby and bleak. A chilly wind blew permanently across the plateau, and I was glad of the extra jacket I’d brought with me.

But I felt exhilarated as I sat down and lay back on my arms, my bike to one side. I’d brought coffee and snacks, but didn’t feel I needed either. So I sat and watched the clouds and the sky change colour as the sun rose above a flat city of concrete and trees.

I looked up and noticed the clouds above me were tinted pink and red underneath as the rising sun caught their underbelly. To the north-east, a break in the thick cloud was allowing beams of golden sunlight to pour through the purple grey clouds, like fingers from heaven. And it was blissfully silent apart from the gentle rush of the wind. Before my eyes, bleakness had become beauty.

After a little while, maybe half an hour, I rode back down the hill, stopping halfway to meditate in the forest. I carried on to Teufelsberg to enjoy the short road climb there, a cyclist hungry for some uphill, however brief.

And then home. First through Grunewald forest and then through completely unfamiliar neighbourhoods of villas and lakes, and quaint old squares in the monied quarters of West Berlin. The sun was higher, beginning to light up the tops of buildings and sections of the road on still deserted streets, the scene like an Edward Hopper print.

The birds were in full song now, the afterparty of the dawn chorus: Eurasian jays, nuthatches, blackbirds and wood pigeons. Their symphony mingled with the only other sound I could hear, the whirring of my bike’s cassette, something a friend once memorably described as the sound of man and machine in harmony.

What joy. What simple joy.

Me, alone out here. Hardly the wilderness and yet a certain kind of wild and liminal time - before the city has risen, before the cafes are unshuttered and before even those earliest of risers, dog walkers and runners. I felt like a fugitive on some secret mission, an explorer of some alternate reality.

As I neared home, the familiar streets looked different. I was seeing them in a new light, literally and metaphorically. Some satisfaction began to rise within me. I would sleep a while when I got home, cosseted by the knowledge that I had covered forty kilometres to climb a hill, gliding through the golden hour in solitude.

I turned the corner onto my street, and I could swear it had changed. Sun was breaking through the thick foliage of the linden trees, casting dusty beams upon the road. It looked mythical, ancient.

Had I really been away? Was I really out here?

I tiptoed into our apartment, the light was different there too, as if I’d walked into an oil painting. I could hear Ren beginning to rouse with his early morning mutterings, and Lucy rising in response.

A warm shower and then bed beckoned, entering sleep with a rare kind of satisfaction behind the weariness; I know this feeling from ventures through mountains, on hikes, on snowboards, on bike packing trips, and long-distance running. A rest needed and deeply earned.

“Routine as protection and defense, always feels merciful and protective to begin with, while slowly, over time, narrowing our character and our sense of possibility, all the while closing down our freer relationship with time itself.”

— David Whyte

The explorer Erling Kagge invoked the great philosophers when he suggested that humans should be willing to burden themselves in order to be free. Truly living life, he proposed, is not about avoiding adversity and challenge. “If you always choose the path of least resistance,” he wrote, “the alternative that offers the fewest challenges will always take priority. Your choices will be predetermined and you will not only live un-freely, but also lead a dull life.”

To always be comfortable and safe when we have the option to occasionally be otherwise is a certain kind of soul death. It is an atrophying habit that sets in without us realising, as we organise our lives around routine and predictability. In the background meanwhile, is a quiet kind of yearning, a subtle dullness that aches away for something with more risk, something at the wilder edge of life.

I felt this ache a long time ago, almost 20 years now, sitting in a small, semi-cubicle in a consulting office. A recurring thought would come to me: ‘This cannot be the entirety of my life, sitting here in this building, tapping away at my laptop’.

Not long after that, a friend and colleague of a similar sensibility asked if I’d be interested in signing up for an 8-mile running event through the wet hills and muddy bogs of a military vehicle testing site. “Fuck yes”, I said. I’d never run anywhere before except chasing after a football. So began a lifelong relationship with seeking adventure, however small it might be.

I suspect this is a common experience amongst white-collar professionals and perhaps why so many participate in arduous physical sports and challenges, as evidenced by the extraordinary boom in ultra-marathons, triathlons and Iron Man events over the last few decades.

Looking at that poster for the midsummer run, I felt the same urge as I did in that office cubicle. Some part of me was withering inside the confines of routine, imprisoned in predictability and comfort.

This happens all too easily, as we are worn down by work and responsibility, seeking efficiency and ease wherever we can. And yet it is just as easy to break out of.

Take a different route to work. Be outdoors at an unusually early or late time. Go to a different cafe. Go somewhere you’ve never been before, like that park or green space that is really close to your home but not on your normal roster of routes.

Take the path that looks rougher, scruffier, less sanitised. Sit down on the edge of the pavement and watch the world from a different vantage point. Go the long way round. Do something - anything - that is not the most efficient or sensible thing to do.

Some routine is good; too much routine is to reject the essence of life. We are not here to be efficient and predictable.

“Have you ever sat on a seashore spellbound by the majesty and the mystery of the ocean? A fisherman looks at the ocean daily and does not notice its grandeur. Why? The dulling effect of a layer of fat called habit. You have formed fixed ideas of all the things you see and, when encountering them, it is not them you see in all their changing freshness, but the same dull, thick, boring idea acquired through habit. And that is how you deal with people and with things, how you relate to them: no freshness, no newness, but the same dull, routine (boring) ways produced by habit.”

— Anthony de Mello

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 Wikiart: ‘House at Dusk’ by Edward Hopper.]