The Idea

The sun was out when we set off. It was warm enough that our beanies and windbreakers had stayed packed inside our backpacks.

We’d come to Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park to walk the Hooker Valley track. But it had been closed for repairs when we got there.

The Sealy Tarns track, however, was still open. Lovingly nicknamed the Stairway To Heaven, it was a six-hundred-metre climb, around 2,200 steps, and about two hours to the top.

It was a hard track. But we were up for it, so we decided to take the stairway and see what heaven had to offer.

“Easy, let’s go,” My husband said,

We got started.

It didn’t feel too bad at first, mostly because the path began flat. But then it started to incline, finally revealing the infamous stairs.

They were heavy timber blocks and old railway sleepers, zigzagging up the mountainside, with stone and bare earth packed in between. Some were shallow. Some needed a high knee lift. And once the climbing started, there was no let-up, no flat ground, and no trees for shade.

We didn’t stop much for the first part, except to take photos of the river braiding itself across the valley floor, and the peaks with snow caught in their creases.

The higher we went, the cooler it got. Even with the sun on us.

Beanie on.
Jacket zipped.
Hood up.

The steps were relentless now.

My legs had started to burn, I was struggling to catch my breath, and I had begun pacing myself to reach the end of each zigzag before stopping.

Every time I looked up there seemed to be a never-ending set of stairs above the ones I had already climbed.

Why did we choose to do this?

People coming back down passed us one after another.

“Keep going. You’ve got this.”

“You’re close,” one of them said.

We thanked them, and realised we weren’t close at all when another person said the same thing ten minutes later.

We kept climbing anyway. Another twenty minutes passed. Then another twenty.

We were almost at the ridge when we stopped again.

“Look at that!” My husband was smiling and pointing at the sky.

I turned around to see what he was staring at.

And there right below us was a beautiful stretching rainbow. A burst of colour smiling over the valley beneath.

“Oh wow.” I said in awe.

We stood there side by side, sharing the moment.

But could two people ever see exactly the same rainbow?

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The Science

Rainbows have no fixed place in the sky. They only exist in relation to the person looking at them.

Every rainbow is made by millions of raindrops. When sunlight enters a drop, it bends, bounces off the back of the drop, and bends again on the way out.

Now although sunlight looks white, it’s actually every colour mixed together, and each colour bends by a slightly different amount. So by the time the light leaves the drop, the colours have been pulled apart. And the rain bows.

In 1637, the philosopher René Descartes worked out that this coloured light left each drop at particular angles - about 42 degrees for red, down to about 40 degrees for violet.

Those angles are the key to everything you see. There might be millions of raindrops in front of you, but only the ones at exactly the right angle send their colours straight into your eyes. Those are the drops you see as a rainbow.

And because the light bounces back out of the drop, you need the sun behind you to catch it. Which is why a rainbow always appears on the opposite side of the sky from the sun, and why we didn't see ours until we turned around.

Then there’s the most surprising part (stay with me here).

Picture an ice-cream cone with its tip touching your eye, opening out into the rain. Every raindrop sits at an angle on the rim of the cone. That rim is the rainbow. It's actually a full circle, but from the ground, the earth gets in the way of the bottom of it, so we usually see an arc.

So because the cone starts at your eye, it moves when you move. Take one step to the side and its rim passes through a different set of raindrops. You still see a rainbow in almost exactly the same place, but it is made by new drops.

Which means my husband was seeing a totally different rainbow to me, even though I was standing only a step away from him. His rainbow was made from different raindrops from mine.

Where It Shows Up

When you’re watering the garden on a sunny afternoon, with the sun behind you. A small rainbow appears in the spray. Take a step to the left, and it moves with you. Ask someone to stand beside you and they see one too.

When you're at the beach watching the sun come up over the ocean. A strip of sparkling light stretches across the water, from the sun straight to your feet. The person twenty metres down the beach sees a strip of light too, but theirs leads straight to them.

After a storm, when the sun comes back out, the wet road ahead of you suddenly flashes bright like a mirror. Walk a few metres and the bright patch moves with you.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of seeing a rainbow on a mountain was the realisation that I wasn’t separate from what I was looking at.

The rainbow appeared because of the relationship between the sunlight, the raindrops, and where I was standing.

Similarly, we often think that life is something that happens outside of us, that we sit back and observe it. But standing there on the mountain revealed a simple truth - that even when we are looking at something like a view, we are actually a part of what is happening.

Depending on our position, we can change what we see. We can change what we notice, whilst the world around us affects us at the same time.

Experience then is not something that happens in front of us. But something that happens within us and with the world we are moving through.

The Idea

I was lying on my bed after school, staring at the ceiling and willing the phone to ring. Linger by the Cranberries was playing on the radio.

He hadn’t called. I’d tried him three times already. Why hadn’t he answered? Well, I should have been used to it by now. His distance had created an emptiness between us. And it was slowly tearing me apart.

The more I looked at the phone, the more it wound me up. Until I finally gave in and decided to dial straight into his voicemail to leave another message. A loophole in the 90s that let you send someone a message without the phone ever ringing.

It also played every message already in the inbox.

And there, just as I was about to plead for his attention again, was someone’s voice I didn’t recognise.

“I really enjoyed today”, she said.

Who is this?

“I’m glad we got some time on our own”, she continued.

Maybe she’s a friend, or a cousin I haven’t met yet?

“I know you said things are complicated at the moment.”

My hand tightened around my phone. Firmly stuck to my ear at this point.

“But I don’t care, I just want you to know that today made me really happy.”

Her voice was sweet and soft, the kind that told me her every word was sincere.

She paused.

“I really meant what I said before.”

Another pause.

“I love you so much. Call me when you get this”.

The message ended.

My phone stayed pressed to my ear. My chest tightened, and then came a sudden intense feeling in my stomach that made me feel sick.

Within thirty seconds, I’d become bound to his betrayal. My worth taken from me. My pride destroyed.

As a teenager, I thought maybe I’d got heartbreak out of the way early.

But throughout my life it would find me again, each time more devastating and cruel.

For a long time I sank into it, sure I didn’t deserve loyalty. Sure that betrayal was meant for me.

But what if it had been meant for me?

What if the pain was showing me something comfort never could?

If you've been here too, what's one word for how it felt? Leave it in the comments.

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The Science

Painful events can shake the basic assumptions you use to make sense of life.

Researchers who study post-traumatic growth describe this as a kind of psychological earthquake. It’s often a seismic event that makes you question whether the people you love treat you well, that the world is fair, that you have some control over the things that happen to you, and that you’re worthy of loyalty.

This is why being cheated on is so much bigger than the act itself.

The same researchers built a test to measure this. They found that the more strongly an experience disrupts your beliefs, the more likely you are to report growth from it. Because when an old belief no longer holds true, your mind has to decide what’s going to replace it.

But that rebuilding can take a long time, especially after something painful happens - like being betrayed by a loved one.

The mind can go into something known as repetitive thinking. Researchers distinguish between two kinds of repetitive thinking, and they are worth knowing about:

The first is an intrusive thought, it’s the kind that arrives without you consciously thinking about it. You replay the scene, the words that were said, the moment you found out. And you keep asking yourself the same question - why did this happen to me?

The other is more deliberate. Instead of only replaying what happened, you begin trying to understand what it means. You start asking - what do I know about myself now that I didn’t know before?

In the study, the deliberate kind was more closely related to deeper change and growth. The intrusive kind went with distress.

So the moment I realised I was being cheated on, with the phone still pressed to my ear, was the very moment my beliefs broke. The years I spent after, convinced I deserved it, were intrusive thoughts that kept replaying the grief from it all.

And as much as I tried to rebuild my beliefs after, I never quite could. It was only when I started asking the second kind of question of what should I do differently now that I realised my foundations had changed.

Where It Shows Up

When you notice yourself carrying betrayal into your next relationship. You constantly check, doubt, and expect the same ending, and realise the past is still deciding how you see the present.

When you open their profile for the fourth time that evening. You look for something to comfort you, but it makes you feel worse and you replay the whole story again.

And when you play the same song on loop, because for a few minutes it makes the pain feel easier to understand.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of a broken heart is the uncomfortable truth that suffering is life’s most useful teacher.

What happened to me completely broke the way I had understood people. I had believed that loving someone with devotion would be enough to earn their loyalty. And when it wasn’t, I took their choice as evidence about my own worth.

Suffering forces us to confront what comfort never can. That people are flawed. They have their own desires, their own fears and weaknesses, and sometimes their choices are confusing and hurt us deeply.

But betrayal can be useful. When we deliberately ask what it teaches us, each painful experience can sharpen our judgement, help us to accept people as they are, and reshape the story we tell ourselves about what life means.

That new wisdom gets us ready for what comes next.

Betrayal, therefore, is never completely the point. It gives the chance to become wiser than we were before it.

And that is where the rise begins.

If you've been here too, what's one word for how it felt? Leave it in the comments.

The Idea

It was the annual kite festival at Bondi Beach. I’d missed it last year, so I couldn’t wait to get there.

The train was completely packed with people squeezed in wherever they could find space. And little kids were carrying their colourful kites, eager to get out and play with them.

The train finally pulled into the station, and I started my walk down to the beach.

After twenty minutes, I came around the final corner and saw the huge crowds.

The beach was absolutely packed with people, many staring up at the sky, eyes filled with child like wonder. I could see a giant octopus with its tentacles floating above them, huge stingrays, a big football, and lots of smaller kites in between. Some were flying so high that they looked like distant tiny planets.

I walked down to the promenade to get a closer look.

And there it was. An enormous black stingray, with googly eyes, and a huge smile that made me immediately happy. Its tail trailed out behind it in long scalloped segments, black fading into teal, into deep purple.

The longer I stared at it, the more I found myself watching the way it moved.

Up.
Down.
Side to side.
Dropping low and then climbing again.

It seemed completely at ease up there. Riding the wind rather than being pushed around by it.

Is this what people mean when they say it’s easier to go with change than to fight against it?

I moved my eyes down from the huge grin on the stingray to one long thin string that disappeared somewhere I couldn’t see.

Of course…it’s tied to something.

And suddenly my grinning stingray, moving graciously in the wind, became less interesting than the string.

The kite wasn’t just riding the waves of the wind. Something was holding firm whilst the conditions of the space around it changed.

It got me thinking.

What is it that keeps us anchored, when everything around us changes?

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The Science

Here’s how a kite in the sky looks weightless.

The wind pushes against it to carry it away. And the string it’s tied to holds it back. It’s this tension that keeps the kite moving in the air instead of being swept away by it.

Held in position and angled in airflow, air moves faster over the top of the kite than underneath it - creating the upward force that’s needed to keep it off the ground and lift it against its own weight.

To remain stable, kites have an angle of attack that’s set by where the string ties into the kite’s frame. If it’s too flat, the kite will struggle to rise, and if it’s too steep it catches too much wind and wobbles,

A small pull on the string changes the angle against the wind.

Keep making small angle adjustments and it stays anchored in changing winds.

It’s this anchor that kept the stingray flying, while hundreds of people stopped to watch it.

It wasn’t graciously moving in the sky because of the conditions. It was graciously moving because of the person on the beach below, adjusting the string each time the wind shifted.

Where It Shows Up

When you’re walking with your umbrella and it’s pulled by strong winds. You move with it, loosen your grip when you need to, and pull it back when it starts to drag you.

When you’re holding the lead of a dog that lunges forward. You tighten it and your hand becomes the tension that stops it from running into the road.

And when you’re putting up a tent on a windy day. It moves with the gusts, but the ropes stay pulled tight with the pegs firmly on the ground. You see the tent move without it being blown away.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of joy from the stingray was the realisation that we should know what keeps us steady through change.

The kite didn’t drift away because it was anchored. Similarly, something has to anchor us when everything is moving faster than we can make sense of. This means making tiny adjustments over and over again, as we go through the moment.

Being steady is therefore about more than just going with the flow.

Its knowing the values that must stay fixed within. It could be honesty, the way we take care of others, or the standards we refuse to lower - even as things around us feel out of control.

Because although the winds may change our circumstances, what they don’t change is what we stand for.

And that wisdom is the only tension worth holding onto.

The Idea

On their very first day, every employee at Ember was given one to wear, carry, or leave in a drawer. The choice was theirs, although almost no-one chose the drawer.

It was a crystal, and inside it was a quantum sensor that detected the tiny magnetic field created each time a nerve fired in the body. Over time, it would learn how their nervous system behaved, and then turned that pattern into a colour.

Ari, the engineer behind it, had invented a shield that stopped the magnetic field from being drowned out by wifi, phones and other electrical noise around the office. It had been hailed a huge breakthrough in the medical field.

Amber meant steady. Red meant the nervous system had reached its limit.

Red ended arguments. People no longer had to explain that they’d hit their limit, the light gave a visible cue. Red ended scrutiny, and leaving work early from exhaustion no longer needed defending. It was the kind of readout that was impossible to ignore.

Ember’s mission was simple. To make “human energy, finally visible”.

And visible it was.

Within months of launching, the light was everywhere. Glowing red through a 9am standup. Managers checking their own crystal before booking someone in for the seventh call of the day.

And when Ember had its first product launch, companies had immediately bought it for their staff. As a result, workplaces had become kinder. Teammates were stepping in before a colleague turned red.

And for the first time, you could actually prove struggle was happening.

But Ari had been working on something new. Something that would radically change things as they’d known them.

Ember 2.0

It was three days before the launch of Ember 2.0, and Ari was stuck at her desk. It was 10.08pm and her Ember had been glowing an unmistakable red for hours.

“You’ve made your point.”

Ari looked up. Ember’s Chief Spiritual Officer was standing in the doorway.

The voice belonged to Charlotte, whose entire job was to remind the team that they were human. And that human beings, being human, had limits.

“What point?”

”You knew to stop hours ago, but you’re still sitting here ignoring it".”

Ari looked at the crystal.

”That’s annoyingly true.“

“You’re nervous about Friday.” Charlotte replied.

Ari didn’t answer. The original Ember had been really good at reading one part of the body. The new one would read several parts across different biological systems - nerves, muscles, hormonal changes to name a few.

For the first time, people would not just know what was going on in one part of their body, but what elsewhere had caused it.

That had opened Ari’s eyes to something she’d only hoped to solve someday.

Pain. Specifically, menstrual pain.

For generations, women had been speaking up about it only to be shutdown. Ember 2.0 would finally give them a way to be believed.

Prostaglandins were the hormones behind period pain. Ember 2.0 could read them spike before cramping was even felt. It meant women could know their pain was coming before it actually did.

During trials, the sensor had picked up a woman’s usual pain pattern eighteen minutes before her first cramp.

She’d laughed nervously. “So my body knows before I do?”

“Apparently so”, Ari said. “It’s incredible.”

And it was. She’d gone home that night thinking they had finally had a breakthrough. But Charlotte put a stop to that the next morning.

“Why do they need proof?

Ari looked up, coffee in hand. ”What?”

“You keep saying Ember will finally prove their pain is real. To whom?”

Ari stared at her.

“If a woman says she is in pain and Ember agrees, we believe her.”

“Right”, Ari agreed.

“But what happens when Ember doesn’t agree?”

The Test

The answer arrived during the final trial.

Annie’s Ember was amber.

“I need to stop”, she told the researcher.

“Your readings are normal. Do you want to go another ten minutes? It would help to capture the transition.”

Annie shook her head. “No, I said I need to stop. I’m in a lot of pain.”

The researcher stopped.

Later, in a progress briefing, Ari heard about what had happened. Annie had asked to end the trial. The researcher had checked her Ember, saw it was in normal range, and wanted to keep going. Only when Annie asked twice did she stop, she’d trusted the Ember over the person in front of her.

Ari replayed it. Annie spoke. The researcher checked the Ember. The trial stopped.

Charlotte said nothing.

“How did this happen?”

Ember existed because people weren’t very good at listening to their bodies. But they’d built it so well that people had started listening to it instead of listening to each other.

And now, weeks from launching a feature that was meant to make women’s pain harder to dismiss, they’d actually built a new way to do that.

Ari slowly sat down. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“No”, Charlotte said. “But it’s what people will do.”

Ari hated when she did that.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of disbelief is the truth that we’d rather look outside ourselves to make sense of what is going on within us.

That refusal to understand our inner lives is what makes it so easy to hand the responsibility to something else.

Ember’s read on pain was useful, but it was a stand in for the person who was experiencing it - who was the real source of truth.

The more intimately we know ourselves, the harder it is to see other people as completely separate from us. We can recognise their fear, anxiety, and exhaustion because we know something about it ourselves.

Care then is more than a measured act of kindness. It’s the whole point of what it means to live alongside others in this world.

It becomes human work that belongs in ordinary days, as well those not so ordinary days.

This post supports World Suicide Prevention Day on 10 September. Losing a loved one too soon is devastating. If today is a hard one for you, I hope this helps..

If you need someone to talk to, Lifeline is available 24/7 on 13 11 14 in Australia, or 988 in the US. If you’re elsewhere, findahelpline.com can connect you to support in your country.

The Idea

It was a crisp spring morning, and my hands felt good in the gloves. Familiar, comforting, like being home again, in a way that nothing had quite managed to make me feel lately.

I’d booked myself into a session because life was changing faster than I could keep up with, and somewhere in it all, I'd started to feel a growing empty space inside me. Even though I knew things would eventually get easier with time, they hadn’t yet.

My mind was desperate for something else to focus on. So I went back to what had always worked before - boxing.

Kathy, my trainer, was the smiliest and strongest woman I’d ever met. She had the exact energy I needed to be around.

The session was on the sundeck, which had magnificent views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, doubling up as an iconic backdrop. I was the first to box up here. I felt so lucky.

Because back when I had first moved here and nothing was familiar, it was the bridge that had steadied me. Giving me a constant structure I could depend on. Being in front of it now, so it could be a part of another new beginning, felt very special.

How long has it been? Kathy asked.

Years, I said.

I didn’t tell her exactly how many, but it had been long enough that I was completely petrified.

Gloves on. Pads up.

The first straight punches felt like riding a bike again. Easy.

Jab, cross, hook, cross!

The sequence was changing, and so was the pace. I was already out of breath.

I can’t do this. What was I thinking!

Keep going, Niki, you’ve got this, Kathy called, so I kept my hands up.

Jab, cross, hook, cross. Jab, cross, hook, cross.

I looked past her at the bridge.

I’m here with you, it said.

Jab, cross, hook, cross. Jab, cross, hook, cross, duck, Kathy wasn’t letting up.

My breath was now guiding me into each strike.

You can do this, Niki. C’mon! Jab, cross, hook, cross. Jab, cross, hook, cross, duck, kick.

I kept going.

Forty five minutes later, the gloves came down. My arms were shaking, my shirt was soaked through, but I had a huge grin on my face.

Something had changed in me. I felt different. Happier, lighter, more like myself again.

How had one class been able to fill that emptiness?

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The Science

Stress and changes can cause low-level inflammation in the body. That inflammation turns down a chemical in your body called dopamine.

Most people think dopamine is just the feel good chemical, but its real job is simpler than that - it’s what makes things feel worth doing.

A 2024 review by researchers at University College London looked specifically at why feeling low doesn’t mean you are sad — sometimes it’s more that you feel like nothing is worth doing. You’re constantly drained and your thinking goes foggy.

They pulled together decades of existing research. Examining animal studies on how dopamine drives motivation, brain scans of people deciding whether an effort is worth making, and research on how inflammation in the body can block dopamine from doing its job properly.

One of the main chemicals they discussed is called IL-6, which is a small protein your immune system releases whenever it senses stress, injury or a threat. It’s useful in short bursts, but when it stays raised for weeks - which is what tends to happen during ongoing stress - it blocks dopamine.

The researchers proposed this may be what causes the ‘flatness’ that’s felt.

And although the exact mechanism wasn’t fully understood yet, they proposed that exercise lowers inflammation directly, and that’s what brings back the sense that things are worth doing again.

So this might be exactly what was going on for me. My motivation switch had been down for weeks. But that morning on the pads, it came back on.

What’s interesting about this idea of using the body to change your state of mind is that it’s not a new one. An old Vedic teaching holds the same idea that you don’t calm an agitated mind by thinking about things harder. Because a mind that’s already spinning can’t out-think its way to stillness. The way to guide it to this is with action by giving it something to do with the body. The spinning then has somewhere else to go.

Breathing is one of the clearest ways the body can begin to do this. Although you can’t reach in and calm your thoughts directly, you can slow your breathing, so the mind can follow its pace. Which is why breath is so important in exercise and more than a background part of exercise.

But boxing adds something else on top of movement and breath - the act of striking itself.

A 2022 review of non-contact boxing — pad work, bag work, group boxing classes — says that having an experienced coach in your corner measurably increases people’s confidence and sense of agency, not just their mood.

So when I think about Kathy calling out combinations and keeping me moving, she was actually giving me real, measurable proof that I was still capable.

Where It Shows Up

When you feel flat and don’t want to get out of bed because something has knocked your confidence. You get up anyway and make the bed. It’s a small thing, but it gives you your first sense of achievement for the day, and that’s enough to make the next thing feel easier.

When something at work has left you doubting yourself, and then someone gives you a task you’re not sure you can handle. You do it anyway, it goes well, and that becomes proof that you’re still capable.

When your mind is racing before bed, and trying to not think about things makes it worse. So you slow your breathing down and after a few minutes, your body settles, and your thoughts begin to slow too.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of emptiness is the reminder that who you are doesn’t disappear just because your mind has lost sight of it.

That day, I didn’t need to wait to believe in myself again. I just needed to move. Feeling low can make you feel less capable. But your actual capability exists beyond your thoughts, even when they’re telling you otherwise.

That’s why waiting for your mind to feel ready can keep you stuck. The mind gets overwhelmed. It loops, doubts and loses perspective.

So you have to switch the order up.

Moving your body first gives you something real to do. It lets action show you what your thoughts are struggling to see.

You don’t always need to feel ready before you move. The act of moving is what makes you ready again.

And most days, that’s all it takes.

The Idea

It was my first summer in Sydney, and my skin was completely drenched in melted sun lotion.

This was the day I was heading into the bush. Australia's second oldest National Park promised a hike through open forests, a historic boat shed, through a marina, before eventually arriving at a picnic area.

And I was at the beginning of the track, dripping from the heat.

What’s that noise?

It was like a faint buzzing coming from above me, but I couldn't see anything up in the trees. So I thought nothing more of it and carried on. But the deeper I went into the forest, the louder the faint buzzing became.

Eventually I passed two hikers, who were going the other way.

Watch out for the lace monitors on the track, one of them said.

I had no idea what they were referring to. They explained that they were very large, dark lizards with yellow spots that crossed the path without warning.

Perhaps they were the one’s making the noise.

No, it sounds like power lines. There has to be power lines somewhere in here.

I looked. No towers. No wires. Maybe they were buried somewhere in the forest that I couldn’t see. But power lines don’t tend to get louder the closer you walk toward nothing.

There it is again.

A few short pulses. Zzt... Zzt... Zzt... Then one long drone, Zzzzzzzzzzz, before it dropped off. It was surrounding me now, coming from everywhere at once.

Then it began again.

It was as if the whole forest was chanting to something, but I had no idea what the eerie chant was.

What was I listening to?

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The Science

What I was hearing was the mating call of cicadas.

They spend years underground as nymphs, feeding on root sap. And only emerge in the summer for a few weeks with one purpose only - to mate before they die.

Here’s how they were making that sound.

Cicadas have thick, dark bodies and clear, veined wings held over their backs. At around five centimetres long, they are surprisingly one of the loudest insects in Australia. Their calls can reach over 120 decibels when several are calling together.

The males have two large red-brown sacs on either side of their abdomen.

Each of those sacs covers a rigid, ribbed membrane called a tymbal. Powered by the cicadas nervous system, a muscle pulls on the tymbal until it buckles, then it relaxes it and lets it snap back. The buckle is what makes a clicking sound.

So when I heard Zzt... Zzt... Zzt, that was the muscle clicking slowly enough for me to hear it on its own. When it dropped into one long Zzzzzzzzzzz, the muscle had sped up. And hundreds of clicks a second blurred into a single droning sound.

That still didn’t explain why it was rising and falling together, like a sound wave.

Cicadas call in unison when their numbers are dense enough. Each male reacts to the other males around him, matching his rhythm to theirs in real time. One male starts. his neighbours pick it up within moments, and just like that it spreads through the whole population like a giant deafening wave.

Its reproduction turned all the way up.

Where It Shows Up

At a concert, applause can begin as hundreds of separate claps. Within seconds, people hear the rhythm around them and unconsciously fall into time with it.

A crowd walking across a bridge where each person makes tiny adjustments to their steps in response to the movement beneath them, which can eventually cause thousands of footsteps to synchronise.

And in conversation, people begin matching each other by subtly adjusting their pace of speech, pauses and even movements - without consciously deciding to.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of electricity was an urgent vibration.

The cicadas sounded endless.

But this was their first summer above ground, after years of preparing for a life that would only last a few weeks. Once they emerged, they had a remarkably small window to find one another, mate and complete the reason they had surfaced at all.

Then their lives would end.

Which changed what I was hearing.

What had seemed excessive was actually creatures with almost no time to waste. Every call was desperately reaching for another cicada while there was still time to be answered.

The whole ritual was a like a weird biological countdown. Serving as a stark reminder that we should always move with urgency.

Perhaps the real warning here is how easily we live as if there will always be more time.

But maybe the whole point of life is not to live faster, but to live with less delay.

For a loved one lost too soon.

The Idea

It was 11pm. I was at my desk, laptop open, the rest of the house asleep. I’d been trying to write this post for hours, hitting the same wall over and over, and had no idea where any of it was going.

So I stopped for the night and headed to bed, ready to put the day away. But on this night something happened that had never happened before.

I was in my mind, and I could see my thoughts. They were travelling in shaped packets, though I couldn’t have told you what those shapes actually were. I just knew they had a shell.

Some were paired, some alone. But all of them were held together by a kind of diagonal current, pulling everything the same way, left to right, pulsing in time.

I could feel it. A humming electricity that was inside my head.

I knew I was sleeping. But I also knew, at the same time, that I was aware of being asleep.

I’m watching myself think.

It felt strangely calming.

I couldn’t tell how long I did it for, but I didn’t want it to end.

Then I woke up.

I lay still, not wanting to move in case I forgot something. I’d read about the idea of observing the mind before. I’d never actually felt what it was like to be inside it.

I sat up in the dark and reached for my phone, then stopped — if I got pulled into something else now, I’d lose the detail.

Had I really just watched the thoughts in my head?

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The Science

Possibly, and it may have started long before I went to sleep that night.

I meditate every day. And this 2025 paper made me wonder whether there’s an effect I had missed. It describes detached self-observation as a core part of mindfulness, which gives the ability to notice your thoughts and feelings without immediately being pulled into them.

Over time, repeatedly giving your mind something to hold on to - such as breath, repeated word, or a bodily sensation - can strengthen its ability to observe itself.

Do it enough, and that self-awareness can become a familiar mental state that the mind returns to more easily. Researchers call this an 'attractor', because once the mind falls into that pattern, it tends to be pulled towards it again and again.

And although this skill is built during the day, it’s reported to happen to meditators at night too, when they’re lucid dreaming.

So meditation could explain how I was able to notice my thoughts. But another theory offers an explanation for how I was able to notice myself noticing them.

Developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram, the Holonomic Brain Theory suggests that thoughts are patterns of electrical signals spread across the dendritic network in your brain.

This network runs throughout your brain and wherever brain cells connect to each other. It’s made up of dendrites, which are branch-like parts of brain cells that pass signals to each other, and together they form that network.

Those signals are your thoughts.

The network they are contained in behaves a bit like how a file is stored on a hard drive. Where a file gets broken into pieces and scattered across the disk. Similarly, parts of a single thought can sit across different points in the network.

Pribram says that the network spans across layers in the brain, and what happens in each one decides what you experience.

In the first layer, some thoughts are picked up by quick-acting circuits and turned into something you act on, almost immediately. Like trying to catch something the second it slips from your hand, before you’ve even decided to move.

In the second layer, other parts of your thoughts travel across the network for longer, delaying when you take action on them. Like laughing at a joke ten minutes after it’s told, once it’s finally landed.

Pribram suggests it’s this gap in processing time which decides how much of a thought reaches your conscious awareness.

His theory never explains how that actually happens, so that remains a mystery. But the slowdown may explain how I’d been able to watch my thoughts moving that night.

Where It Shows Up

When you’re driving and something appears in the road, you immediately swerve before you’ve worked out what it was.

When you interrupt a colleague talking because you’ve already connected where the logic is going.

When an answer to a deep problem finally arrives in your sleep, long after you’ve given up on it.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of watching my thoughts was the fact that most of my thinking is never consciously done.

That night, I’d spent hours trying to force the words for this post. When I finally went to bed, the ideas that had felt separate were already connecting and shaping themselves.

They had their own identity and existence.

And because thoughts exist well before we’ve thought them, we should expect them to arrive when they’re ready, not when we call for them.

Which means this post may have been written well before I sat down to write it.

The Idea

My favourite brothers were back together for the first time in a decade. Eighty thousand of us were packed into a stadium, ready to sing our hearts out together.

My hardest years had run on loop of their songs. I’d never thought in a million years I'd get the chance to see them live. But here I was, at an Oasis concert.

I felt like I was about to burst from being in a great big giant hug.

Then the music started, and the stadium suddenly erupted with the loudest roar. The kind that tells your ears that this is a moment you need to pay attention to because you’re never going to forget it.

And with it a wave of emotion started to rise. I couldn’t quite work out what it was at first. It felt warm and it hurt, and it was travelling quickly from my chest to my throat, and out through my eyes.

Cast No Shadow had started to play.

You’re crying. Stop it.
Thank god Fay’s on the other side of the stadium and can’t see this.

But I couldn’t.

Partly in joy. Partly because my teenage self had been drawn out and was now standing there right next to me.

She had travelled from a time I'd chosen to bury. Remembering that every relationship had made her feel exactly like this song, unseen. It gave her an invisibility shield that meant she didn't have to say the things she needed to say. Because who would care.

So she’d shut the world out, put her headphones on, and hit play on her walkman.

Except this time, she didn’t stay in the sadness for long. Because she was being carried through the sound of eighty thousand strangers singing which was holding her up.

Her tears stopped. She dried her eyes.

And then she wondered - how were they doing that?

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The Science

Music is one of the brain’s strongest memory triggers. Scientists call the memories it brings back music-evoked autobiographical memories. That simply means personal memories from your own life that return when you hear a particular song.

These memories can appear from hearing a few familiar notes that bring back a person, a place or a whole period of your life. Sometimes, they bring back the version of you who had lived through it.

The medial prefrontal cortex is an area near the front of your brain that helps connect familiar music with memories and emotions. This can be why a song can make the past feel very much in the present.

The more often you listen to a song which was from an important period of your life, the more closely the brain connects it to what was happening at the time. The song literally becomes a part of how you store that time in your life.

Decades later, your brain recognises the opening chords of a song, and begins filling in everything that once surrounded it.

That explains why my teenage self appeared.

What may have stopped my tears was something called collective effervescence, which is the powerful feeling that rises when a group becomes absorbed in the same emotion at the same time.

When you’re at a concert, the music pulls everyone’s attention towards the same beat, the same words and the same anticipated moments. People begin singing, moving and reacting together.

This shared rhythm can make the boundary between what I am feeling and what we are feeling soften. And the emotion becomes less lonely.

That night in the stadium my sadness entered a much bigger feeling. One where thousands of strangers replaced it with comfort.

Where It Shows Up

At a team karaoke night, and everyone joins in with the chorus. Suddenly the song you were nervous to sing alone becomes everyone’s.

In the car when you’re driving your children to school, and you know every word and sing far too loudly. The song becomes your shared memory.

During devotional singing, when the same words are repeated until individual voices begin to disappear into one sound. The feeling is still personal, but it’s no longer being carried by you alone.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of a stadium singing as one is the idea that you don’t need to always be understood to feel less alone.

That night nothing about my past changed. But what did change was that I didn’t need to hold on to it by myself.

What weighs on you gets lighter the moment you’re not the only one holding it - whether or not anyone else knows what it is.

In that stadium, it was the sound, the crowd, the vibration of it all that reached in and filled the space where the sadness had been living alone.

And that was enough to stop me crying my heart out.

The Idea

I’d been going to the same dumpling restaurant for a year.

Lai knew my name and my order by heart, so I sat at my usual table.

Six dumplings, steamed, the skin thin enough to see the green of the vegetables through it. They came out too hot to touch, drenched in chilli and soy sauce.

So I waited.

They were soft all the way through, giving way completely.

I finished all six and got up to pay.

So delicious! See you tomorrow, Lai!

We bowed, like we had done so many times before. Just for a few seconds, bending at the waist, back completely straight, one hand on top of the other.

I didn’t notice until I was halfway home, but something had gone quiet in me.

What had I just put down in that bow?

The Science

Bowing is a language. And in this language, depth is everything.

Across many cultures, lowering your head or upper body is used to show respect, gratitude and deference.

In India you press your palms together and dip your head. It’s known as Namaste, which means bow to you.

In Thailand the same gesture is called the Wai, which has origins in Buddhism and the Anjali Mudra. A slight bow, with palms pressed together as if in prayer.

And in Buddhism the same palms-together is called Gassho. The full version of it goes to the floor. You lower your forehead, turn your palms upward, and lift them above your head. The gesture means you are holding the Buddha’s feet higher than your own.

Whatever the culture, the intent is clear. The lower your head, the more it means. But there’s something more happening when you look at the movement more closely.

In Japan, the depth of the bow can change its meaning entirely. A small bow acknowledges another person, while a deeper one communicates greater meaning.

0° = we are equal
Meeting at the same height.

15° = I see you
Eshaku. A small bow to casually acknowledge another person.

30° = I respect and appreciate you
Keirei. A lower bow that gives the moment more attention.

45° = I deeply honour you, or I am deeply sorry
Saikeirei. A bow kept for apology, gratitude, or reverence.

As the angle increases, the body gives up more of its height for respect to rise. This is the exact opposite of what you naturally associate with power - where you’re told to stand tall, lift your chin and take up more space.

In fact deliberately lowering your head and body can help you feel more humble. Research has shown that downward, more contracted postures are associated with greater humility than upward ones.

That makes a bow much more than just a polite gesture.

For a moment, you willingly set your ego aside to let humility in and say I honour you.

Respect has geometry.

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Where It Shows Up

When you bow your head before eating dinner to give thanks for the food in front of you. The movement stops you treating the meal as something you’re owed to something you’re grateful for.

When you attend a meeting and instinctively offer your hand, only to notice that everyone else has bowed, so you follow their lead. The exchange leaves you humbled and tall at the same time.

And when you greet an elder in the family. The gentle gesture shows that you greatly recognise the value of their experience.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of quiet is the truth that we spend our lives climbing to earn respect. A bow does the opposite.

While we are taught to protect our height, hold our ground and never make ourselves small, true respect begins when you stop needing to be above the person in front of you.

A bow shows that you can lower your body without lowering your worth.

And that’s the strange arithmetic of it all. When you minus your ego, respect adds up.

The Idea

The day was finally here. I was on my way to the Great Barrier Reef, and I was so excited.

We’d left early in a small catamaran, the water shone like diamonds under the morning sun. I stood near the front watching it for most of the hour it took to get there.

Then the engine cut, and it was time to get in.

Are you crazy! You can’t swim.

I had known this the entire time I was booking the trip, and somehow I hadn’t accepted the risk I was taking until I was standing on the deck in a wetsuit looking out at the open ocean.

The diver went through it with me - I'd hold onto a ring, he'd stay with me, he'd move me around. I nodded nervously.

The cold hit first. Then the waves, which had looked gentle from the deck but were not so gentle after all. They pushed me sideways, lifting and dropping me up and down. I held on for dear life, too scared to do anything.

The diver moved me across the surface to a spot where he said there’d be something worth seeing, and told me to look down.

So I took a deep breath and went under.

Everything fell silent.

There was an entire world, with fish everywhere. Tiny ones moving fast in groups, bigger ones drifting past without hurry, and coral in shades of gold and green. All of it was busy. All of it was going about a day that was happening without me.

I was a guest.

Uninvited, unnoticed, completely irrelevant.

My heart opened with joy.

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The Science

The Great Barrier Reef is around 500,000 years old, with some of its coral structures millions of years old. It stretches over 2,300 kilometres, and is home to 1,500 species of fish, and 600 types of coral.

Healthy coral reefs are surprisingly noisy places. Underwater, a reef sounds like something frying in a pan; the result of snapping shrimp around three to five centimetres long.

Snapping shrimp have one oversized claw that closes at around 60 miles an hour, fast enough to create a collapsing bubble of air. The pop it makes can stun a small fish, and measures above 190 decibels - putting it in competition with the blue whale for the loudest animal in the ocean. The frying sound is thousands of them snapping at once, hunting across the same stretch of reef.

Snapping shrimp can’t survive without coral, so the amount of snapping tells you how much living coral is there.

But I heard none of this, and here’s why.

Human ears are built for air, but underwater the middle ear stops transferring sound properly, and everything gets sort of muffled. It’s like having cotton wool pushed into your ears.

And because sound moves through water around five times faster than through air, sound travels straight through your skull instead of being blocked by it.

Which is why everything fell silent.

Where It Shows Up

When you’re at the base of a waterfall and the sound stops you. Its roar is so loud that it’s difficult for your ear to pick it apart, drowning out the sound of your own voice and thoughts. You stand there humbled, emptied of whatever you were carrying, aware of how small you are next to it.

When you step inside a temple and whatever you carried in with you feels smaller by the time you leave. The scale of the place, the quiet, the sense of something much older than your own problems puts them in proportion.

And the moment you accept you cannot control what another person does to you. The arguments in your head stop, and you feel a stillness from knowing the experience was never sent to wound you, but to wake you..

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of being underwater was the fact that insignificance is strangely freeing.

That day on the reef I found an entire civilisation running perfectly with no regard for me. Busying around with an intelligence that had long existed before me. Even the silence belonged to it.

Most of your life is spent trying to matter, each day pulling you back to your choices, your problems, your story.

But the reef reminds us that we expand in insignificance. Being small doesn’t mean you are less, it means feeling how much larger everything else is.

And that, weirdly, makes the world so much bigger.

The Idea

I was a few days into a road trip across New Zealand, and I couldn’t get my head around the constant beauty coming at me from every direction. It was like I was looking at a painted canvas made up of magnificent mountains, the bluest valleys, and hues of light that ranged from purple to pink to orange.

How is this real? It’s breathtaking.

I’d climbed Mount Cook the day before, and my legs were aching with pride. So I’d spent the night in a glass roofed eco cottage to recover, chosen mostly for a romantic night sky with my husband. It was our wedding anniversary, and I’d wanted to gift him an experience that was as extraordinary as him.

We left early the next morning, energised from the stay. A few minutes down the farm road, we stopped the car.

Two horses were standing close together in a paddock.

Their coats caught the morning light and looked like they’d been brushed with gold especially for our special occasion. They moved with a deliberate elegance and poise, unhurried.

I got out of the car and walked towards them. They suddenly looked up together, ears forward. Then they took a few steps to the side, exactly together at the same time. Stopped. Stared at me. Walked again, Stopped. Stared at me again.

This dance continued eight or nine times, and each time, neither one moved a second before the other.

It was a brilliant show, but kind of strange. Why did they need each other’s permission to move?

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The Science

The horses both moved, stopped, and rested within moments of each other.

A horse's eyes sit on the sides of its head, so it sees almost all the way around itself - about 350°, with 65° of this being binocular vision and the remaining 285° monocular vision.

It can only really focus with both eyes at once on a narrow strip straight ahead. Everywhere else is blurrier, good for catching movement but not for making out detail.

To get an actual, clear look at something, a horse has to angle the head so it lands on a thin strip of the retina called the visual streak, which is packed with far more light-sensitive cells than anywhere else in the eye. That's hard to do while walking forward, so they stopped to actually look at me.

Then they tried to figure out what the other one was focused on, by reading its eyes and ears. Horses do this specifically to work out where the others attention is. Researchers have found that they lose the ability to do this the moment their ears are covered, which means their ears do more than just hear. They point at whatever has their attention.

And finally, they synchronised movement. This was because they had a close bond which told them to protect each other. This relationship was what synchronised their movement more tightly than horses without one. Falling out of step with each other would leave them exposed, the safest place to be surrounded by others, so they moved as one.

It was a show of love built from the close relationship between them.

Where It Shows Up

In two people who have been married for decades and intuitively know to protect each other and their relationship from outside threats. They see their bond as a special service to each other, that moves them through life as one, loyalty and trust is their choreography.

In a toddler who is sitting at the top of a slide, ready to plummet down, but turns back to check the emotion on your face before going any further.

When starting a new job and hanging back in the first team meeting, because you don’t know the room yet. So you watch, read, to figure out who’s who before committing to speak up. You observe because getting it wrong might result in the wrong first impression.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of amazement were two horses who were not simply copying each other. Each one was taking the other into account before it acted. Their bond changed the way they moved.

That is what service looks like in a close relationship. You don’t only ask, “what do I want to do?” You also ask, “what will help the person beside me to feel safe?”

Sometimes that means waiting for them. Sometimes it means noticing what they haven’t said. Sometimes it means changing your own pace so they’re not left to face something alone.

When both people live this way, protection doesn’t sit with only one person. It’s something that moves between them, and becomes part of their strength as one.

Over time, they become more careful with each other, more aware of what their choices create, and less concerned with moving through life on a single person’s terms.

Love, then, is not only a feeling between two people. It’s a function that keeps you steady, unhurried, and always in step.

And that deserves protection.

The Idea

The kettle had just gone off in the kitchen, and I was on the sofa waiting for my chai, half in the conversation and half out of it. My cousin stepped out to take a call, and before the door was even shut properly, the room turned.

She never stays in touch to see how we are.
She doesn’t even cook for her husband.
She’s the reason they don’t have children.

You know this scene. And if you’re honest, you’ve probably taken part in it.

I have too.

One comment lands and you add one of your own.

I sat there that day feeling like I was having an allergic reaction to the whole thing, itching to get out of the room. So I left.

But on the way home I kept thinking about something that bothered me more than what had been said about my cousin.

I’d said something too.

And I couldn’t work out why.

The Science

Gossip feels good. There’s a reason for that.

Brain imaging studies show that sharing information about someone else triggers a release of dopamine, which is the same chemical the brain releases when you eat something you love or hear good news.

But there’s more going on here.

Research shows that gossip activates both the brain’s reward centre and its stress centre simultaneously. While the dopamine is firing, your amygdala — which is the part of the brain that scans for threat — becomes overactive. At the same time, your prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for clear thinking and focus, starts to lose efficiency.

You get the hit of pleasure and the cost of arousal at the same time. Which is why a long gossip session can leave you feeling strangely drained, even though it felt good while it was happening.

And then there’s the hidden consequence of what you’re doing to yourself.

When you regularly speak negatively about people, you’re actually training your brain to look for what’s wrong first. Not only in others, but in yourself too. You literally become someone who sees all people as a threat.

And here’s the part most people don’t talk about. Gossip is the most memorable type of information the brain encounters, more memorable than facts. Brown University found that the brain’s approach to spreading gossip resembles the same algorithms that drive viral content on social media.

When someone hands you a negative story about a person, your brain stores it deeply and your instinct is to pass it on.

Which is kind of like how a virus works.

Where It Shows Up

At a coffee catchup with a friend that starts as a check-in but quickly turns into an hour about someone else entirely. You try to offer a new perspective. But they don’t really want advice, they just want to vent. The conversation gets louder and more charged. By the time you leave, you’re drained and promise yourself to not see them again for some time.

On the train home after a productive day at work, you overhear two colleagues who are not so quietly talking about their day and complaining about a particular person. You shake your head and pop your headphones in, frustrated that they’re investing their time badmouthing someone instead of talking about something they were thankful for.

And then there’s the family group chat, or the phone call that starts with “did you hear about so and so?” This conversation is the worst kind because it pulls the person apart in what should be a safe space - family. By the end of the call you’ve been handed the same story, the same judgment, the same way of seeing that person.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of dopamine is the fact that we’re living within a social virus.

We think gossiping is harmless, but words are not just sounds. They carry the energy of the person speaking them.

That energy gets passed on — to the friend at the coffee table, the colleague on the train, the family member on the phone — and with it a dose of criticism gets transferred to an unsuspecting brain.

The more you repeat it, the more you harm them. They go home seeing the world a little more negatively.

And so it spreads, one conversation at a time, like an epidemic.

The person being talked about doesn’t even know the conversations are happening.

But you do.

Do better, the brains in this world are relying on it.

The Idea

The night before I flew to London, I packed a red panda in my carry-on. His name was Rem Rem, and he had long weighted arms, round ears, and a smile that wasn’t going to disappear because of bumps in the air.

I’d brought him because I was a nervous flyer and I’d read that deep pressure therapy was good at promoting calmness. After a run of turbulent flights around Australia and New Zealand, I was desperate enough to try anything.

I’m going to look ridiculous, but this will be a fun experiment.

Rem Rem had extra-long weighted arms designed to wrap around you. The idea was that the weight of these across my body would mimic the feeling of being held - like receiving a hug.

Every time the plane went up on take-off, my stomach would drop and I’d spend the rest of the flight hyper sensitive to the smallest bump in the air. It had happened enough times now that I started dreading things from the moment I booked a holiday.

I boarded the flight to London already drained from it all, Rem Rem’s arms sitting across my shoulders.

A few hours in, the turbulence hit. The plane shook, the lockers rattled, but instead of gripping the armrest, I looked down at Rem Rem.

He was still smiling, still calm.

The panic I’d been bracing for didn’t arrive.

The Science

Your body is covered in tiny sensors found within your skin, muscles, joints, and inner ear, that track movement, pressure, and vibration. They’re called mechanoreceptors and they feed your brain a constant stream of information about where you are and what's happening around you.

For a regular flyer, the brain registers take-off, the tiny movements of the airframe, the shift in altitude, as unremarkable. But for anxious flyers who are already on edge, something different happens. The same data gets read as urgent instead.

The stomach drop felt on take-off gets interpreted by the nervous system as a warning, rather than a routine part of flying. When turbulence starts, the inner ear and eyes send the brain conflicting information, telling it the body is feeling movement that the eyes can’t account for.

The brain reads that conflict as threat, which is why it’s so frightening even when you know the plane is fine.

Deep pressure works through the same system but tells your body the opposite story. When even weight is applied across your body, the tiny sensors activate the vagus nerve. This is a long nerve that travels from the base of your brain through your chest and into your gut. It’s responsible for regulating your heart rate, your breathing, and how your body responds to stress.

Its activation pulls you out of fight-or-flight and into rest-and-recover. Your cortisol drops and you stop treating everything around you as a threat.

The weight of Rem Rem’s arms feel like a hug from a loved on, reassuring the body:

I’ve got you, you’re safe, I’m still here

During turbulence it gives your nervous system something solid to hold whilst everything else feels uncertain - and it works.

Where It Shows Up

You may have heard of weighted blankets that work on the same principle. First developed for children with sensory processing differences, they offer steady pressure across the body throughout the night. People who use them regularly report lower cortisol and better sleep.

The weighted blanket market is projected to reach $3.82B by 2035 - something airlines should pay attention to.

The hugs you receive from people work the same way - but only if they last long enough. Researchers have found that a hug needs to hold for around 20 seconds for it to be registered as safety, rather than touch. A proper hug held long enough will visibly soften you, causing your shoulders to drop and breathing to slow down.

There’s even a small wave of adult-sized swaddle sleeping bags on the market now. Fully grown adults are tucking themselves into something that mimics being tightly wrapped. It sounds a little silly. But it works for the same reason everything else here works.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of fear on a flight is a body that doesn’t believe what it’s being told.

You can know logically that the plane is fine. Pilots fly through worse conditions, and i’m told that you’re statistically safer on a plane than in a car. But none of this information reaches the part of you that’s afraid, in the moment you’re afraid.

That’s because fear doesn’t live in the part of the brain that listens to facts. It lives in the part that listens to sensation.

Which is why my beautiful red panda with weighted arms did something a thousand reassurances couldn’t do. It gave my nervous system the one thing it actually trusted - the feeling of being held.

The next time you’re scared and the facts aren’t landing, stop reasoning with yourself. Find something to hold you instead.

Meet Ari, a character who will appear in Subtextt when the science calls for it. This is her first story.

Her morning begins in a meeting about electron shuttling, a technique that moves a single electron through a silicon chip. She ends up inside one, passing through quantum wells that show her something she wasn’t expecting to find.

Ari had not meant to leave the meeting

She had been sitting at the long table on the seventh floor, her notebook open, her pen in her hand, watching Dr. Ling draw a diagram on the whiteboard of something extremely small.

The diagram showed a row of tiny dots inside a silicon chip, connected by a long thin corridor, and Dr. Ling was explaining how a single electron could be moved from one dot to the next. Carrying a piece of quantum information with it as it travelled.

“We call it shuttling,” Dr. Ling said.

Ari wrote the word in her notebook.

Then, without any warning whatsoever, she was gone.

The Ride

She was sitting on something.

It was small and round and warm and it hummed. She looked down at it. It was glowing a faint blue-white and vibrating at a frequency she could feel in her back teeth.

It was an electron.

Well, she thought. That’s new.

The electron didn’t wait for her to have any further thoughts on the matter. The corridor ahead of them lit up, and they shot forward at a speed that made her grab onto the electron with both hands and hold on very tightly indeed.

The walls blurred, the ceiling disappeared, and her hair streamed behind her. There was no sound except the hum, which was now radiating from her in all directions.

Ahead of them, at the end of the corridor, something glowed.

It was red.

The Red Well

The electron dropped into the first well and stopped suddenly.

Ari looked around.

The space was vast, but she wasn’t.

The walls pulsed with a deep red light. She took a step to the left, the red darkened. She stepped back, it brightened. She did this three more times because it was satisfying.

Then she saw them.

Every version of herself she had ever been was standing in the red light looking back at her. She couldn’t count how many there were, but it must have been many thousands.

She noticed one sitting in the corner of a room, a baby who wasn’t yet walking. Another with a woman she didn't recognise, who took both her hands and said she had needed to hear that. And one at a table by the ocean, writing fast, filling pages.

Ari looked at the one writing. It collapsed immediately.

She looked at the one at the conference.

Gone.

She looked at the baby in the corner. The red light was pulsing faster.

She reached toward her.

Before she could touch her, the electron shot forward. The red light and every Ari in it disappeared at once.

The Orange Well

She had arrived at the second well with her arm still reaching. Ari quickly put her arm down before anyone noticed.

She looked up.

This well was full of light. It had thousands of tiny points, darting and turning, forming shapes and patterns, then dissolving before she knew what they were. They moved like swooping starlings, as if one mind was controlling all of them at the same time. She turned slowly on the spot watching them, mesmerised.

Each one was making its own decisions, and yet all of them together made something that took her breath away.

She had seen this before, she thought. It was like the way a conversation moved around a table without anyone guiding where it should go.

Nobody in control. And yet…this.

The orange light wheeled and turned above her head.

The electron tapped her foot.

It was time to move on.

The Yellow Well

Ari arrived into the third well and looked down.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, the floor was the night sky.

Stars stretched beneath her feet in every direction, tiny and brilliant against the dark. She walked on the stars, half expecting to fall through. But she didn’t.

Then she saw it. There was a pattern in the stars, and it was Dr Ling’s diagram. Every dot exactly as he had shown it.

She stood there for a moment, looking down at the universe. She felt very, very small indeed.

The electron tapped her foot again.

They moved.

The Blue-Violet Well

The final well was different. Ari knew it immediately.

This one held still.

A deep blue-violet quiet that felt full.

Ari climbed off the electron and crouched beside it. She had been riding it for so long she had assumed it was solid.

It’s made of waves.

She reached toward it and found no surface. Just patterns of energy moving in every direction and spreading into the space around it.

She remembered something Dr. Ling had said once, half to himself.

At the smallest scales, the universe stops being a collection of objects. It becomes a collection of relationships.

Then the well began to show her things.

The red well first. All those versions of herself, still shimmering. The choices she’d made in each version had all been hers. Every single one of them. Which meant she had similarly assembled this particular version of her life without knowing it.

That’s a bit alarming.

The red well faded.

The orange appeared. The points of light were swooping together. She found herself among them, a single point threaded to everyone who had shaped her and everyone she had shaped in return. Her sisters. Her friends. The teacher who had said something once, that she still thought about.

Every one of them had changed her. And she had also changed every one of them. Without any of them realising it.

The orange dissolved.

Now the yellow. Stars above and below, revealing the same shapes at every scale. The universe, it turned out, did not invent different rules for different sizes of things. What governed an electron governed a galaxy. And if it governed a galaxy, it governed everything in between.

Including her.

Ari sat beside the electron and thought about this.

She had assembled herself from choices. She was woven into a pattern far larger than herself. And the same rules that applied to the electron applied to her too.

Which meant she wasn’t solid either.

She looked at the waves. She was more like them than she had known.

It was a very good thought.

Then she smiled. And climbed back on. The corridor lit up, showing the way back home. Each well glowing as she passed through.

The Return

Ari blinked.

She was back at the long table on the seventh floor. Her notebook open, her pen in hand.

Dr. Ling was still drawing on the whiteboard.

“…and so the electron arrives here,” he was saying, tapping the final dot.

"You cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string. The electron carries everything it has passed through with it. That is the point."

Ari looked down at her notebook.

She had written one word.

Shuttling.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of wonder is something Ari didn’t expect to learn from a silicon chip. She is not a fixed thing moving through life, but a form of the relationships between everything she has passed through.

Nothing lived is ever truly left behind, it travels with you.

The Idea

Every morning I give gratitude for another day. It’s another chance to learn something new and to make some small difference to someone else. I light incense to cleanse my mind, a ghee lamp to give me clarity, and listen to calming music.

One morning, I was in the middle of it when I heard screeching coming from outside.

It was panicked, coming from the balcony. I looked through the glass doors to see what was going on. It was a rainbow lorikeet, screeching loudly and looking around lost and confused.

Head down, then up, then left, then right. It could hear its companion but couldn’t see it. The screeching got louder, more frantic. It flew to the left, and then toward me, then back to the left, trying to work out where its other half was. Until it finally figured out it was on the balcony upstairs, and just like that it was gone.

I stood there for a moment, fascinated by what I had just seen.

It felt familiar. Almost exactly what I do when I can’t find my husband, although I don’t think he appreciates my screeches ;)

I’d always thought that the need to find the one person whose presence settles everything was just love between two people.

Turns out love is not uniquely human at all.

The Science

What sounds like screeching is actually a specific sound rainbow lorikeets make to locate their companion, when they can’t see them. You can think of it like a signature sound, the same way you’d recognise a specific person’s voice in a noisy room.

Lorikeets pick up new sounds throughout their lives from the birds and environment around them, adding to the range of calls they can make. So the sounds they produce keep changing and growing. This had always puzzled scientists because if their voices keep changing, how do they recognise each other?

In 2023, researchers at the Max Planck Institute found the answer studying monk parakeets - another parrot species. Even though a bird’s call changes throughout its life, its voice always sounds like itself.

That consistent underlying tone, unique to each bird, is what allows them to find each other across distance and noise. It's called a voice print.

It’s the same way you’d recognise your best friend’s voice whether she or he is laughing, whispering, or singing. Something about it always stays the same because your brains learn the sound of the people you love and maps it permanently.

That morning the lorikeets used a distress call that only they could understand, and listened out for each other. That’s quite intimate, because in a way their voice prints - or calls - were serving one another.

Stay with me here.

• When they were moving through trees, calling let the other know I’m here, stay near me.

• When they were in danger, calling warned the other and said I will keep you safe.

• When one flew off and they were separated, calling comforted the other and said I will find you.

So the voice print was in service of the relationship, and not just for survival.

It said,

I am here. Are you still there?

Come this way.

Don’t lose me. I won’t lose you.

It’s love at its simplest. The repeated act of recognising each other.

Where It Shows Up

In a healthy partnership between two people who constantly check in on one another, so they know they are emotionally safe. They recognise when something is off before the other has said a word, and show up to the distress call. In times of despair, they take the lead and say follow me. It’s something most of us forget to do, almost always distracted by our own needs that we totally miss it.

It shows up in the relationships you have with your siblings and parents, who hear something shift in your voice and already know something is up. So they rally together to show up and make sure you don’t feel alone.

And it comes up at work, when a colleague notices you’ve gone quiet, and can see you’re feeling unsafe, so steps in. These people are your work lorikeets, because they pay enough attention to recognise others.

In each case, someone learned the sound of you. And didn't stop listening.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of fascination is an important lesson that came from the most unlikely messenger, a lost lorikeet.

It called for its companion without hesitation. And it didn’t stop until it found it.

There are people in your life who have been doing the same thing. Learning the sound of you. Calling out to find you. It may be a partner, it may be family, it may be a colleague.

Whoever it is, the people who learn the sound of you often don’t know the effect they have.

Tell them today.

The Idea

I almost walked right past it.

A light projection hovered above the water at Vivid Sydney. I didn’t quite know what I was looking at, so I sat down and waited to see what would happen.

The longer I watched, the more it pulled me in.

It moved through space, showing planets, stars, and geometric patterns that shifted and folded until it arrived at a black hole.

It was at this point, staring at a portal-shaped pattern of light that looked like something out of Dr Strange, that a question I’ve been carrying my whole life surfaced again.

If I can watch time passing, what part of me is doing the watching?

The Science

Sir Roger Penrose is a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2020. He has spent decades studying the relationship between the brain, consciousness and the physical world. And what he concluded is this.

The brain produces many things. But it does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is simply awareness, the part of you that experiences, feels, and knows that you exist. And awareness cannot be simulated or replicated, not by a computer, not by technology, not by anything science can currently explain.

Therefore, consciousness isn’t contained inside the brain. It exists beyond it.
And if it exists beyond the brain, it isn't limited by the body either.

If this is true, then we don’t begin at birth, or end at death. We may be timeless.

Which brings me to time.

Most physicists believe that past, present and future all exist simultaneously. Not one after the other, but all at once. It’s called the block universe, that states every moment you have ever lived, and every moment you haven’t lived yet already exists.

Your mind processes these moments one piece at a time because it has to.
If everything arrived all at once, it would be impossible to make sense of them. So it puts them into a sequence instead - what is past, present, and future.

But that's not strictly how time works, it’s just how the mind carries it.

If time isn’t the straight line your mind makes it, and if consciousness exists beyond your body, then the question of whether you have always existed becomes a very real one.

Not the person you are, but the awareness that sits behind everything you think and feel and know. Does that part of you really have a beginning and end? Maybe it was here long before this life, and will continue long after it.

Where It Shows Up

You may have watched Quantum Leap, a show from 1989 that follows a physicist whose consciousness gets pulled out of his body and sent back in time, leaping into different people's lives across different moments in history. Decades later the same idea showed up in The OA on Netflix, where a woman has near death experiences and discovers she can move between dimensions, existing outside the rules of time and the body entirely.

You may have had that feeling of having been somewhere before, when you know you haven't. Charles Dickens explored déjà vu in his 1850 novel David Copperfield as a feeling, he said, of having been here before in a remote time. Of knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if you suddenly remembered it.

Scientists have studied it and found that the experience is real, because it can be measured. What they haven't found is a complete explanation for where it comes from. But the possibility that it's a trace of a life already lived hasn’t been ruled out.

You may have seen YouTube videos about near death experiences. They all describe the same thing, that time stops existing and people seeing every moment of their life all at once. They share an overwhelming sense of love and connection to everything and everyone. And may be experiencing time the way the block universe says it actually is.

And then there are those visitations from friends and family members who have passed away. You know this if it’s happened to you. They don’t feel like ordinary dreams, they are lucid, calm, and strangely certain, as if a loved one has stepped through the distance death creates to let you know they are okay.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of your life moving in one direction is an idea that changes everything. The mind is turning time into a straight line, but your consciousness is never bound by it.

And because it isn’t, it moves through a timeline that never stops.

From inside the line that the mind creates, everything looks final.
Outside of it, nothing is.

The Idea

It’s 5:30am and I’m at Bondi Beach, cuddled up with my husband, waiting for the sunrise. Around us, dotted along the sand, are others who have come to do the same.

There’s something ritualistic about this, which I love. A community of people have shown up to watch the sky turn golden.

But as I’m sitting here, I feel a sense of shame. Because while I’m waiting, there are lots of people already moving. Runners on the beach, swimmers moving in the early swell. And closest to us, a yoga group, stretching in near silence as the light begins to come in.

There’s a simple philosophy behind what I’m watching. Rise with the sun. Move with its energy. Because the early morning carries the highest vibration of the day, and these people know it. They are in sync with something most of us sleep through - including me - well, except for today.

My eyes stay on the yoga group. The way they stretch deliberately is like they’re greeting every part of themselves before the day starts.

And it reminds me of something I’d read about ants.

The Science

In 1953, a Cambridge-trained entomologist named Derek Wragge Morley published a book called The Ant World. He had been studying ants since he was fourteen, and what he documented about their waking behaviour is, in his own words, a very human-like ritual.

When an ant wakes, it stretches every part of its body before it moves. Scientists have a word for this - pandiculation. It's the involuntary urge to stretch on waking. Humans do it. Dogs do it. And as it turns out, so do ants.

After the stretching comes what Wragge Morley calls a prolonged grooming. The ant systematically cleans its antennae, head, and body before it does anything else. Only after both are done does it get started with its day.

There’s a reason for all of this. An ant finds its way through the world almost entirely through its antennae, picking up chemical signals that tell it where to go, what to eat, and who to trust. If those antennae are dirty from sleep, the ant is essentially operating blind. The grooming fixes that, and the stretching wakes the muscles up. Neither step gets skipped.

Similarly, humans have known this for thousands of years. Ayurvedic medicine, which is an ancient Indian approach to health and wellbeing that predates modern medicine, has been recommending the same morning sequence: to stretch and move when you wake up, then cleanse the body before the day begins.

The practice is called Dinacharya. The ant does it in minutes, for humans it’s takes a bit longer. But the principle is the same: move first, then clean the body, then begin your day.

Where It Shows Up

A friend told me that her cat does this every single morning - stretching every part of its body when it wakes up. She’d never thought about why. Most people who have pets will have seen the same.

If you’ve stayed at a wellness hotel, you might have signed up to a morning yoga session which is almost always the first thing on the schedule. It’s always at sunrise, before breakfast, and before you do anything else.

And whilst yoga has become a modern fitness trend, it’s actually rooted in Hatha yoga, the physical practice that most modern yoga descends from. It was never designed as exercise, but a preparation ritual used by Hindus and Buddhists as a way of waking the body up before meditation.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of the stretch is the truth that we are just like ants.

The pull you feel to lengthen and reach before you get out of bed is something your body wants to do. The ant knows it, the cat knows it, and history knows it.

Somewhere along the way, we gave our innate wisdom on stretching away to the fitness industry, confusing it for something done at the gym, or a yoga class.

But that’s not what it is. It never was.

Stretching is intimately connected to who we are, with the natural world, done universally.

Before you reach for your phone tomorrow morning, let the stretch happen. The ants will be doing it, so you're in good company.

The Idea

This happened a long time ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

It’s 3am and I’m awake.

Anxiety has pulled me out of sleep again. I’m lying in the dark going over and over what I’m going to say tomorrow.

Just stay calm. Say the right things. Don’t answer back. It’ll be fine.

I’ve been saying that to myself for a year now.

He appeared to have it all. Charismatic, visionary, the kind of person who walked into a room and immediately owned it. Everyone admired him. I admired him, it’s why I’d joined his team, and I trusted he would open doors for me.

If only I’d known it would turn out like this. His fists slamming the table. I couldn’t think straight. Frozen. Told I was wrong, told I didn't listen, told that I was too special to behave like this.

Did that just cross a line?

I was so consumed by anxiety that I couldn’t pick myself up. I stopped speaking up at work and at home too.

The Niki who always spoke her mind was on the floor, along with her confidence.

For a long time I thought the whole thing was my fault. But I was wrong.

Everything changed when I stopped asking what was wrong with me, and started wondering what had happened to him.

The Science

Picture the moment as it unfolded.

I’ve said something. Maybe given a different perspective that didn’t fit with his. You know the kind of thing that gets shared in meetings all the time.

But he reacted immediately. I saw him tighten up, and then the disproportionate anger came in fast. His fists came down on the table, again, and again. His voice filled the whole room - direct, accusatory, threatening.

I did what I had done so many times before, I went small and said nothing.

Please God, let it be over soon.

He tells me to leave, so I get out of there quickly.

He’s alone now.

He picks up his phone almost immediately and calls someone who will listen. As he speaks, he needs to hear that he was right. That what he said was reasonable and that I must be the problem.

There's something in science that helps explain this moment.

Every human brain has a system whose only job is to keep you alive. It scans your environment constantly looking for anything that might be a threat. When it detects danger, it moves fast, flooding the body with stress hormones. This shuts down rational thought, and takes over completely.

Neuroscientists call this an amygdala hijack — the moment the brain’s threat detection system overrides rational thought entirely. It happens in seconds, before the conscious mind has caught up. And it looks, from the outside, exactly like anger.

In most people, another part of the brain will step in quickly to reason clearly, find empathy, and offer perspective. It will say: this is just a meeting, you’re safe, stand down.

But when someone has spent years, maybe a lifetime, learning that their position in the room is the thing keeping them safe the threat response runs the show.

And what comes out isn’t leadership. Let me repeat that, what comes out isn’t leadership. It’s someone who was never taught that a difference of opinion doesn’t mean danger.

The phone call ends. The feeling settles in him, for now.

He doesn’t know that nothing has actually been resolved. He doesn’t know he’ll need to make the same call to his friend tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

He doesn’t even know that the anger in the room was his fear dressed up as authority.

He just knows he needed to hear that he was right.

Where It Shows Up

You know this person.

It might be a boss who takes credit for your ideas at the same time as dismissing them. Or a partner who needs to say the last word. Or a friend who leaves you minimised in every conversation and you can’t quite put your finger on why.

What makes this so hard to see in the moment is that these people are often extraordinarily compelling on the surface. Charming, decisive, magnetic.

But the gap between the public version and the private one is precisely the point. They perform confidence. It’s how their fear stays hidden, even from themselves.

What they do to you in those moments has nothing to do with who you are, because it is actually about them.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of being shut down is someone else’s fear looking for a place to go.

There’s a principle in physics that says energy cannot be created or destroyed — it can only move from one place to another. His anxiety became my 3am. His fear became my self-doubt. His instability became my silence.

I didn’t create any of that. I just absorbed it.

He taught me something I really needed to learn: finding humility instead of bitterness in an unbearable situation — because that was the only part of it that was mine to choose.

Humility doesn’t excuse what happened, but it helped in understanding that the energy being transferred to me wasn’t mine to hold onto. And just like that, after years of pain, I let it go.

I didn’t know that while I was lying awake at 3am, rehearsing my survival. But I know it now.

And if you’re lying awake right now rehearsing yours — I want you to know it too.

Someone else’s inability to regulate themselves is not evidence that you are too much, too wrong, or too difficult.

It is evidence that their fear needed somewhere to go.

If you can get to this place, gratitude and freedom can begin.

The Idea

I didn’t expect silence to be so loud.

When I moved to Sydney I had left a career, a city, and a version of myself. I knew it was the right call, a choice I’d made with both eyes open. I stepped off the plane ready for a fresh start. Genuinely ready. And then, well, nothing happened.

For the first month I let myself settle in. And then, the panic set in.

Omg, what have I done? Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life?

I wasn’t sure, so I did what I always do when things feel uncertain. I defaulted to work. I went on a mission to understand the job market - the landscape, the equivalent title of my previous role, the pay bandings, and where my skills might fit in. I told myself I was taking practical steps, but if I’m honest, I was looking for myself in a job title. And it wasn’t there.

Working in deep tech had given me a lot of purpose and belonging, but now without it, I didn’t quite know who I was.

So I kept moving. Applications, introductions, threads with no replies. I kept showing up every day as if effort alone could fast-forward the process. What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn’t stuck because I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was stuck because I hadn’t yet understood what the pause was actually for.

It took an octopus to explain it to me.

The Science

An octopus has three hearts.

Wait, what? How wasn’t I taught this in school?

Yes, three hearts. Two smaller ones handle the background work of keeping it alive — pushing blood through its gills, ticking away without any effort from the octopus at all. And one main heart that does everything else, things like powering its brain, arms, and decisions.

For most of its life, the octopus moves slowly and deliberately across the seafloor. Swimming is reserved for moments of genuine threat, and every time it does, something has to give. Its main heart stops. Not slows, it actually stops.

The pressure of high-speed movement is so intense that the heart simply cannot beat. The harder it pushes forward, the more its main heart shuts down.

So the octopus does the most logical thing. It walks instead, because walking is the only mode that keeps all three hearts beating. It gives itself the reset it needs before it moves again with any real force.

We are not so different. You cannot run on panic mode and build the next version of yourself at the same time. Something has to slow down first.

Really slow down.

Where It Shows Up

You can feel this in the gaps between chapters in your life, whether you chose them or not.

The months after a relationship ends, before you know who you are without it. The stretch between leaving one job and finding the next one that fits what you want to do next. The quiet after a house move, a sudden loss of a loved one, any decision that was right and still cost something real.

We’re hard on ourselves in these pauses, calling them stalling. We treat them as proof that something is missing — drive, direction, a certainty other people seem to carry easily. We try to force the next thing, and when it doesn’t come we push harder, the way the octopus would if it kept trying to sprint with a heart that had already stopped.

A pause is not the absence of progress. It’s the condition for it.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of being stuck is a reset that’s already underway.

About six months into the new start, I sent an email to a contact I’d received from a SXSW mentor. It felt so small against the size of the silence I was sitting in.

I fully expected no response but received a reply immediately. We spoke and she posted my resume out to her network, and Mel Kramer (my hero) grabbed me with both arms. A few days later I interviewed and was offered a role that broke any career ceiling I had reached before.

What followed became Diraq, Subtextt, and moments that slowly started to feel like me again. The next version.

None of it was reachable before the pause had run its course. My main heart had needed the stillness to reset before it could power anything new.

If you’re in a pause right now, let me reassure you that it won’t last forever. The question isn’t how to end it faster, but what you can do inside it to get ready for what comes next.

The Idea

I’ve noticed that I function best when my body and mind are in rhythm. Over the past few years, meditation has become a daily way to tune myself into the day.

What started as an experiment quickly produced results I’d only heard about but never quite believed. My heartbeat, breath, and focus settled into a natural rhythm and everything became clearer and lighter. And my energy slowly began to flow more efficiently.

The Science

Engineers have spent decades trying to solve a problem your body solved long ago. How do you hold energy steady instead of burning through it?

The answer, in both cases, is rhythm.

Think about a child on a playground swing. Push at random times and the swing jerks around, wasting energy. Push at exactly the right moment, just as it reaches the top of its arc, and it climbs higher and higher with almost no effort at all.

Inside your phone is a tiny component called a dielectric resonator, a material engineered to vibrate at one precise frequency. When it hits that frequency, it holds and amplifies energy instead of wasting it. It’s why your signal stays clear instead of drifting.

Your body is doing the same thing.

When your heartbeat, breath, and attention fall into alignment, you stop fighting yourself. The same principle that keeps your phone signal steady is what moves you from scattered and reactive to calm and deliberate.

If you run or walk regularly, you will have experienced this. It’s when your breath, stride, and heartbeat find each other and it stops feeling like effort. Your lungs are in sync with your legs, and your heart isn’t racing ahead. Everything is pulling in the same direction.

Scientists call this state coherence. And your heart is the one leading it.

Your heart is running the show

Research from HeartMath shows that when this state of coherence takes hold, something measurable happens. Your stress hormones decrease, thinking becomes clearer, and your body shifts into a calmer more recovered state almost automatically.

This is why it’s nearly impossible to think clearly when your heart is racing, and surprisingly easy to find focus when your breathing is steady. Your brain takes its timing cues from your heart, not the other way around.

Where It Shows Up

You feel this the moment a piece of music instantly shifts your mood. It’s why a few slow, deliberate breaths can pull you out of a spiral. And why some mornings you wake up already in flow, while other days feel like you’re pushing through mud from the moment you open your eyes.

The difference between those days is often rhythm - whether your heartbeat, breath, and attention are working together or against each other.

Some simple practices that support coherence include slow breathing at around five to six breaths per minute, walking or swimming, and meditation. None of these are complicated. They’re just ways of giving your body the right conditions to find itself.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of exhaustion, of scattered days and effort that goes nowhere - there’s usually a rhythm problem, not a motivation problem.

You aren’t a collection of random parts running on autopilot. You’re a sophisticated biological system that works best when its rhythms aligns, just like that dielectric resonator in your phone, hitting its perfect note.

The solution isn’t to push harder. It’s to find the timing of the swing, and let the momentum build from there.