Welcome to this journal. It is not particularly useful. It will not fix the economy, cure disease, or explain cryptocurrency (does anyone actually know?). In fact, if we're being honest, these are mostly my wife's tales — small thoughts, wandering ideas, little mental side quests that serve absolutely no purpose for the world. But they serve a purpose for me.

This journal exists mostly as maintenance. Like stretching before a run, watering a plant that may or may not be alive, or occasionally cleaning out the mysterious drawer in the kitchen that contains batteries, rubber bands, a single candle, and three instruction manuals for appliances we no longer own.

Lately… my brain feels like it's permanently stuck on scroll. Not the peaceful kind of scroll where you slowly read something meaningful. No. The frantic kind. The thumb-flicking, never-finish-a-thought, move-on-to-the-next-thing type of scrolling. Thoughts rush through like commuters trying to catch the last train. None of them sit down long enough to introduce themselves.

Ideas start. Ideas stop. Ideas get halfway through a sentence and then disappear like someone closing 27 browser tabs at once (guilty). Closure? Rare.

Over the years I've realised something about the way my mind works. It has been said to me that I tend to notice the small things — the moments that many people walk past without stopping. A strange line of sunlight across the kitchen bench. A sentence someone says that could mean three different things depending on how you hear it.

Those little observations used to have somewhere to go — into great communication, into ideas, into creativity, into stories or projects that lived somewhere outside my head. But somewhere along the way, life has become loud. Responsibilities stacked up. Expectations crept in. And gradually those small thoughts stopped leaving my head. They just stayed there — piling up quietly like things you keep throwing on that chair rather than putting away.

Which, when you think about it, is a slightly ridiculous sentence. Seeing through sound. But that's exactly how it feels. And somewhere in all of that noise I think I lost a little piece of myself. Not dramatically. Not in a movie montage kind of way. Just slowly, unknowingly — the way creativity sometimes slips quietly into the background when life gets busy.

And recently I realised something that felt a little unfair: I haven't been offering that same kindness to my own imagination that I offer to my four-year-old's. Mine has been shoved into the back of my brain like a messy closet. You know the one — where you throw things in quickly and close the door before gravity exposes your poor organisational skills.

Inside that closet live half-written stories, strange observations, ideas for projects that happen in the shower, philosophical questions that appear while brushing teeth, and the occasional thought that arrives on the toilet to which I insist is brilliant (it rarely is).

This journal is me opening that closet. Slowly. Carefully. Preferably while wearing personal protective equipment.

So… this journal will be messy. Some entries will be thoughtful. Some will be strange. Some will probably make perfect sense only to me. But that's okay. Because sometimes the purpose of writing is not to explain the world. Sometimes it's simply to slow the scroll.

And maybe, somewhere between the noise and the quiet, I'll find the parts of myself that were never actually lost — just waiting patiently to be written down.

On being a creature of routine in a universe that never read the itinerary.

A note before we begin: this article was born from a conversation about veganism — a lifestyle I do not personally follow (yet, maybe). That conversation did something unexpected. It didn't make me want to change my diet (fully). It made me think, quite seriously, about why change itself feels so confronting. What follows is less about food, and more about that feeling. The cheese is staying. That part is non-negotiable.

I've realised something about myself as I get older. I am, quite unapologetically, a creature of routine. I like knowing roughly how the day will unfold. I enjoy the quiet comfort of predictable patterns — the same morning rhythm, the same general flow to the day, the same unspoken agreement with the universe that if I do A, then B should logically follow.

Of course, the universe has never signed that agreement. In fact, if the universe had a personality, I suspect it would be that friend — the one who enjoys practical jokes and dramatic plot twists. Because life, for me personally, has rarely unfolded the way I expected it to. If I look back honestly, it has been less of a carefully drawn map and more of a series of curveballs thrown by someone with excellent aim and deeply questionable timing.

Plans change. Paths bend. Entire chapters appear that were never on the original itinerary. And then, of course, there was the moment the entire world collectively experienced the ultimate plot twist — that little thing referred to as the global pandemic. Suddenly everyone's routines, plans, and carefully structured lives were tossed into the air like confetti at a party nobody meant to attend.

You would think that living through something like that would make a person remarkably good at change. You would think that after enough curveballs, someone would simply become an excellent catcher. A seasoned, roll-with-it kind of human who greets disruption with a serene smile and a well-prepared contingency plan. I am not that human. Not entirely, anyway. I have the serene smile. The contingency plan remains a work in progress.

The Conversation That Started It

It began, as many unexpectedly philosophical moments do, with food. Someone I know spoke with open curiosity about a veganism documentary — the ethics of it, the definite benefits, the environmental weight of it, the quiet but insistent logic of it. I listened. I nodded in the places that warranted nodding. And I felt a small but unmistakable niggle of guilt, because I knew in that moment — with great clarity and zero remorse — that I am not giving up truffle cheese. Does anyone, really? Has anyone ever watched a documentary and thought: yes, this is the moment I say goodbye to camembert, brie and blue.

But something else happened in that conversation, something I didn't expect. A small, uncomfortable question took up residence in the back of my mind and refused to leave: why does the mere idea of that kind of change feel so unsettling? Not the veganism itself. But the category of change it represents — the kind that doesn't just ask you to take a different route to work, it asks you to look at something you've done your entire life and reconsider it entirely.

The Polite Changes and the Grinding Ones

Here's the thing — I'm not actually anti-change. I'll happily rotate coffee mugs. I'll change my running route without complaint. I'm perfectly comfortable rearranging the small, harmless details of life. Those kinds of changes feel manageable. They feel, frankly, polite.

But the change that conversation was gesturing at? That's a different species entirely. Because eating meat isn't just a habit for most people — it's a given. It's what was on the table growing up. It's Sunday roasts and barbecues and the assumption so deeply embedded it barely qualifies as a choice. Asking someone to reconsider it isn't just asking them to change what they eat. It's asking them to look at a piece of their identity and wonder, perhaps for the first time, whether they'd have chosen it if they'd chosen consciously.

And that, I think, is where the grinding begins. People, this is just food. Dinner. The contents of a plate. If that conversation alone is enough to make us squirm, what on earth are we doing with the genuinely hard ones? Racism. Gender equality. LGBTQI rights. Abortion. War. Climate change. These aren't dinner table inconveniences — they are the defining questions of our time, and they are all, in one way or another, asking the same uncomfortable thing: are you willing to reconsider what you've always assumed was simply the way things are?

None of this means every idea demanding change is correct, or that every challenge to tradition is automatically progress. But it does mean that the discomfort we feel when these topics arrive at the table — uninvited, inconvenient, and refusing to leave quietly — is worth paying attention to. Because discomfort, it turns out, is often just the feeling of something important trying to get in.

The Quiet Defence Mechanism

Why is it so difficult to accept those kinds of changes? Is it simply habit? Or is it something deeper — some quiet defence mechanism that activates the moment we feel the ground shifting beneath something we've always believed was simply normal? I suspect it's both, and then some. Because accepting that kind of change asks something quite specific of us: it asks us to admit that the old way might not have been the best way. And humans, generally speaking, are not particularly fond of that feeling.

What the Vegans Might Actually Be Onto

I want to be clear: this is not the part where I announce a dietary revelation. My relationship with a chicken schnitzel remains intact and I will not be taking questions. But the conversation did do something useful. It held up a mirror — not only to my plate, but to my patterns. It asked, without meaning to: how many of the things you do without thinking have you ever actually thought about?

And that's a question worth sitting with, regardless of what you eat, who you worship, or what your values may be. Because the willingness to genuinely examine your defaults — not to necessarily change them, but to choose them consciously rather than simply inherit them — is, I think, one of the quieter forms of personal growth. Less dramatic than a transformation montage. More honest than most. Considerably less photogenic, but somehow more useful.

A Small Promise I'm Considering Making to Myself

I remain, at my core, a creature of routine. I don't think that will change, nor do I particularly want it to. But it is definitely time to renegotiate my relationship with the kind of change that challenges identity — the change that doesn't just move the furniture but asks why it was arranged that way in the first place.

Instead of resisting that discomfort. Instead of treating every challenging idea like a personal attack disguised as a dinner conversation. Maybe I could start welcoming it as what it actually is: an invitation to be a little more deliberate. A little more awake. A little more chosen in how I move through the world.

After all, if the curveballs are coming regardless — and if some of them arrive in the form of a very earnest conversation about oat milk versus cow's milk, or any of the other things that tend to ignite a dinner table without warning — I may as well let them make me think rather than simply make me defensive.

And who knows. Perhaps the best version of this story is one that required a few unexpected conversations to arrive at something worth saying — or a curveball worth stepping toward.