When we arrive, there’s a crowd of people milling around in the entrance hall, nobody looking too sure what to do. An official-looking person with a lanyard and some sort of scanner looks around the room. “Anyone else for the five thirty viewing?”

I look over at Anisa and we quickly glance around to see if we’re skipping ahead of anyone else. When nobody else moves, we shuffle towards the official, me frantically trying to make sure the QR codes on our tickets are visible on my phone screen.

“Thank you” he smiles after scanning our tickets. “The exhibition is on two levels, and starts just up these stairs.” We thank him and are on our way. Oddly, nobody else seems to be heading up the stairs, preferring to mill around and cause confusion for newcomers.

I wonder if this is part of the exhibit. It would be cool if it was, somehow.

The stone steps up to the first hall have a runner spilling down the centre, clearly sheepskin or clipped wool, with pink and blue dyes from the sheep still on it. I wonder what the evening will have in store.

I knew very little about Andy Goldsworthy before I attended the exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, a retrospective of fifty years of his work. Anisa had said a few times that she really wanted to go, and we had both then promptly forgotten about it. I had been reminded that week that this was the last weekend, and had booked tickets as a surprise. She had been thrilled.

I was curious, but no more than that. I assumed I would definitely be a “plus one” to this event, happy mainly to watch Anisa get excited about things. I always feel out of my depth at exhibitions, especially for people who are well known. I become painfully aware of how much I don’t know, and it has a tendency to distract me.

All of that ended when I got to the top of the stairs.

Barricading our way from one side of the hall to the other was what looked like a loosely-knitted wall, stretched from one pillar to another. The wall was all sorts of autumnal hues, red, orange, some green, some grey, some yellow. It looked very inviting to the touch, despite the signs strongly advising against this.

I moved closer, and realised that this was no wall of yarn. I felt myself drawn even closer, right to where the material was wound around the pillar, then connected back with itself to form the wall.

It was barbed wire. Miles of it, intricately wound, entwined, and then stretched across the hall. The whole thing was likely four metres high, perhaps eight across. The colours were completely natural, being the rusted and worn parts of the wire.

The whole thing demanded consideration of the craft of the construction. How had this been installed? It was a true installation, too, recruiting the extant pillars of the gallery to its cause. This was not something constructed elsewhere and then imported. The art had been created here, by hands.

I winced at the obvious injury that must have been sustained during its construction.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” a gallery employee was standing next to me. I realised that my nose was maybe a couple of inches from the barbs, my glasses off so that I could see more closely (my age being now advanced to the curse of constantly removing and replacing my glasses as the situation demands). I mumbled some awed “Yes, I was convinced it was wool…”.

“We get a lot of that. I got to watch the team installing this, and I still have no idea how they worked it. I’m sure there was a full health and safety inspection, but still…”

He trailed off, then started pointing out various details: the tufts of wool still caught in the barbs from unfortunate sheep who had strayed too close (much as I was doing now), the fact that the lines did not all go straight from one pillar to the other, but meandered, straying from their lanes to provide the occasional diagonal, connecting threads.

But throughout it all, I found myself disappointed. A team had produced this. Not an artist, but a group. And this was the first thing we saw? How connected was this Andy Goldsworthy to his art? Was he simply an art director, taking credit for the graft of others?

As I would learn, in a way yes, but if so, he had earned it.

We moved to the next rooms: a dark room filled with broken stones, which had been displaced from the ground when graves had been dug. This room was lit by a skylight during the day, but being the night time (Edinburgh in November rarely sees sunlight after 4pm) torches had been provided. The whole thing was oddly insistent, demanding that I see past the fact that it was “just a room full of stones” and instead grapple with the practicality of it. They had been moved, lifted, placed. They looked evenly laid out, still natural, but clearly this was not a natural occurrence. The artifice of nature in a gallery room, brought here at great effort, all to evoke… something. These had been displaced by humans after their lives had ended, and now were exhibited.

The art was impossible to engage with fully without the knowledge of the construction. I was starting to see a theme here even though I assumed another team had been employed here as well.

The next room was a collection of reeds suspended from the ceiling. Again, these were four metres tall at least, impossibly long for reeds, and arranged in a maze around the perimeter of the skylight (this room was the twin of the previous one with the stones). In pitch darkness, we were provided torches, the light from those walking through the maze casting moving shadows like bar-codes on the walls. My vertigo kicked in and I had to leave Anisa to explore alone while I steadied myself on the back wall, listening to another gallery staff member explaining that there was no fixtures to keep the reeds in place. They were jammed into a shelf at the ceiling level, and then subsequent reeds were jammed into the hollow ends of the ones above, leading to the surprising height. There they dangled, free-floating. When some fell, they would be carefully replaced before the next showing.

I found the patterns on the wall mesmerising, not just because of the vertigo they induced. I found myself jealous of being unable to explore the maze myself.

The next room featured a wall taken up by dried mud, a vibrant red colour and cracked from the baking heat of the sun. Four by four metres, at least, and mounted vertically so that the viewer felt they were looking down on the ground. Cracks regular to the sides divided the otherwise random breaks into almost perfect squares, making me wonder what mechanism caused such regularity. Was the surface prepared in some way to force this regularity, or was there some underlying crystal structure to the mud? The plaque (much like the rest) offered no such information, only the raw details of what I was looking at. Meaning and understanding were something the viewer was clearly invited to bring themselves.

Another wall showed pieces made from a dead hare whose carcass had been filled with snow and allowed to drain on to parchment. As gruesome as this sounded, the results were stunningly beautiful, black and red and white ink-blot tests upon which to project your own ideas. Prior to being told the method of creation for these pieces, one had revealed to me the image of a dancing hare or rabbit, feet outstretched, ears high above its head as it whirled like a top.

Onward, we moved to the centrepiece, an oak “walkway” along the length of the next room. Wind-fallen branches of oak trees arranged in two rows along the floor, from the outside looking simply like piles, but from either end of the path between, the edges resolved to sharp, crisp lines. Walking the path, it was clear that like the reeds, there was nothing holding these pieces of wood in place other than the tangle of the other branches themselves. And yet regularity emerged from the chaos.

By this point I had ceased caring about how many or how few people had been involved in these creations, and was simply allowing them to flow through me as experiences. There was something mystical about the colocation of such natural, seemingly randomly assembled materials and the harsh, mechanical regularity that demanded attention be paid to the assembly.

The room after was the one that broke me. Photograph after photograph of scenes in forests. A felled tree with an interesting crack in its bark, but with vividly golden leaves applied to the edge of the crack, then darker and darker hues applied further out, till the crack seemed a black void surrounded by glowing light. The same effect achieved with the same crack, but this time using fallen snow and judicious clearing of the snow in layers to highlight the crack as though cut through sprinkled icing sugar. In another photograph, a particular branch in a pile of branches was chosen to be covered in bright yellow leaves, plastered down to give the effect that the branch itself had been painted.

Another picture showed snow cleared from a succession of fallen branches to give the impression that a dark path had been cut across them all, a jarring negative space in the snow-covered dell.

On and on these photographs went, one optical illusion after another, gently snapping my brain.

I had to leave the room before it became too much. I’m still unsure how to name the feeling that I had. Overwhelm, perhaps, mixed with awe, mixed with some dissonance arising from trying to square the natural setting and materials with the artifice.

We moved on, downstairs now to his earlier work.

Up till now, the rooms themselves had been compounding somewhat. As I moved between the pieces, I found that each new piece made me review the last in new light, such that I had a distinct impression of carrying an increasing “load” as the rooms progressed. I suspect this is what lead to that last room overwhelming me in some way, the common threads of the work all colliding and giving me a glimpse of an overarching… what? Not narrative. I did not feel that he had been trying to tell a cohesive story with these pieces. It was more that each piece had come from a common source, a drive, a need to express… something.

It was downstairs that this something started to make sense. There were only three rooms downstairs, with a more intimate, restrained feeling. This was clearly his earlier work, and gave more of an impression of the artist himself. Here he is, hauling himself through twisted trees and filming the endeavour on super-8 film. Another, he’s walking through frozen ground barefoot, the ice breaking under his weight as we watch his feet, blue and muddy, plunge into the freezing bog below. Each step making itself felt in my own feet, the artist’s silence with each step as impressive as any of the works upstairs.

Then here he is spitting into the air, or at least here are some photographs of him trying to capture it, failing most of the time but in one frame, there he is, time frozen at just the right moment. Yet more of him trying to capture a bundle of sticks thrown into the air. These shots are all taken on film, meaning that nobody had any idea whether any of them would be workable till after the film was developed.

Now he’s trying to capture a rainbow by hitting a pool with a stick, and photographing as the droplets hit the sun. Two or three successful shots, but how long had all this taken? How many rolls of film discarded, how many visits to the pond to try again, how many days where the light wasn’t right?

Then finally, the earliest work, but echoing into the future: split stones arranged such that each gap aligns, rendering the viewer unable to unsee the single, unified crack through the stones. Or a perfect circle of golden leaves on green, made by ripping leaves and sticking them to matching ones and arranging to create the illusion.

All through, this striving to shock us into seeing… what? I came away with a profound sense of humans as being a part of nature, and of our difficulty in seeing this. We dismiss as “unnatural” anything we create, but are any of these pieces “unnatural”? Any more than an inexplicable boulder in an otherwise empty plain, deposited aeons prior by some wandering glacier? Or the Giant’s Causeway of Fingal’s Cave, once thought so unnaturally regular as to be clear evidence of construction, but now understood to simply be a result of the way lava cools?

I left the exhibition somewhat stunned, feeling both apart from and a part of the natural world, sad that I could not immediately return to see the initial works with these fresh eyes (given that this was the last day of the exhibition), but also quite sure that part of this impermanence was the point. We are all our own creations, in many ways, and the biggest revelation to me was that the creation is as much in what we choose to see around us, what we pay attention to, as in how we choose to respond to it.

Now that we’re firmly in the depths of Decorative Gourd Season, it’s time to crack out my hot chocolate recipe. I say “my” hot chocolate recipe as the kids usually begin a campaign around November for the return of “Dad’s hot chocolate”, but in truth it’s a simplified version of a Babish recipe.

Which itself is an imagining of Flanders’s recipe from The Simpson’s Movie.

So I guess it’s interpretation all the way down.

Anyway, I’m not going to duplicate it here. Go and watch Babish’s video and create your own interpretation, since that seems to be the tradition. One word of warning, though: this shit is rich. It’s pretty good in a keep cup when out on an autumnal walk, but if drinking at home, do not plan on doing much after the first mug. Maybe just lying on the couch to recover.

It also works very well as a vehicle for rum, if you are so inclined. Apparently.

When was the last time you answered a greeting question without thinking? The kind of thing I mean is this:

How are you doing today?

It’s a standard opening, which essentially means “I acknowledge your presence with my words”. The actual words themselves are rarely important, and one of the key agreed norms here is that the person initiating the greeting rarely actually wants to know the answer to the question. There’s a reason why the following exchange reads as comedy:

How are you doing today?

Oh well, you know. The bus was early to the stop which frustratingly made me late as I was on time, just in time to see the bus leave. And then the school called to ask me to come and pick up one of the kids as they were sick in class, so I had to bail back home, get the car keys. That said, after that I decided that we should make the most of the morning together so I called in a family support day at work and we watched some movies snuggled under a blanket on the sofa. Then she was sick again, so that ended that. How are you?

…

But the insidious thing I notice, at least around where I live, is that the answer really does hold a message, even when it’s terse. It’s often something like one of the following:

Oh, not too bad

Getting there

Could be worse

Surviving

Mustn’t grumble

All of these clearly position the default answer as being some form of “bad”, and so they seek to reassure the asker that things are not quite as bad as they would expect them to be.

Think about that. I know negativity bias is a thing, but think about how many times we engage in this exchange in a month, or week, or even day. How many times we repeat the mantra, implicitly reminding ourselves that the best we could hope for is a neutral day, and that in most cases, we’re happy to settle for somewhere slightly north of “the worst things could possibly be”.

What effect does this have on our view of the world?

And what if we could flip it. What if, instead of the default “better than disaster” answer or the long rambling life story, we said something like:

Actually, my day’s going pretty well thanks. How about you?

If we said that enough, might we start to believe it? And if we start to believe it, might our brains (hard-wired as they are for confirmation bias) start looking for evidence to support it?

I mean, it might be worth a try.

So yes, I’m definitely doing better than fine. I’m pretty damn good right now, thanks. How about you?

“Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them”, at least according to David Allen. This is all well and good, but why do my systems always end up with me still holding everything in my head?

It’s trust. It’s always trust. I lose trust in my systems. And then I burn them down and start again. It’s a pattern. Part of it, of course, is painting the hammer (“ooh, shiny new app!”), but I’ve started to notice a pattern behind the pattern.

See, every time I start a new system, there’s a honeymoon period. It does work. I do trust it.

Then suddenly, after weeks or months, I notice that it’s stopped working. The ideas have started to build up, unloved. The inbox is overflowing, the momentum is gone.

I wake at 3 in the morning, trying to remember if I added that critical task to the project. I grab my phone, it’s not in the inbox, it’s not in the project. Where is it? I add it to the inbox and go back to sleep, but it’s fitful. Will I really ever see it again?

See, the system has gone from a place of action to a dumping ground. Despite my best efforts to keep things “organised”, all I’m doing is shuffling tasks from place to place. The projects end up with a mix of things to do, ideas for things to do, notes that I think are important, and very little room for actual clarity on what the next thing to work on is.

I’ve gone from farming to gardening. It’s exhausting, leaving me very little time to harvest any crops. And I’ve returned to holding the important stuff in my brain again.

But when did it happen? This time, I found the trap.

The systems always start out the same: a simple list. A brain dump of everything in my mind. The pattern is familiar to anyone who’s spent a minute looking at productivity. Get it all out, then organise it into actions. Notice where an “action” is really a project, and break it down into actual actions.

So I did this, but decided not to do the breakdown. Not yet. What would happen if I just left the “get a new job” project as a task on the list, alongside “take out the bin” and “email changes to the bathroom refit quote”?

It was so crazy it might just work. It also aligned with the underlying idea of this system from Mark Forster, which he calls “resistance zero”. You just have one list, and work on whatever you feel zero resistance for. The hook is that you have to read the whole list, every time you’re choosing what to work on next.

I combined this with Kourosh Dini’s idea of a “visit”. Rather than thinking of “get a new job” as a binary “Only check it off when it’s complete”, I tried thinking of it as an invitation to do “something” on the project. To sit with it.

So, I started. Sat with “get a new job” and figured out there were four or five things I could do right now to move it forward. I added those things to the list, picked a couple, and worked on them.

All good.

The day wore on, and I made progress on the list. I was using Things at the time, just using the “anytime” view to see everything in one list. Ideas kept coming up for actions I could take to get a job, and I added them to the bottom of the list. Resistance remained high to them, so they stayed on the list.

Day turned to night, night turned to day, and in the light of the morning, I saw that I truly, really had a project on my hands. Half of the tasks were to do with the Get a Job project. I was glossing over them as a unit, and what I really wanted to do was see them all together. I wanted to work on “get a job”, to visit with it, to shut everything else out and work on that, to make progress on it. I wanted it to be organised, so that I could get a clear view of it.

So I made a project.

I moved all the related tasks into the project.

And though I didn’t quite realise it yet, the trap was sprung.

Projects feel inevitable. A project is just a list of related actions that build to an outcome. “Get a job” is not an action. I can’t “just” do that. I need to update my CV, find job adverts, write cover letters, write emails, consider what I even want to do, budget out how much money I need and so on.

So we create projects, whether it’s a page in the notebook, a heading in the text file, or an actual “Project” in the to-do app. This becomes a container for all the things, all the actions I listed above, and so on. The organisation feels like it’s progress, like “Okay, so now I can see everything I need to do”.

But all that’s actually happened is that we’ve created needless complexity. We’ve hidden all those actions behind the goal. We now have to work on two things: getting a job, and those actions. It can be easy to fall into the trap of just completing the actions, rather than heading for the outcome.

Worse than that, though, was what I had actually done. I had created an albatross. A shrine to the idea of the outcome.

See, by giving the outcome its own space, it had become separated from the bit of me that did the work. I now had two jobs: doing the work, and planning the work. This is fine when you have a team, but I’m just me.

Except I’m not just me. I am managing a team. I’m managing my workload right now, I’m delegating things to future me, and I’m picking up stuff that past me couldn’t get to.

But past me doesn’t know jack shit about my current context. They guess, but they don’t know. Those actions they left me: are they still relevant? Do I need to preserve them somewhere?

And what about future me? Sure, that idea past me had to reach out to my old boss and see if they have anything interesting I could help with, I don’t think that’s relevant just now, but what if future me loves the idea?

Better keep it around.

Because the project is a safe haven for cruft. It’s separate from the “main list” of stuff to do, so all manner of crap can accumulate in the projects. It hangs around “just in case”, because I’m sure past me had some good intentions.

But by over-indexing on past me, I’m dooming future me to drown in shit.

And guess what. Future me, at some point, is going to say “yeah, fuck that” and stop even looking at the project. They’re going to go back to holding it all in their head.

Trap sprung, future me fucked.

So what now? Am I consigned to concluding that we can’t complete complex things? Obviously not. Well, hopefully that’s obvious.

The problem isn’t the complexity. It’s not even the projects. It’s the accumulation. Projects just make it easier to hide the accumulation.

Ultimately, it comes down to curation. It comes down to editing. Past me just comes up with ideas, suggestions. That’s all the list is: Suggestions from past me.

Dini talks about “honouring” the past self by at least showing up to those suggestions. Deciding not to do them is absolutely a valid course of action.

But I wasn’t even showing up. I was kicking the can down the road, and I was giving myself permission to do this because they were all tied to “get a job”. So everything remained on the table till that project was completed.

My solution? Stop organising.

When I keep everything on the one list, there’s not only nowhere to hide, but I start to feel it when the list gets too long. There’s always going to be more I could add to the list, and I will likely add it, but by adding it to the one list, it makes it more obvious what stuff I can cut. What stuff I can show up to and say “thanks past me. I’m not going to do this now, but if it comes up again future me can add it back”.

So the project process now is quite simple:

1. Decide to work on “get a job”;
2. Add some actions to the one list;
3. Work on some of those actions till I decide to stop working on “get a job”;
4. SCORE OFF “GET A JOB”, and then add it to the end of the list again for future me to work on when they want to;
5. SCORE OFF ANY REMAINING ACTIONS FROM 3. If future me needs them, they’ll come back.

Because it turns out the trust isn’t only in the system holding the ideas. It’s in trusting the system to hold the ideas only as long as they’re useful, in trusting present me to weed out which ideas are not worth holding on to, and in trusting my brain to have more ideas in future.

After all, having ideas is what it’s for.

That horrifying moment when you’re working from the coffee shop (or, let’s be honest, the pub), and you nip to the bar to get a top up, and you leave your stuff on the table because, you know, you trust that people are generally good and honest, but more to the point you can still see the table and besides you’re also between the table and the door, so that if anyone grabs the laptop you’ve got a comfortable amount of time before they run past to position yourself to tackle them to the ground before the even get near the outside.

And you take your drink gratefully from the bartender. Or barista, perhaps. And you amble back to the table, basking in the glow of the general honesty of humanity, and feeling warm and fuzzy in the way toddlers do when they’re cuddling their toy dinosaurs. And you sit to write, but then you realise you need the loo.

And now you’re sitting in the stall, trying to go as fast as you can because you’re convinced that the old boy at the back has been eyeing your kit for hours, and now is his time to strike. He’s downed his pint, wiped the froth from his grizzled chops, and has snatched the laptop, the expensive laptop that you bought with the advance on the work that’s currently sitting on it, and he’s working his way to the door, furiously shuffling, the laptop in one hand, walking cane in the other. And so you pinch it off and wash hands and burst forth from the gents.

And the old boy is, indeed, gone. And the table is empty.

It’s fucking empty.

You’re unsure whether to laugh or cry, slightly stunned by the accuracy of your deepest paranoia, are you perhaps psychic? The table is clear. Everything has gone. Jacket, laptop, backpack, even the drink you just got. They’ve even changed the flowers.

And then you notice you were looking at the wrong table, and your stuff is still there, and the old boy is standing next to you, looking like he’s about to pee himself.

You jump, startled.

“Excuse me”, he says, motioning to the loo. “But are you finished? I’ve been waiting…”.