I wake up with the dawn and I have Randy Newman’s You’ve Got A Friend In Me playing in my head. Quite often I wake up in the middle of a sentence. (I write, apparently, even in my sleep.) But today I wake in the middle of a song.

And I think: music! I haven’t written here nearly enough about music. I used to suggest to my writers that they listen to Moza…

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The Place of Peace started as a gentle bit of British irony. I would find myself standing in a muddy field, in all kinds of weathers, feeling the peace flowing off a mighty thoroughbred mare, trying to join her in it, thinking that this was as close to meditation as I ever got in my life. For once, my monkey mind could rest, and I could believe in the steadiness of the good Scottish earth under my feet, and I could stop trying - trying to prove myself, trying to make everyone think I was fabulous, trying to be someone I was not.

That was the beginning of an unexpected voyage of - what? Discovery, perhaps. Exploration, certainly. A tremendous gathering of tools. A building of what I now call protocols, like a Robert Ludlum novel. (There is the Difficult Person Protocol, for instance, and the Not Enough Sleep Protocol, and the Emotional Processing Protocol. I just take them down off the shelf and there are all the elements, ready to go.)

I changed my entire self for the sake of a horse. (She has very high standards.) But the point is that you are supposed to be dashing around doing all kind of complicated riding, when you have a mare, not standing endlessly in the field breathing and Zenning and connecting with the universe on an atomic level. Thus - the Place of Peace was a little joke at myself.

Now, I think it was actually a slightly brilliant name because oh my goodness, all of us surely need to build inner peace. Outer peace seems like a bitter joke. So it’s up to us, each of us, to create our own place, and perhaps to create little oases of peace where other people can join us, and to link up with anyone on the same quest. And the reason I do five days a week here instead of the standard One Big Essay each week is because this is not definitive.

I keep seeing people who seem to think that all the life conundrums can be solved. You just understand this brain science and you read this data and you keep up with those papers, published by those grand universities, and you’ll be golden. You follow that guru and you read that book and all your problems will be resolved.

This is so wrong it’s almost a category error. It’s why, I think, so many self-help books don’t work. It’s not that some of them aren’t good; it’s that they are being sold incorrectly. Read this book, and change your life! In the same way - listen to this podcast, and your eyes will be open!

In fact, if I have learned one thing at the very heart of this funny Open University of the Place of Peace which I created for myself, it is that everything is about the process and not the destination. My horses too have taught me this. It’s not fixing everything and getting your five gold stars. It’s absolutely learning something every day, and constantly testing your ideas, and tweaking this, and adapting that. It’s going back to the old friends - the wise books, the reassuringly excellent thinkers - and remembering all the parts you have forgotten. (We humans, I say, over and over, are champion forgetters.)

What is lovely, in this ongoing process, is to have someone with you, who gets it. Some of us have good friends, whom we can ring at five in the morning. (It helps if they live in a timezone on the other side of the world, so they are just having their tea.) But sometimes those good friends are away or busy and you need another kind of companion.

We all need a companion, and I’ll invent those out of binder twine and duct tape if I have to. (For instance, I often think of the poems of Mary Oliver or Wendell Berry as companions. Many songs, which have been with me through all the heartbreaks, count totally as old friends.)

Here is one such. This Place of Peace is designed to be a good companion.

I won’t tell you that you have to read one solve-everything book and get all your ducks in a row and go to the top of the class. I will show up, sometimes a bit cracked round the edges, sometimes slightly out there on the whimsical fringe, every Monday to every Friday. With all the ideas, some of them speculative and works-in-progress, some totally practical and stress-tested to destruction. All of them useful, in one way or another.

And on we go, side by side. That, to me, is a lovely thing.

I think this may not be the precisely accurate title I am looking for. I was going to talk about shifts, but that’s not quite right either. It’s whatever the opposite of stuckness is. I want to talk about keeping things flowing along. About letting things roll.

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I find two lines, buried away in an old file.

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One of the things I love the most about writing the Monday-to-Friday Place of Peace is that this process makes me draw constant lessons from my own life.

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When I started running Place of Peace groups, right at the very beginning, I’d say, ‘There is no right and wrong in this group.’

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I love a mission. I much prefer it to a goal. (Goals are too concrete. You hit, or you miss. A mission is marvellously flexible and it can all go to hell but you still pick yourself up and move swiftly and laughingly on to Plan B.)

I like over-arching missions. I have, for instance, a Ten Year Plan, which sounds very posh but really is just me thinking, ‘When I am seventy I would like my life to look like this.’ And then there is a little movie in my head, or a vignette.

I also like strictly limited mini-missions. Going from now to June, I have a bit more space in my calendar than usual. Clients have moved on, or finished their books. I’ve put a lot of the new clients into groups at 5pm or 6pm. And for a couple of months, I’ve worked out, I can afford to keep that lovely space in the middle of the day. In July, I’ll need to fill it up again; in the meantime, I am on such a mission, I can’t even tell you.

I’m going to give my writing a marvellous blast. I’m going to think about ways to get better, to charge out of my comfort zone, to be wild and fierce. I’m going to stretch my muscles and my sinews. I want to see.

It might be that this is all my talent and all my skill and there is no taking it up a notch. I may belong in the intermediate. But suddenly, at the age of 59, I want to find out whether I can consciously raise the bar. Let’s go crazy, and discover.

It’s a tiny mission. It won’t mean anything to anyone else. It means so much to me that I’m getting butterflies in my stomach even thinking about it.

Can you do that? Give yourself the most idiosyncratic mini-mission you can think of? Not give a sod whether anyone else gets it or not? Experiment and explore and see?

What do we have to lose but our chains?

I’ve had someone to stay this weekend and she knows all the about the brain. The brain is her job and her expertise. She has a brilliant brain and she uses it to do marvellous things.

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I know that your lives are very rarely simple.

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Just ask yourself good questions.

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This one is so simple that I feel I may be teetering on the edge of parody.

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I normally do a longer essay on a Tuesday. Today, I’m going to challenge myself to do a shorter essay.

Why? Because so much of modern society and culture is predicated on more. More money, more success, more productivity, more projects, more social media posts,…

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This week, we are going to do five marvellously plain, really quite obvious things. Things you know. Things your Granny definitely knew. But things that we can sometimes forget, when we are rushing around trying not to lose our temper every time we see some celebrity hawking the benefits of generative AI.

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I’m a writer, so I’ve always been conscious of the power of words.

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I’m always walking a very fine line, here at The Place of Peace.

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I laugh a lot when I see people on the internet talking about their morning routines. There’s a famous actor who gets up at something mad like 4am and meditates and prays and does cold plunges and lifts weights and makes disgusting whey shakes or some such. I’m reminded irresistibly of the Monty Python sketch where they boasted about getting up before they went to bed. (They then licked road clean with tongue. Still makes me laugh.)

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A friend sent me a message yesterday with the word ‘phonological’ in it. I had to look it up. I knew it must have something to do with sound but I did not know what. I discovered - and how lovely it is to discover, and to have the means of discovery at my fingertips - that phonology is ‘the science of speech sounds including especially the history and t…

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It won’t always be better in the morning, but quite often it will. And I think there are ways to make the better more likely.

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This week, I’m putting together three new writing offers. (We small businesses always have to be talking about our offers. Actually, it’s a word I quite like, except that the charlatans have got hold of it and now I’m going to have to think of a new word, just like I can never again use the word ‘journey’ because everything is now a sodding journey, and it has come to sound ridiculous to my ears.)

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I think quite a lot about the strength the body needs to go into the later part of life. I need to lift more things and do more stretching and generally give my body back the power it is starting to lose. (I feel very grateful that my body can lift water buckets and look after half-ton flight animals.)

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