A time for action, a time for inaction

On New Year's Day I didn't leave the house. I didn't even get out of my pyjamas. I had an overwhelming desire to go nowhere, see no-one and do nothing, to retreat into my cave, my home. I stayed in bed until midday, reading, then spent the next two weeks doing....whatever.

In hindsight, the batteries had been depleting for a while. I have several partly written emails to you for example, that I just couldn't bring myself to finish. I usually enjoy writing to you.

It shouldn't be a surprise I guess. I've spent the last 14 months on the move.

You might know I'm a committed track athlete. I train 5-6 times per week. My local track has been closed since the end of 2024 which means I either have to spend 8-10 hours per week battling Sydney traffic just to be able to train, or I have to live elsewhere.

For the first six months I battled the traffic. I hated it. What a waste of my life time.

For the last year + I've been a nomad - at first weekly trips up to the Central Coast staying in caravan parks, then house-sitting and then renting a room in Cairns (where several arrangements fell through at the last minute and I had to re-organise things from scratch). Then since October I've been staying at a friend's place in Melbourne and traveling back home for visits.

I was supposed to go back to Melbourne at the start of January. But the idea of packing my bag again and going back to the airport made me want to cry. I just needed to stop!

This is how I ended up in my pyjamas on New Year's Day.

On top of this exhaustion, I recently found myself having an existential crisis at the terrifying prospect of what could happen to human civilisation if we don't make the huge changes we need to avoid climate change, FAST! These are not new thoughts to me, but I'd been avoiding them for a couple of years.

This brought into question the whole direction I'd chosen for my productive energies for the rest of my days - Flourish Personal Growth! Am I doing the best I can to further the cause? Should I return to doing leadership development and offer it to organisations on the front line of climate change?

For a time, it seemed to me that I might be attending to higher order needs while the house is burning down.

With the help of AI, I identified a sector that I could get passionate about - one that could make an enormous difference - alternate protein sources (human consumption of meat contributes more CO2 to the environment than all forms of transport combined!!!) This includes cultivated meats, plant-based meats and fermented proteins. These would also address food security, world hunger, and help avoid the next global pandemic! (See The Good Food Institute here if you're interested.)

But in my still moments I noticed a reluctance to move ahead.

My husband Matt asked me several times what I was doing about it. But moving to action seemed very clearly the wrong thing to do at that point. All I could say was you've got to slow down before you turn a corner.

The very question felt wrong. I just knew deep down that racing off in a new direction wasn't right. I had to sit with the discomfort of this in-between place and give it time to yield what it wanted to offer.

And so I stopped. It was a very uncomfortable place to stop, but I did it anyway.

It's moments like these that I'm so glad I've prioritised time over money in my life. I would be much richer if I'd stuck to leadership development in the corporate world, but I wouldn't have the time to spend two weeks just pottering around home doing not much at all, giving myself whatever time I needed for this flux to settle.

It's easy to get swept up in our culture's 'doing' momentum, its emphasis on action as the only valuable use of time, seeing life as one long string of productivity. But I believe that's a recipe for finding ourselves either way off track somewhere down the line, spending emotional energy suppressing that quiet voice that asks those important questions like: what really matters? Or worse, perhaps regretting our choices once it's too late to re-choose.

I want to suggest we see our emotional energy as a cycle. We spend time acting on the world, then we cycle to inaction - to stillness. That allows us to tilt our wings if we need to as we fly off into the world of action again, regularly homing back to our nest, our still place, before setting off again. Regularly taking time to stay aligned with what matters to us. Regularly choosing again rather than just do, do, doing whatever's in front of us.

As we say in athletics, rest is as important as running - it's not actually doing nothing, it's allowing our bodies to adapt so that they can better meet the challenges we throw at them next time.

That analogy applies directly to personal growth. Still time allows us to be self aware, to be grounded in what matters, in our intentions for how we want to show up in the world, to re-orient, to tilt our wings in the direction of greater flourishing.

If we do a good job of honouring this need for still time, of time in the cave as I've been calling it, we find ourselves, as I have this week, naturally moving to reinvigorated action again when we are ready. I'm now back here enjoying writing to you, my mind feeling grounded, energised and ready to face 2026.

If we see our energy like a hose rather than a cycle of action and re-generation, like the athlete who devalues rest, we end up burnt out, overwhelmed, or in crisis as we find ourselves living a life that's empty, exhausting, overwhelmed, or out of whack with our values.

If you're a member of PAR (People Against Rushing), you'll know that one of the three commitments is to put nothing time in the diary. I've just lived through a stark example of how essential this is to a flourishing life.

I haven't resolved my crisis yet, but I have some perspective on it. It's not a decision I need to make right now. There may in fact be nothing I can do. I'm sitting with the question and allowing it time to come down to ground from being the panicked existential thought it was initially.