Embracing uncertainty

We tend as humans to strive for certainty and definition, hard lines and comprehensible patterns, familiar routines and rituals. Life, however, is rarely certain or hard edged. We don’t know how long we have here on earth. Sometimes it’s tempting to follow a leader just to have some clear rules to obey. We may well want a rest from change. But change is the essence of growth and more often than not is complex, interdependent and not entirely predictable. What’s most interesting and inspiring in life is hard to pin down and fully define. You can’t draw in black lines the feeling of walking home after your first kiss. Uncertainty is full of promise…

Mental Radar

Phillips auction house, Berkeley Square

Our mental radars are fascinating. We can train our brains to notice certain things.

After spending 13 years at Channel 4 where issues of diversity were a thing long before the advent of DEI and where giving a platform for minority voices of all kinds is baked into the remit, a sensibility becomes instilled meaning that when I visited the Royal Opera House last week I quickly noticed there were no black people among the thousands of audience members (eventually I spotted one person plus one on stage (the maid of course)).

Many years ago I met a lovely eccentric woman called Karen. She used to find single gloves in the street and take them home and hang them over the bath. I think the idea was to reunite single gloves with their lost partners. I evolved this into a photo game when Insta came along (long before Tom Hanks got the glove-photo habit). After years of posting #onelostglove photos not only do I have a highly evolved capability for spotting single gloves, but also it has rubbed off on some of my friends and followers who now notice lone gloves and even send me their glove-pictures on the sly from all over the world.

Whole lotta glove