Inhabiting our lives
I woke up this morning with a lot moving around inside me.
Over the last few days, I’d watched the Take That and Robbie Williams documentaries on Netflix. What stayed with me wasn’t the music or the nostalgia, but the way their journeys became a catalyst for something deeper.
Watching them, I found myself reflecting on what they went through, the inner cost of success, the pressures of being seen, the struggles that unfolded alongside the applause, and how those experiences speak not just to them, but to all of us. Not as spectacle, but through a lens of learning and understanding about how we navigate our own lives.
Lying there, it became clear that these thoughts weren’t really about celebrities at all. They were circling something closer to home, how we experience life, what we look to for fulfilment, and how we learn, or don’t learn, to inhabit ourselves. It’s tempting to think that this kind of life causes the suffering, but I’m no longer sure that’s true.
What if success doesn’t create the wound, but simply amplifies what was already there? For many, being seen, applauded, or valued became a substitute for being met. External validation stepped in where something more fundamental was missing, and no amount of approval can fill a place that was shaped by absence rather than lack of effort. Fame, attention, or achievement don’t resolve that. They remove the buffers, the silence becomes louder, the stillness more confronting, and the self, no longer hidden, has nowhere to escape.
This has made me reflect more deeply on my own work with people. Insight matters. Understanding patterns matters. Naming what happened matters. But I’m increasingly aware that understanding alone doesn’t transform us. The deeper work seems to happen somewhere else.
I’m seeing that it happens when the nervous system begins to feel safe enough to stop bracing, when someone is met without being improved, and when old strategies are respected as the intelligent strategies they were to survive at the time rather than being made wrong. That’s when change emerges slowly, through lived experience rather than force, not necessarily through breakthroughs, but through small, repeated moments of “I can be here and not disappear”, “I can rest and still belong”, “I can disappoint and survive”, “I can be open and stay connected”.
Recently, I also learned that a dear friend with a young family has a life-threatening illness. There are no frameworks that hold that. No reframes that make it meaningful. It simply brings you to your knees.
Presence becomes the offering.
Witness becomes the language.
Silence becomes enough.
Perhaps this has touched me even more deeply as I have also recently become a father for the first time.
What do we fear most? Is it really death, or is it being left alone emotionally before it arrives? Being accompanied, without agenda or fixing, becomes a profound form of care. It’s impossible not to let this kind of news turn you back toward your own life. I’ve found myself noticing how much I’ve been given, how often life has met me, supported me, surprised me, even when I couldn’t see it at the time. This reminded me of a line by John O’Donohue that everything we have, we’ve been given, a line that once felt at odds with how I understood my own life, but which now, in this context, feels undeniably true. And how the more present I become to that, the more life seems to respond in kind. Not because life becomes easier, but because it becomes inhabited.
I’m starting to sense that life can feel like heaven or hell not because of what it hands us, but because of how able, or not yet able, we are to meet it. This isn’t about positivity, it’s about presence.
And perhaps that’s the real work, not fixing ourselves, not transcending our humanity, but learning how to stay with ourselves, with others, with life, exactly where we are, even when the circumstances may bring us to our knees.
Sometimes that’s all that heals. Sometimes that’s all that’s needed.