Sarah Wilson

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Sarah Wilson: author and activist

Full transcript

“Where you are right now, so you might be a mom with three screaming kids, you might be a nurse doing night shift, you might be somebody whose heart's just being broken. You might be somebody in a job that's not wholly satisfying. Whatever it is, start where you are, because where you are is your opportunity to wake up. And often it's your pain point or your limitation that takes you to an edge where you'll actually be of greater service.”
– Sarah Wilson

Madeleine Dore: In moments of overwhelm, in spirals of what’s-the-point, in the moments after we emerge from hours of doom-scrolling, perhaps we can be reminded of the words of Emily Dickson, “In this short Life that only lasts an hour. How much - how little - is within our power?”

We’re entangled in a system that perpetuates disconnect and excessive standard, yet what is within our power is starting where we. 

The remarkable Sarah Wilson articulates just how vital individual change is in a world demanding more of us in her latest book that will crack your soul open, This One Wild and Precious Life. As Sarah writes, “Don’t get caught up in the granular fights and that dastardly fear-guilt-anger-despair-overwhelm cycle. Don't worry how others are doing they’re everything. Just keep doing yours and then doing some more.”

It might be overwhelming to face the complexities of climate change, coronavirus, racial inequalities and our disconnection from ourselves and others, but the simple and sometimes courageous act of starting where you are can create a wonderful feedback loop – taking the small step in front of us and doing everything we can with what we have makes us feel useful. When we feel useful, we find meaning. When we have a sense of meaning, we expand, and doing what we can with what we can begins to multiply. 

Sarah describes this variety of showing up as infectious, charming, and I think it’s fair to say her life is one such example of the infectious vitality. Sarah Wilson is a former journalist and TV presenter, best-selling author and activist. She hikes around the world and lived out of two suitcases for almost 8 years. In May 2018, Sarah closed her successful I Quit Sugar business and gave all money to charity. She now builds and enables charity projects and campaigns on mental health, wasteful consumerism and the global warming tragedy.

There’s so much more to say about Sarah, but I have to note that This One Wild and Precious Life has had a profound impact on my days and she will be doing a big bookclub experience tour of New Zealand and Australia in early 2021 with Live Nation - so perhaps you can learn more in person, when it’s safe for us to connect and gather again.

In this conversation, we speak about using routine to bookend your days, tilting rather than abiding by strict rules, cool aloneness as an antidote to loneliness, the insidious idea of getting ahead, how you can always add an AND, the concept of creative fending, reframing a rut as going to your edge, soul-nerding, and showing up to our appointment in life – in our own way.  

So, given starting where you are differs day by day, here’s Sarah Wilson, on how she is… today. 

Sarah Wilson: Well, it's funny, I actually do operate in a fair bit of chaos, but what I try to do is bookend my days. 

So I tend to have a bit of a morning routine and then I have also an evening routine and then a night time routine. But in the middle of the day, it's kind of like whatever goes. But mornings I tend to wake up reasonably early around about 6:00 and I drink hot water and I tend to scroll through my American emails because I have a couple of publishers overseas and sometimes it's urgent stuff and I just do that as I sort of wake up. I know that goes against all the mental health things that you are meant to do, but I then go and do exercise half an hour to an hour. It'll be a sand run, an ocean swim. It'll just be yoga or a workout in my house. And especially during covid it was sort of workouts inside. And then I'll meditate for 20 minutes. I then grab a coffee generally out somewhere just so that I have contact with other humans, albeit briefly. And I'll go through my emails and get myself sorted and attend to a few things. And then I come back and it's usually about nine o'clock and I sit down and I start working. So that's the morning. Evenings, I try to shut down at about six. I try to walk or meditate and then at night as I'm getting ready for bed my routine is I turn off all electrical stuff by nine and it takes me ages to kind of dial down from my day. And if I don't do this routine, which takes a good hour, so it's having a shower reading, stretching a whole bunch of quite detailed things just to get me in the right space to sleep. And then it's a gamble as to whether I'll sleep or not. But that's been my problem for a while.

Madeleine: How does that have a ripple effect if the night before it wasn't the best sleep, does that then impact the next morning and the ability to kind of follow that, getting up at six, going for a sand run?

Sarah Wilson: Well, I wake up early no matter what, so I've got to adjust things at the back end of the day. So even if I can't get to sleep till three, I'll still wake up pretty early. I just don't sleep in. But yes, I've got an autoimmune disease. I've got a number of different kind of compromised health markers and lack of sleep just wipes me out, and I can tell you now, Madeleine, I didn't sleep enough last night and today has just been a struggle. I still do the exercise. I still meditate. It's a frenetic, frazzled, agitated experience, but I still do it. I try to just keep to those things because without them, everything, all the wheels will come off, you know? So it's after many, many years of being an insomniac and struggling with mental health issues that I just know I've still got to do it. And it's painful. I'm tired, I'm ratty, but it's a non-negotiable and equally with eating I just try to keep it as I try to keep it routined, you know, I try not to sort of veer off into eating bacon sandwiches and things like that, which is sort of what I'm craving because my energy is so low. But I mean, it does have a ripple effect. What I've got to do is just try to get on business as usual no matter what.

Madeleine: Hmm. It's really interesting to me because I think that there can be this really fine balance between placing a lot of expectation on yourself to be someone who bookends their days and and follows this sequence of rituals. But on the flip side, there is this importance or there is this is non-negotiable aspect to it. And and I heard a conversation you had recently about how it's actually about modulation and that dance between vigilance and softness and vigilance and softness. Do you feel like that helps you be kinder to yourself so it's not an expectation?

Sarah Wilson: Yeah, well, I think it's also about the reasoning. It's about framing why you do things. And I think sometimes this draconian, I must do this because it's a hack that all successful people in Silicon Valley do, it's going to not serve you in the end. I instead take a gentler approach and I've worked out what actually serves me and actually what does make me feel better and get me through the day. So I don't do them because I have to. It's like I've never been on a diet in my life. I quit sugar because I just needed to feel better. And while it's continued to make me feel better, I just stayed off stuff, you know, and then there are phases where I do eat sugar and I a bit of sugar each day, but I'm I'm sort of aware of how much. So moderation for me just feels like another rule - people say oh just do moderation is and that sounds like a rule, you know.

Instead, a really great piece of advice I was given by a psychologist who's actually a demographer, and he used to do some work for Cosmopolitan back when I was the editor of Cosmopolitan. I think a study come out showing that the most miserable people on the planet were women in their 40s who are lawyers. Now extrapolate what you want from that. But he instead went, well, why don't we look at what who are the least miserable women? And what he found was that it was the women who didn't have rules for themselves, didn't try to balance this with that, didn't try to find the perfect ratio between yoga classes and kids commitments and work commitments. Instead, it was people who were able to what he calls tilt. 

In any given moment, they leaned towards the thing that was the most pressing and probably therefore most meaningful thing to do. And if that meant that their child needed their attention, they would tilt in that direction and let them work commitments go for a few hours or a day and other times they needed to tilt towards looking after their own health or whatever. So that's what I think modulating is. It's ebbing and flowing in real time according to what you are feeling and what you need, rather than an external rule of moderation or morning routine or a perfect balance, which are other people's notions. So, yeah, that's probably how after forty-six years on the planet, I've come to manage things most successfully. And part of modulating is constantly adjusting. I pivot. Sometimes I don't feel like meditating and three or four days will go by and I've done nothing like it is just it really is something that I have to just kind of keep changing, keep tilting. And sometimes I feel like working. Work is what kind of keeps me on the straight and narrow, and I'll just do that. I don't need a day off. I don't need to have that sort of balance, you know, and then other times I'm just fed up with work and look, not everyone has the luxury of being able to go "I'm fed up with work. I'm going to have a day off." I tend to work sort of six days a week. So it allows me sometimes to take a couple of days off. Usually it ends up to be just one day, but just enough to go, that's what I needed right now.

Madeleine: Yes. Yes. I love this idea of tilting. It's I like to think of it as instead of finding balance, it's about balancing. And that that reframe really helped me. But just this idea of taking a day off, or this idea of leaning into rest, I really like to. And I loved the lady in red that you spoke about in the book and how she was just sitting there and you asked why and she said, on special days, I like to sit and think nothing. 

Sarah Wilson: Yeah, she became a bit of a motif in my book, This One Wild and Precious Life.  She sort of pops up at the beginning of the book when I was in Slovenia on a public holiday. It was a very lonely day, a very lonely time in my life. And I won't give away why you have to read the book to find out. She sort of became a sort of a motif. And I posted a photo at the time and I got lots of comments on Instagram from people going, oh my god, I remember when I could do that. And it garnered this sense of homesickness in people, this nostalgia for a way that we used to be able to be as though it's no longer in reach and all she was doing was not touching her phone, not feeling she had to be doing something better or more productive. She was sitting there literally just enjoying observing the world, drinking her coffee. And for forty five minutes she just sat there. And I think that's something that we have lost touch with and I think we do feel sad that we've lost that ability. We know we're being tugged and pulled away from our own sense of ourselves. Our ability to sit with ourselves - and I say Lady in Red does cool-aloneness. And that's what I called, cool aloneness is the idea of being totally cool with being on your own. And ironically, because I explore this in a chapter on loneliness, the salve to loneliness is to be cool with your aloneness. You're at least lonely when you're cool with being alone. That is when you're perfectly comfortable being on your own. And in that state, you're able to actually be at peace, you're able to actually have discerning thought, you're actually able to have a meaningful relationship with yourself. 

Madeleine: Yes, exactly, I'd love to explore those the contradictions of loneliness that we're facing, that we we feel lonely, yet we push people aside for our time alone. And you also really prod this idea of being time poor. And in some ways, for those of us with the privilege, maybe it is a choice and we can just stop. That sort of stopped me in my tracks. 

Sarah Wilson: Yeah, we've come to sort of I mean, you say to somebody how are you and the standard answer these days is busy and it's sort of said as a badge of honour. So we've created these busy lives for ourselves. And then I use an anecdote from a book that I read that was written by New York Times columnist, and he wrote about how wealthy people in particular create these rods for their back and they get caught up in the more-more-more cycle and the fact that they're time poor, they are just are so time poor. And he's point was, no, you're not, you just need to stop. And in fact, could you just stop? And he refers to, I think, parents in New York, wealthy parents who will sleep out on the street in a queue to get into the best school in the neighbourhood. And it's just a ludicrous concept. In the same chapter I refer to the fact that my brother just walking along and he goes getting the head, the whole notion of getting ahead, he said it infers getting the ahead of other people of others. Now, who are those others? Generally your neighbours and your friends, even your family. And what an insidious idea, for instance, queuing up outside a school to get your kid into the best school so that they can get ahead. Right. That you're trying to get them ahead of the other kids in the neighbourhood, the other kids in that cohort, their peers. And why? Why not just stop, just stop this incessant surge forward into more, more, more? Why not have time? Just have more time. Stop being time poor. It's a choice. It is absolutely a choice — for the a certain cohort.  

Madeleine: Yes. Yes. On the flip side, what I think you thoughtfully put it that it's a system that is actually perpetuating this feeling that we're falling behind. So we're trying to get ahead. We're told we're behind and then we blame ourselves for not coping with these excessive standards of more-more-more. And in the book, you describe the fear, guilt and despair overwhelm cycle and some wonderful strategies to kind of move through that cycle.

Sarah Wilson: To put a name to it, it's the neo liberal of modern capitalist system that sees us eternally chasing more, more, more. And the supply demand cycle kind of demands it the whole way that businesses are set up. They create a demand for more within this and we get sucked into it. And it's very, very hard to escape it. And as you know, Madeleine, I describe capitalism as a cult. It operates exactly like a cult, like the parallels are pretty much direct. You know, we sacrifice i.e. we take out mortgages and have credit card debt to achieve these things, these promises, these false promises, because, of course, we know that material possessions don't bring us happiness. And yet that's what we're promised and we get sucked into the cycle where we can't escape it. And what's more, once we're in it, we can't actually see that we're in a cult - we think that everything else is the problem. We assume that capitalism is just the default way of being. It's always been like this is the way and any suggestion of living otherwise, you're sort of deemed a radical or a socialist or a communist or whatever. The idea is abhorrent that you would question the status quo.

But as to the guilt anger fear and overwhelm cycle, that's something that we all fall into and we particularly fall into it at the moment because there is so much going on. It's just this world of hyper-objects and black swans and all these other sort of phenomenon that just swamping us at the moment. And it's very hard to work our way through it and to see clearly and to see, for instance, that we exist within the cult, that we're trapped in a capitalist cycle.

So I talk a lot about how we're all familiar with the flight or fight mechanism, which is sort of the anxious mechanism and it's a survival mechanism. So if you take the example of a deer being chased by a tiger and a deer can't fight a tiger, but it can outrun it for a certain period of time, but eventually it will run out of steam and it can't flee or fight, so what it does is it reverts to the third mechanism, which is the freeze mechanism. Now it's a last ditch survival trick. The deer will essentially collapse in a heap and play dead. And so, for all intents and purposes, it is dead. Heart has stopped. It's no longer breathing. And what that will do is see that the tiger might relax a bit, might go and get its cubs and say, hey, let's come back and have a leisurely lunch.

In that time, a deer can jerk back to life again and bolt to safety. Now, it's a mechanism that we also possess. And so if you think about people who are in deep trauma, they'll go into a freeze state where they literally can't think, they're frozen, they're absolutely frozen. And that can be a self-protective mechanism when we are so overwhelmed. And I think we've got various degrees of that happening at the moment. So much is going on, COVID, the climate crisis. These are big, big as I mentioned before, hyper objects, hyper objects are issues that are so big that they encompass everything. And it's impossible to get perspective to see how we can solve it and escape from it. And the climate crisis is the prime example of it. So, yes, we are sort of overwhelmed by the world and we essentially go into a state of freeze. I call it acedia, and it's a term that's existed since the Ancient Greek times and it's re-emerge throughout history. And it describes a sort of state of sort of slothfulness, avoidance. And if you think of the typical person on the couch with the remote control tweeting on their phone, not engaging with the world, ordering Uber Eats, basically asleep, you know, living a half life. And that's what I feel that a lot of the world has reverted to in the face of such overwhelming times. Now, what we need to do is the equivalent of what the deer does, we actually need to find a way to jerk back into life so that we can bolt to safety and save this one wild and precious life. Because if we sit in the state of slothful, overwhelmed and non-caring, we will witness the destruction of this planet. There is no doubt, and I'm sure many people listening to this, even if you're a bit uncertain about the climate science or whatever it might be, or you might be just kind of trying to bury it, put it aside because it's all too much, we all know we're going to have to do something pretty dramatic. So a big part of this book is about trying to suggest some techniques for jerking back to life again. And so some of the things I mean, I think they're mostly enjoyable then, they're mostly things are we craving. 

Madeleine: And they also ordinary as well.

Sarah Wilson: Yes. They're free, mostly.

Madeleine: It struck me that it's in our days we are numb, in that picture you just described of the the modern sloth that happens in the container of a day. And we can use a container of a day to shift that completely and grasp that low hanging fruit that you spoke about, or use the ordinary as an opportunity to to create change. And I found that really empowering because for me, I've definitely fallen into that trap of thinking, well, whatever I do in my day in my ordinary little life isn't going to make a difference. But that's the biggest kind of...

Sarah Wilson: Misnomer. Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of things I'll say to that. 

Firstly, you might recall the three and a half percent sort of figure of hope, as I call it. So a study was done a few years back that took every single protest or action group from 1900 through to 2016, she basically found that every protest or activist demonstration that was peaceful, that managed to kind of bring together three and a half percent of the population, whether it was a school group, whether it was a town, whether it was a country, always succeeded. So you only need three and a half percent of a given population to tip the zeitgeist to change. And that is extremely hopeful. Three and a half percent, not a lot. And when we had the protests in September last year, the big sort of climate protests, we weren't too far off it, to be honest. And that gave me great hope. 

The other thing that I mentioned in the book, and it's a quote from the wonderful Pema Chodran, she has a sort of a phrase and it is start where you are. And it's not so much a call to to start small and grow. She actually goes further than that. She actually says that where you are right now. So you might be a mum with three screaming kids, you might be a nurse doing night shift, you might be somebody whose heart has just being broken, you might be somebody in a job that's not wholly satisfying. Whatever it is, start where you are, because where you are is your opportunity to wake up. And often it's your pain point or your limitation that takes you to an edge where you'll actually be of greatest service. 

And I use the example of a beautiful friend of mine up the road who's got two kids, and she's frustrated that her career is on hold and the climate rally is coming up and she couldn't get anyone to kind of mobilise to go to these strikes. And most people say, well, it's just too hard to get into the city with the kids. So she actually said, Sarah do you reckon I should just try to get a mini-bus? And I said, yes, do it. So she booked a mini bus, put up an events kind of link, and it booked out within the hour. So she then upgraded to a coach. Right. So 50 odd people, parents and children that booked out within a few hours. So then she ended up with two coaches. So she ended up getting, I think, one hundred and ten people to the climate rally. Now, I then shared the story on my on my Facebook, and that actually prompted a couple of other people to do exactly the same thing in their community. And that's the point, when you start where you are, she was a frustrated person who was just all she could do is book a bus and send a note out to the other parents in the school. But look what happened. You know, she would have been responsible for getting, I would say conservatively, a good couple of hundred extra people to that rally. And and so action begets action. And that's and that three and a half percent figure it grows exponentially.

Madeleine: Oh, that's such a powerful example. And you know what I love about that stat where you are? I love the starting part, but I really love the where YOU are, because all of this overwhelm for me can come from the comparison. I'm not doing as much as that person, or I'm not doing it like how that person is doing it, but it's about how I can do it. And that for me was incredible to step into. 

Sarah Wilson: That's right. The thing is, and I say this as well, but it's care. It's the care that we as humanity need to see right now. And care is contagious. So it's not so much this big, bold action or how many signatures you get on a petition that's going to change the world. It's going to be the infectiousness of your care. And, you know, we can show care in all kinds of special ways. And quite often it's a very small, intimate moments that can shift us. It's not the big bodacious ones. And I think that is really, really powerful. And we need to remember that. And humans can act in magical ways. Light magic can happen when humans are enrolled by seeing care, when something becomes charming to them. 

And what I mean by magic is, for instance, when we love something, we'll do everything we can to save it. And so a big part of my book is to remind us all of our love of nature. And when we love that nature, when we connect with it, we'll do everything we can to save it. So I use the example of a parallel with World War II. The world mobilised into action, turning what was a consumer economy into a wartime economy in a matter of weeks, no one would have thought it was possible, until it became possible, until people got on board to support the war effort. And so in America, they were producing army tanks, etc, within three weeks. They were able to get through tax rates as high as 94 percent. They are able to enforce rationing around the country even while the war was on the other side of the world. I mean, that's pretty extraordinary. And in the UK, where obviously the war was a lot closer, the country reported its healthiest and happiest period ever. And so suicide rates and the admissions into mental health institutions dropped virtually zero during the London Blitz because people rallied together. There was this kind of mobilised care and all kinds of magical things happen when we are in mobilised care.

Madeleine: Yes, I love how you put it that the darkness connects us. And I think that's why I love to put the rut part of this in these conversations is because the rut can be something that we fear or we think that we're going to get stuck in. But it can be such a great teacher. And so I wonder how you would define a rut.

Sarah Wilson: Oh, gosh, I've many of them throughout my life and my career. Oh, gosh, it's a country and western song called I've Been Down So low it looks like up to me. And sometimes literally it's as simple as, you do go down so low that there's no other direction other than up, you know. 

Thee's a parable of the speck of light that I refer to in First We Make the Beast Beautiful, which is my book on anxiety. With a little speck inside the sun goes, I feel I feel abandoned. I feel like my life has no meaning. I don't know who I am. And this little speck cries out to God. So God says, all right, here we go I'm going to pull you somewhere so that you can get that perspective and you can find out who you are. So God plants this speck of light way out into the depths of the dark universe and this little speck of light goes, God, why have you forsaken me? You've placed me out here on my own. Now, what happened is a speck of light in the darkness see who it was—it was the light. It was part of the light. And sometimes we do it to go into the darkness to see who we are. 

So ruts do afford that. Ruts take you into a rawness. And I think the COVID experience for much of the planet has been a bit about that. It's been a stripping back. You actually find you strip your life, your values back to the essentials and the redundancies naturally slip away. And I guess, how I refer to the ruts, my language in This One Wild and Precious Life is going to your edge. So when you're in a rut, you're at your edge. And that is where life happens. That is where you feel the breezes, the sharp cool breezes of life. It's where you smell everything. You can see everything. And sure, it's perilous. And sure, you get tossed to and fro out on the edge, and it's not as comfortable as hanging out in the trunk if you use a tree example. But it's where real, alive, living happens. Of course we have to kind of again modulate. We have to come backwards and forwards from our edge and then back to comfort to regain energy again. But quite often, it is part of the cycle of life.  

And we live in a culture where we resist the edge, we resist the rut, we stigmatise it, we medicate against it, we cocoon against it. Pretty much all technology of the last fifty years has not been geared at making the world a better place. It's been geared at making us more comfortable, about seeing us avoid ruts and edges. We won't even delay gratification. We don't wait around in unknowingness and uncertainty. There's an answer for everything. We we are not left in the unknown, which is an ultimate rut, right, where you're stuck in a decision and you really don't know what's going to happen or what you're going to do. And we have technologies that prevent us from having to experience the discomfort of that. So when we get thrust into a rut, like a life edge, calamity, I don't know, a global crisis we're completely ill-equipped. And so a lot of what I talk about in the book is building up that resilience so that we can be fully prepared.

Madeleine: I love how you called it creative fending. It's almost makes it this. I'm going to go out and creatively fend today. It's this kind of... it's a training.

Sarah Wilson: Yeah, it absolutely is is sort of what the Stoics did. You know, the Stoics were very engaged in activities and pursuits that pushed the creative faculties to make them stronger.

I mean, a really simple example is, for instance, and it's so innocuous it's ridiculous, but not buying things. So say if you've got a wardrobe of clothing and, you know, from circa 1980 something and three to the current time, when you stop buying things, you're actually forced into creatively fending and creating an outfit out of stuff that's sort of old and maybe was out of fashion for a few years, but maybe if you team up with that jacket, it's back. And so we're actually at our best when we are creatively fending. There's a phenomenon called the IKEA effect. And they've done studies that show that when we actually have to construct or build or actively engage and again, I use those words, actively engaged in life in the process of putting together a bookcase or whatever it is. We enjoy the end result a lot more as opposed to just buying it and having somebody deliver it into our home. Another example is packet cakes, they didn't actually take off in the 1950s until people had to add their own eggs and milk and sort of have some engagement, and that's when they became popular. But the point is what we actually do like a bit of hard work and we like solving problems and we like sort of being engaged and unfortunately we are being denied that because we have a culture that thinks we want comfort.

Madeleine: Yeah, exactly. It just creates such a beautiful feedback loop because we are numb because we don't feel useful. But if we start where we are and do what we can and actually step into the edge or the rut or do the work or everything that we can, we then find the meaning and connect back to who we are as humans. And then we can do more of that.

Sarah Wilson: Yeah, it's far simpler than we realise. And I suppose that's why I pursued in writing the book, I really, really wanted people to feel that there was a different type of path. Because I'd been a climate activist for a very long time and I was getting despondent because nothing was getting through. Nothing was working. Nothing was sparking people's imagination. And what I realised is you've got to make the the new option, the better option, more charming than the old option. It's actually got to be charming. It's got to be joyful. It's got to appeal to our humanity.

Madeleine: Well you definitely show the charm in This One Wild and Precious Life. I just like to change track just a little bit to return to your writing of the book. At a few different points you sort of admit that you're at a point of stubbornness or a rut, I guess, with the writing. And as someone who is deep in that moment in the writing of their own book, I just wanted to ask how you got through it in terms of reading the book, there's so much knowledge, and in speaking to you now your brain is just full with incredible thought. And I'm just wondering how you untangled all of that and actually finished such a charming feat.

Sarah Wilson: I slogged. There's no other answer for it. I wish I could say yes, I had this wonderful poetic languid days. No, it was absolutely horrendous. I lived out every one of those emotions in that overwhelm cycle, sort of daily on high rotation. I lost my way several times and I write about those processes and then how is out to push through it, mostly through hiking. But yeah, this book was written as a way for me to process my own grief. And it is grief. I have a lot of grief for the world that will no longer be as it was when we were growing up, grief for my dreams that I thought I would be able to fulfil and then I'm scared I won't. The grief for the futureI hoped that my nieces, nephews, the children around me will have. So I had to sort of face all of that. And that's one of the big things I talk about is facing your emotions. And I've got a number of techniques in the book for processing emotions in a way that's quite primal and very much required. And it's sort of this new form of somatic therapy, which is getting quite a lot of traction. 

But I suppose Madeleine, the other thing is, while ever I was learning, while ever I was digging deeper, I was engaged. And once you start on this track, you can't un-see it. There's no unseeing of this truth of the climate science. So I don't know. The penultimate chapter is about the inevitability of having to become an adult and and how we live in an adolescent society and to survive we're going to have to evolve into adulthood. And previously we had initiation ceremonies and things like that. We don't have that anymore. But basically a crisis can take you there. And I think that's what we need to embrace. It's sort of like the hero's journey, and the writing of the book was that process for me.  I could have given up. I could have written now sort of a fluffier version, you know, and I have friends who started a book and finished it and had it come out and do the publicity trail in the time that I was still kind of going through my first manuscript, it was very frustrating. It took me a solid three years and I just had to accept that that was my process. It was a lot of adult reckoning, to be honest, and it was hard, but it actually became part of my process and part of my polemic. You know, hard shit has to be pushed through and that's called becoming an adult, becoming responsible, and probably the only way we can have a chance of saving our lives on this planet. 

Madeleine: Yes, sometimes you just have to have patience. I interviewed Clare Bowditch, who I know is a friend of yours for the podcast, and she waited 20 years to write her beautiful book because you need to do the growing up, or you need to slog it or you need to be in it, so thank you, I will keep slogging. 

Sarah Wilson: My pleasure. And I'll give you some little some other examples. As you know throughout the book, I actually say studying the lives of other creatives is a really great salve for the anxiety we're feeling collectively. But I do this regularly and I did this in First We Make The Beast Beautiful, I actually talk about the fact that anything, any good takes a long time. And that's an Ira Glass quote. But keep in mind, and I think he was referring to the same examples, but keep in mind that Leonard Cohen took five years to write Hallelujah, that beautiful song that he's most famous for. Bruce Springsteen took six months to record Born to Run because it required backwards and forwards and perfectionism. And it wasn't right. So you went back into the recording studio. There are countless examples of creatives taking a very long time to write things that we now think are just brilliant and we assume only took six months. But in many cases that's not the case. First We Make The Beast Beautiful took me seven years...

Madeleine: And you wrote it by hand as well. 

Sarah Wilson: I did, I did. But I get writer's quite often asking me what's the best way to do it, and I'm like, all I can say is find a way to enjoy working at your way and actually find the process of finding your way quite beautiful and unique and special. Because if you can't if you can't enjoy that, your unique process, then it's going to be very, very difficult. 

Madeleine: That's what my books about – a combinations of all these interviews to show that there is no one way. 

Sarah Wilson: That's right. There's no guidebook to life. Nobody got it. 

Madeleine: I love how you call this soul-nerding in the book. And I wondered if you still soul-nerd on Sundays or how you approach reading so much and how you kind of keep it all in your brain.

Sarah Wilson: While this sounds ridiculous, but I keep it in my brain, I think what helps is I have bipolar and I actually think that that intensity, which has been a huge achilles heel throughout my life and highly problematic and of being bullied and ostracised for it, I've realised I now can turn it into my superpower. You know, it does mean that I retain large slabs of information that I can rattle off because I go down these rabbit hole and I, I find things so interesting and I find the legacy of other people's pain and how they've written about it. really interesting. 

Yes, I soul-nerd daily, really, I've got a whole range of practises where I go and find deep reads or long reads on various forums and I save them for Sunday. I didn't grow up this way I didn't grow up reading literature, we just didn't do that at my school. I don't know what we read, but it certainly wasn't, you know, Steinbeck or Dickens or anyone. I've had to read these a little later in life and in the process, the process of sitting in the intention of the author has become a beautiful thing. And it's slowed me down. It's got me mindful. And if you allow music and poetry, if you read it in such a way where you're not speed reading, that you're actually absorbing each word and you're there with the writer, and the best writers write in such a way that it goes at the same pace as a thoughtful, discerning mind. You go to places that the words only point to, you know what I mean? And and that's a wonderful experience that we in our culture today deny ourselves of because we do speed read and we've lost the art of long reading. So much so the younger generation are actually problems with contracts and important sort of processes like voting and knowing what they're voting for. Brexit being a prime example of it, the number of Brits that went off and sort of voted or didn't vote had no idea what they were doing it. It's a practice that I don't do because I'm trying to do some stoic resilience training. I do it because it's pleasurable. I've realised if I allow myself to sink into that space, it's really pleasurable.

Madeleine: Yeah. And another thing like aloneness that we don't give ourselves time for to our own detriment. I wanted to speak a little bit about "and", because you just sort of, you know, you openness about anxiety and bipolar and how this message that you don't actually have to fix yourself to start. You can be anxious and you can be a big human.

Sarah Wilson: Yeah, yeah, do both. This is something that I discussed with—and it's great to drop his name—His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he sort of taught me that principle. It's like, don't wait until you're fixed, until you've kind of sorted your life out. This is your life. You're imperfect, you will always be imperfect. You'll never get there. And so just start doing what you want to do. Start living your big life, start taking risks, being messy. Again, start where you are, because that is where you need to be. And that's something that I think applies to the anxious experience. Many of us feel that we've got to tame, moderate, fix, get rid of our anxiety before we can be happy. And I just after decades of being shoved around from pillar to post different psychiatrist, drugs, I just went, oh, no way. I'm giving up on this. This is who I am. I am going to be anxious and fretty and a little bit mad, neurotic and have my sleepless nights like I did last night. And I'm still going to live a good life. I'm just going to have to do both. You know, I'm not going to wait There's no time. There's no time for a run up any longer. 

Madeleine: Yeah, exactly. It's interesting to me have a lot of this is about going inward and embracing your own imperfection and I guess finding who you are and finding meaning in the small things in your life. Do you think that you have to get all of the inner stuff figured out before you can look outward and join the fight to fix the world? Or can you do both with that too?

Sarah Wilson: That's a really good question. I actually think and there's a lot of psychological kind of books written about this, I think going out into the world and being of service, or the Jungian psychiatrist James Hollis says, attend your appointment with life. So our souls call us to an appointment with life. Now, if you go off and attend that appointment, you basically do what life is calling you to do, whether it's to book a mini bus for your school so that they can get to the protest or whether it's helping a neighbour down the road or whether it's just doing whatever is presented in front of you that is being required of you. And it's probably going to be hard as probably going to feel very unglamorous at times. But that process in itself has been shown to be one of the best psychological tools for overcoming anxiety and depression—being of service, getting out of your own sort of vortex. So I would say yeah, do both. It is great to do the self care work. But I think history also goes through phases. As with everything in nature, there's periods of creation, there's periods of maintenance and stability, and then there are periods of destruction. At the moment, we are in a period of destruction and we can't do self-help hanging out on our own, having baths and I don't know, sorting out our chakras. I mean, that's great to do if you can fit it in. But at the moment, the more important thing we're being called to do is getting big, being of service, going out into the world, connecting with each other because we need each other right now, but also connecting with nature. And by nature I mean the planet, but I also mean our nature, our real nature. And that all happens out in the world.

So, yes, I do both. But I would say at the moment, if anything, the priority is certainly to go out. And when you go out, it'll probably start to really sort what's going on inside you as well.

Madeleine: What's an example of going out? 

Sarah Wilson: I'd say, for instance, getting politically activated. So I write political posts, I engage in the political process, in political debate. I share information that I hope will help people in my orbit to understand things. And I started out in journalism in the press gallery at Parliament House, and I did some speech writing in my early twenties before I started out as a journalist, which always comes as a bit of a shock. And I'm constantly told to just stick with writing sugar-free recipes as though, you know, a woman can only have one trick in her lifetime. But this is a daily thing that I cope. 

And I also come across people who are spiritual or in the self-help realm and they say, I'm not political, I'm not interested in politics. And I would argue that the spiritual is always political. And we are called upon if we have. If we have. Any kind of work in that spiritual wellness realm, then we really do have a responsibility to go and share it with the rest of humanity and mostly that occurs through being politically engaged, especially at the moment. I mean, we are generation not used to this, but the greatest advances for humans have come about from the world mobilising into political action. Jesus was political. Gandhi was political. Martin Luther King was political, all these sort of spiritual type heroes, were political. That's what they're responding to. And then the world shifted because we railed and and rose up against political inequalities. So, yeah, that would be an example of going out, getting involved in politics. And there's this idea in 2020 that, oh, no, that's just not cool. I'm not interested. It's just too heavy. Well I sort of say, well too bad it's non-negotiable. That's what we're being asked to do right now.

Madeleine: Yes, it's interesting because for me, it's not about the fact that it's not cool. It's more that there is tension of being quite introverted and not wanting to sum it all up in a tweet. And so finding other ways to actually engage that, again, work for me in a way that is enlarging me rather than, I don't know, contributing to the noise, I guess, it's this fine line...

Sarah Wilson: Oh you don't have to contribute, you can learn. And I talk about, again this in the book, not everyone has to be a prophet. So I talked to Sister Joan is incredible Catholic nun in her 80s, and she's like a radical activist. And she and I talked about this. She's like, get out of the Spiritual Jacuzzi, get political. And she said, choose a better prophet. We've got to follow the prophets. And I said, well, does that mean everyone's going to be a prophet? She said, no. In fact, it's much better... like we need more people backing, supporting, clicking on, doing a like on all the prophets who have got the true message. And they're often ostracised people, so Greta Thunberg is a prime example. Not everybody has to be tweeting or putting information out there and adding to the noise, quite the opposite. For the majority, it's really appropriate—and this is where you can be of service— is to support the people that have put their neck out there, that have shared something that is important and uncomfortable and likely to see them get cut down. But they are the people, if they are the truth tellers, they need the support. And so that's what going out and being service is about, is choosing a better prophet and supporting them, just backing them with a like, listen to them talk, attend one of their Zoom conferences, share in your private group, share your thoughts. It doesn't have to be out to the entire world. I agree. There's too much noise. There's too many people sharing fake news, we're not particularly informed, but I think what we can all do is become more artful in who we do follow.

Madeleine: That fits. It feels... I can start where I am with that.

Sarah Wilson: Yes, it's doable and is a word I love that I use it in the book is congruence. When we feel congruence, we go hmm, okay, and things feel right. 

Madeleine: If we could circle back briefly back to your sort of your many tricks and how women are really meant to have one. And it's very narrow. You've lived a big life like they even just now in this conversation, touching on a lot of different things that you have done and the different paths that you've explored and walked down and paved for other people as well. It strikes me that it's a life that's quite unique in terms of I don't think many people would live this version of a life, but maybe many people want to. And I just wanted to ask, what do you credit to you being able to do this and what maybe blocks other people from doing it?  

Sarah Wilson: Well, I don't think it is a path for everyone. You know, I think there's horses for courses. And there's certainly been things I've missed out on. I'm single and I don't have children. And that's the price that sometimes a woman has to pay in particular to live an unconventional life.  

I think the other price is, as I mentioned before, and this is what's also enabled me to live this way is I do have this so-called disorder called bipolar and, you know, a percentage of the population throughout history, about 1.2% in any given time in history and in any given part of the world tends to possess this disorder, if you want to call it that. And it sort of exists, I suppose, in some people to go and take risks and live unusual lives that nobody else would want to live. So if I was to answer you as honestly as I could, I'd sort of say that's the distinguishing feature or thing, you know. And I say that as I'm talking about myself in the third person, just to answer your question. 

Yeah, I think for anyone who is wanting to maybe take more risk and get out of the rut that they feel that might be in, you know, I sort of talk about that in the book is sometimes physical risk. I mean, my friend said to me, "Sarah, sometimes you just go and put yourself in trouble, don't you? You just get yourself into trouble." And I'm like yeah, that is what I do. And that's just it's been in me since I was a kid. I always had to climb to the higher branch. I had to push edges. I had to go and, my parents were exhausted by my constant ideas and the things I would get myself into. And I'd do it to this day but I do it physically. So, I do do risky things, and that is unfortunately/fortunately, part of the condition that I have. But if you're wanting to get out of a rut, I suggest go for a hike, like do something in the physical that will actually might not be a bit of a risk. You know, call up the person that you've been meaning to for a while and suggest that you meet for picnic, do something out of the usual, out of the normal, and you can start to practise getting into a bit of trouble. And sometimes we need to get into a bit of trouble to get a fresh perspective. Most of the incredible inventions in the world were of necessity. It's often that when we're at our edge, when we're in a new place, that is when we can start to create and become bigger. And so I would just advise going to your edge, wherever that might be. And everybody's age is a little bit different, but just sort of think of something that just feels a little bit scary. And if it's scary, that's a great signal, you know, just a little bit scary. I'm not suggesting everyone does what I do and hitchhike and things like that, I'll get in trouble for advocating that. But just do something, like it might be taking a different route to work. It might be try an ocean swimming, you know, because you've always wanted to do it. Just give it a go.

Madeleine: Yes. If it's not already obvious, your book has had a profound impact on my day to day life. A beautiful example, I think from yesterday is I was going for a walk around the park, and I'm in Melbourne so we've just recently been able to meet with two households outdoors. And I was just strolling around around midday and I saw these two couples probably in their 80s, sitting out with a big table, a beautiful tablecloth, cutlery, glasses full of wine. And it was just a beautiful scene. And I felt this tug to connect. And it's often a tug that I ignore because of my own shyness or awkwardness. And so I kept walking and I even set up my own picnic blanket on the other side of the park. And then I sat there and I thought, no, no, I'm going to choose to be wild. I'm going to choose to enlarge and go to my small little edge. And I packed everything back up just so I could walk back over to them and tell them that they've reminded me how to live. And then we have this beautiful conversation and they told me all about how they've been tennis partners for forty five years. And this is the first time they've seen each other during this time. And I just think it can just be these small little things. But it made my day, that little thing. So I guess I wonder, to sort of close up, I like to ask what kind of small little moments remind you, or keep that present that we have this one wild and precious life?

Sarah Wilson: Well, my immediate answer is just nature. If talking congruence, I go into nature and I can just see the beautiful, eternal, unexplainable logic and patterning and belonging because I'm part of that happening. And I explain it through fractals in the book. But just listening to your example and you used the phrase enlargening, that comes from once again, James Hollis. And I suppose if I was to sit at the end of the day and go, what is the marker for a wonderful day or day well spent, it's it's that lens that James Hollis teaches me and that is, did it enlarge or diminish life? And I use that as a way to make decisions. Will it enlarge or diminish life? I think it can also be used to frame whether you've had a wonderful, enriching, meaningful day and did it enlarge or diminish life. And I think you going over to those people in their picnic blanket that certainly enlarged, enlarged life. So, yeah, that would be my that would be my little litmus test. 

Madeleine: Whether we’re faced with a tricky decision, or feeling the itchiness of overwhelm, Sarah reminds us that we come alive when we go to our edge. 

I hope this conversation inspires you to go to your edge-in big and small ways. Maybe it’s a rut you have to inspect, a big change you have to make, or even a small awkwardness you have to overcome. My dear friend Georgia has a great saying for dealing with a variety of life’s tricky moments, which is to “Poke life with a stick and make it dance.” It’s a reminder to not be so fearful of  embarrassment, of not being good enough or whether or not you’re making the wrong decision - instead we can prod the moment with curiosity, and be playful with how we feel and what we experience.”  

I’m Madeleine Dore, and that’s what I hope to share with this podcast – to inspect the rut, to go your edge, and make life dance.