First in, First Out

What’s something you do completely differently from how you were raised?

Saturday morning, rain or sunshine, we were ready to do the shopping before the shops opened.

Not merely early. We arrived so early that we sat in the car waiting for someone to unlock the doors. My father had the car out while the sun was still deciding whether it wanted to rise. My mother somehow had all the children washed, dressed and ready to go—a feat that mystifies me even more today when I see parents negotiating with one child over a missing shoe.

The family strategy was simple: first in, first out. By the time other people woke up and wondered what they needed from the shops, we had already returned home with it.

I do things rather differently today.

My Saturday mornings begin slowly. I meditate, drink my coffee and give the sun sufficient time to make up its mind. There is no frantic departure before dawn and certainly no sitting outside a locked shop as though we are competing for pole position in the Grand Prix of Grocery Shopping.

And if I urgently need something, there is Checkers Sixty60. I tap a few buttons, and the shopping arrives at my door—sometimes before I have finished deciding whether I should get dressed.

Of course, if the app had existed in my father’s time, I suspect he would have phoned the driver at sunrise and told him to go and wait outside the shop until it opened. Even technology would not have escaped the family discipline of being first in and first out.

For my parents, getting up early was about duty, preparedness and never allowing laziness to gain a foothold. They taught us that the day should be met standing, dressed and ready.

I have retained the sense of responsibility, but changed the method. For me, life is less about racing the sunrise and more about using time deliberately. Convenience is not necessarily laziness; sometimes it is simply choosing to spend your morning meditating over a cup of coffee while someone else searches for the groceries.

I was raised to beat everyone to the shops.

I have evolved to let the shops come to me.

The Apps My Finger Finds Automatically

What are your favorite 5 apps on your phone?

There are some apps on my phone that my finger finds automatically.

My Apps – my life!

The app adventure begins in the morning when I get up to do my rune yoga and meditation. Insight Timer flickers onto the screen, offering meditation music of every kind: those lovely, lovely tunes, shamanic drums or simply binaural beats. I have spent 601 hours on this app—601 hours of turning within, becoming still and preparing myself for the day.

From there, I move over to Jetpack to see what the writing prompt is for the day. I catch up on some of the great blogs other people have written and finally write an entry for one of my own blogs. My Xanga blog dates back to 2004 and continued until 2014. My WordPress blog began in 2014 and has carried my story through to 2026. That is more than twenty years of blogging and twelve years on WordPress alone—years of telling my stories, shaping my myths and recording how I see the world.

ChatGPT is my go-to AI app. It is not merely a summary version of Google for me, nor simply a fancy meme creator. This is where I think, explore and chart new territory in my own thinking and advancement. I learn, create and brainstorm. It is like taking my mind to the gym every day—not merely to find answers, but to exercise my ability to question, connect and grow.

My deliberations then move to Evernote, where these days much of my writing is posted automatically from ChatGPT. Evernote is like my long-term memory: the place where my best ideas are carefully tagged, categorised and regularly reviewed. Here, the story of my evolution as a thinker has been developing quietly since 2013.

But a life worth living is also a life worth recording. My day would not be complete if I did not jot down my mood in Daylio and make a voice recording in Audio Diary. Together, they close the cycle, because life is not only about spirituality, blogging, thought and memory. It is about lived experience—the relationships I have built, the things I have experienced and those days when the universe surprised me. Those moments must also be recorded and remembered.

So, although my fifth choice is really a pair, these are my favourite apps in a nutshell:

– Insight Timer for turning within.
– Jetpack for telling my stories and myths on WordPress.
– ChatGPT for expanding, learning and growing.
– Evernote for remembering the best of my explorations and writings.
– Daylio and Audio Diary for capturing my lived experience.

Stillness, storytelling, learning, remembering and consciously experiencing life—these are what lift these apps above all the others for me. Together, they do more than fill my phone. They trace the daily movement of my life: from silence, to story, to thought, to memory and finally back to experience.

Symbol of Life Buried in Street Rubble

What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

When your consciousness shifts, your awareness of the world around you shifts with it.

I remember when I first learned this lesson. My tutor gave me a simple exercise:

“Go outside and find five feathers that have fallen naturally from birds.”

So I walked—and looked for feathers.

It sounds almost trivial, but the exercise taught me something profound about attention. Feathers that I would ordinarily have passed without noticing suddenly appeared everywhere. They had presumably always been there; what had changed was not the street but the person walking along it.

Where attention goes, energy flows.

After that, I became far more conscious of my surroundings. I began noticing the small things that appeared along my path and wondering whether some of them carried meaning.

In 2005, I started my journey with the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC. The Order symbolically traces its origins to the mystery schools of ancient Egypt, and during that period I was deeply immersed in Egyptian history and symbolism. My awareness had been tuned to recognise them—and that awareness soon proved fruitful.

I had also learned to regard synchronicity as a teacher. James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy had impressed upon me the importance of being aware of coincidences that lead us towards purpose. Life, I came to believe, places signs along our way. Once we learn to notice them, they can become as visible as actual road signs.

And so there I was: a starry-eyed Rosicrucian walking through Cape Town, thinking about the Egyptian mystery schools and watching for coincidence leading to purpose.

Then, one morning, the street answered.

An AI illustration of my Ank discovery

Half-buried among the street rubble was an extraordinary object: a crudely forged silver ankh, almost the size of a man’s open hand.

It was beautiful, but not conventionally so. It lacked the sterile symmetry of something produced by a machine. Its irregularities revealed the presence of human hands. Someone had shaped it. Someone had drilled the holes. Someone had invested time and effort in bringing it into existence.

The ankh is an ancient Egyptian symbol of life, rebirth and the union of complementary forces—the masculine and feminine joined in the mystery of creation. Finding it at that particular moment felt like an extraordinary confirmation of the spiritual path I had begun walking.

To this day, it hangs on the wall above my bed.

I still wonder who made it. Why did they make it? What did it mean to them? How did something so large and unusual come to be abandoned among the rubble of a Cape Town street?

Those questions have never been answered. Perhaps they never should be. An explanation might reduce the mystery, while the unanswered questions allow the ankh to remain what it became for me that morning: a sign, a confirmation and a treasure.

It still reminds me to pay attention—to remain open to synchronicity and to notice the quiet ways in which life speaks.

And there it will remain until the day I, too, transition from this life and enter whatever mystery of rebirth awaits beyond it.

A Case of Meaningful Synchronicity

A Case of Meaningful Synchronicity

A few days ago, I finished carving my wooden Mjölnir pendant. Thor’s hammer: a symbol of protection, of will expressed through action, and of facing the giants.

I put it around my neck. In the same week, a giant arrived.

Admittedly, this one was in a game.

I have been playing Evony for more than five years. To progress beyond a certain stage, you must finish among the top five players in a server war. For someone who does not pay to play, that goal becomes increasingly difficult. The big players keep getting bigger, and the distance between preparation and possibility seems to stretch a little further each year.

Still, I kept building. Gathering resources. Preparing for an opportunity that seemed less likely with every passing month.

Then something extraordinary happened.

On a server better known for strife than cooperation, an agreement was reached—and not only among ourselves. The opposing server agreed too. The big players would sit out and allow the smaller players to fight for their chance.

For once, the giants would stand aside.

I put my name down.

What followed was a forty-eight-hour ordeal.

Initially, I dropped my shield on my own server and waited, supported by reinforcements. After about two hours, I realised that nothing much would happen if I remained passive. An open door is of little use if you refuse to walk through it.

Like Thor venturing east to confront the giants, I needed to cross into enemy territory.

So I went.

For almost six hours, I held my ground at a temple on the opposing server. But my strategy involved more than fighting. I sent messages to the players who engaged me. We agreed on attacks that would optimise points for both sides.

In the middle of a war game, conversation became one of my most useful tools.

Slowly, I climbed the rankings.

Seventeenth. Tenth. Higher still.

Eventually, second.

Then a rogue player on the opposing side decided that the agreement did not apply to him.

He appeared beside me and hit me so hard—twice—that for a moment I could not remember my mother.

I was zeroed.

There was my giant. And I had lost.

But five years of preparation had left me with more than ambition. I had the resources to recover. I could restore my power without permanent losses.

I returned to my own server, raised my shield and took a deep breath while quenching the fires of my keep.

The kings of both servers reacted promptly. They reprimanded the rogue player and agreed to stop the fighting, preserving the leading positions. I slipped from second to third.

And there I stayed.

After more than five years, the goal was achieved: a top-five finish in a server war.

Placing third in Ebony SVS

It is a game. I know that. But the syncronicity is mind boggling.

And yet, in my world of wonder and mysticism, the timing carried meaning. In the same week that I crafted a small wooden Mjölnir and placed it around my neck, two usually antagonistic communities changed their behaviour. An unlikely opportunity opened. I stepped forward, crossed a boundary, faced a giant, suffered a defeat—and still achieved my goal.

I do not need to claim that my pendant caused any of it. The synchronicity lies in how the outer events and the symbol I had been shaping suddenly spoke to one another.

Victory did not mean winning every encounter. Protection did not mean never being struck. My preparedness allowed me to recover, while the willingness of others to uphold an agreement helped secure the outcome.

There was also a lesson in the long wait. While the odds dwindled, I had continued building. When the opportunity finally came, I had something with which to meet it.

Now, when I feel the small wooden hammer against my chest, it carries a story alongside its symbolism.

I remember the patience to prepare, the courage to cross over, the value of speaking to an opponent, and the relief of discovering that one devastating blow need not decide the whole battle.

My Mjölnir is still a little crooked.

But it has already accompanied me into a story worth remembering.

I Want to Be Paid to Do Nothing

If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?

I Want to Be Paid to Do Nothing

If the salary were the same, what job would I be doing right now?

I would want to be paid to sit and do nothing.

Really.

Is that a legitimate answer? Of course it is. I would love to move from being a part-time meditation coach to becoming a full-time one. In meditation, sitting and doing nothing can become the ultimate form of doing.

Of course, meditation coaching involves far more than simply sitting quietly. It requires preparing an appropriate space and bringing your own nervous system into a state of calm so that you can be fully present for another person. It asks you to connect with someone deeply, to put them at ease and to help them feel safe enough to let go.

For many people, sitting still and doing nothing is something they fear. It feels impossible while thoughts rush through their minds and their bodies remain tense. They search desperately for an off switch, but the mind does not have one. The body does not immediately respond to the mental command to relax.

And then, sometimes, something shifts.

The role of the meditation coach is to help each person find the key that unlocks the door into that quieter state. That is what makes meditation coaching more valuable to me than any other paid work I have ever done.

When someone steps across that threshold—beyond comparison, beyond performance and beyond the constant pressure to become something—they rediscover what it means simply to be.

Then something miraculous happens.

The conflicts between body and mind begin to soften. A space of calm opens: a space from which creativity can arise, healing can resonate and the fragmented parts of the self can begin to become whole again.

We live in a society that often scorns inactivity. We celebrate busyness, productivity and constant motion. Yet this apparent “doing nothing” can unfold into something extraordinary.

What is the value of peace? What is the price of quiet confidence, inner stillness and deeper knowing?

To be honest, these things are priceless.

To step off the hamster wheel and drift slowly among the clouds—fully aware, fully present and deeply connected to oneself and the universe—is not laziness. It is a return to being. From that connection can arise love, belonging, creativity, will and compassion.

Could there be a more worthwhile job than helping people enter that space of genuine presence?

So yes, if the salary were the same, I would choose to sit and do nothing.

And I would help others learn to do nothing with me.

Sitting together, doing nothing—fully aware, fully present, with nowhere else to be.