the story pilgrim

sharing sacred stories on the pilgrimage through life

Musings

I Finished a Book.

by

Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Red Circle

Another autumn, and with that come the sayings, “Look at the colour of those leaves”, “the nights really are drawing in”, and, of course, “they are already setting up for Christmas in the shops.”

Time flies, and then again it doesn’t.

I recently returned from a small holiday, a vacation away from the day-to-day of walking the dog, going to work, doing laundry, shopping and generally looking at the bank account expecting it to be more and the mortgage amount expecting it to be less.

But I kind of did.

Before I left, I had started reading a book, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. I felt I should; it is a classic after all, but I have not read a book in its entirety for…

Do you know, I cannot remember the last time I read a book fully. It has been a long time.

I have wanted to, but I always seem to think that reading is somehow a waste of time, that I could be doing something much more productive, such as doomscrolling on my phone. Quite how that became a more productive use of my time, I have no idea, and while we are here, where did that term come from anyway? Doomscrolling?

I see a lot of people reading and I see a lot of very successful people talking about how much they read. Are they really reading all these books? How do they find the time? Ten to fifteen minutes before I go to bed is going to mean the average book takes me about three years to finish.

I am a very, very slow reader.

You probably know about my dyslexia. It makes reading and writing a chore at times, it is tough and I am slow, but I love the images that words create in my head and I love that feeling of accomplishment when I reach the end and realise that I did it.

So I persevered, took the book away with me and, as it happened, we stayed in the perfect place for me not only to finish it, but to enjoy finishing it.

And I really did enjoy it.

I found myself second-guessing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I figured out who one of the mysterious characters was halfway through the book and I even managed to get a little annoyed at what I thought was a slightly lazy ending. It wasn’t all wrapped up neatly in the way Miss Marple would have done it, but I learnt a lot.

I learnt that I can finish a book, that spending time reading one is not a waste of my time and, perhaps most controversially, that Dr Watson is probably a better character than Sherlock Holmes.

There, I said it.

So far in 2026, I have finished one book, and I still have two and a half months to go. Who knows, I might finish two.

I have said it before, and I will probably say it many more times: I overthink, and I worry, a lot. I can turn something I want to do into something I should be doing, then something I haven’t got time to do and eventually something I feel guilty about doing because surely there is something else that needs my attention.

Yet when I relax a little, throw caution to the wind and go out on a limb by doing something I have wanted to do for a while, I usually discover two things: I learn to enjoy it and, perhaps more significantly, I learn that I can do it.

Maybe that is what those six days away gave me. Not just the time to read a book, but permission to spend time doing something that had no obvious productive outcome.

No project was completed because I read The Hound of the Baskervilles. Nobody paid me. The mortgage certainly didn’t get any smaller. But I finished a book, and I loved doing it.

A wise person said to me recently, “Never be afraid to fail.” I am not sure finishing a Sherlock Holmes novel quite counts as leaning into failure, but perhaps the wider point does. Sometimes the fear of doing something, or the voice telling us that we should be doing something else, is far greater than the thing itself.

Lean into it, give yourself permission to try it and see what happens.

You might even finish the book.

Breathe. Listen. Watch. Act.

by

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

Have you ever wondered how many people have come in and out of your life?

I have. Quite often.

Start at the beginning, and there is family. They are relatively easy to count. They may be the people closest to us, or they may not, depending on the relationship, but there is usually a number we can put on them.

Then we begin this wondrous journey called life, and the numbers become impossible.

We make friends at primary school, secondary school, college and work. We meet people socially. We walk down the street and speak to a stranger. We shop and interact with the person behind the counter. We sit next to somebody on a train. We watch people on the many screens that now occupy our lives.

Some people we are drawn to. Others, not so much.

Some become lifelong companions on the journey. Others play a part in our story for seconds.

But does the length of time determine the depth of the connection?

I don’t think it does.

We tend to think connecting with somebody requires conversation, preferably something deep and meaningful, but perhaps it can be much smaller than that. A look exchanged across a bustling high street. The brush of shoulders as two people leave a train on their way to work. A few words at the post office when all you wanted was one second-class stamp for your distant cousin’s birthday card, and you’ve somehow chosen the queue behind the person posting twelve parcels from their eBay sales.

These moments count.

I’ve been fortunate to travel and to live in different towns, cities and countries during my 56 years. When I think about the number of people I must have met, seen, heard and, occasionally, smelt along the way, it is impossible to comprehend.

Most of them I will never see again.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t matter.

Knowing people, or perhaps trying to understand people, has taught me how to connect. Acting has taught me that. Walking has taught me that. Travelling has taught me that. Sitting opposite somebody with a microphone between us has taught me that. Even working on an aircraft with hundreds of strangers for a few hours has taught me that.

And after all those encounters, I keep returning to something remarkably simple.

We have two eyes, two ears and one mouth.

Watch more. Listen more. Speak when there is something worth saying.

Connection doesn’t begin by making yourself heard. It begins by paying attention.

Perhaps that person sitting opposite you needs to talk. Perhaps they need to laugh. Perhaps they need somebody to notice them. Perhaps they don’t need anything from you at all.

Learning the difference is part of connecting.

For me, it comes down to four words.

Breathe. Listen. Watch. Act.

And sometimes the most powerful part of that last instruction is knowing when to do nothing.

Life in Transit

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Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Søren Kierkegaard

Life never seems to stop. I know, I’m stating the obvious again.

There is always something waiting. Projects to finish, messages to answer, people asking for our time because they trust us to show up. We complain about being busy, yet if all of that disappeared tomorrow, I suspect many of us would feel a little lost. Perhaps it isn’t the busyness we object to. Perhaps it is how we carry it.

I’m writing this from a hotel room at Heathrow. My window overlooks the two runways, and since checking in, I haven’t gone more than a few minutes without watching another aircraft climb into the sky or descend back to earth. Thousands of people arriving, thousands leaving, families beginning holidays, others returning home. Business trips, funerals, weddings, first dates, last embraces, every aircraft carries a collection of stories that will never meet.

Heathrow does pause for a few hours each night because of the agreement on noise. Then, before most of us have finished our first cup of tea, it begins again. Seven days a week, every week of the year.

Watching it from afar, I found myself thinking about momentum.

Life has a habit of moving whether we are ready or not. We finish one chapter only to discover another one has quietly begun before we’ve even noticed the page turning. I find myself at one of those moments now. Not at the end of something, but standing in the doorway between what has been and what comes next.

I spend a great deal of time wondering what life feels like for other people. Not what they do for work or where they live, but how certainty feels to them. When they believe they are on the right path, does it arrive with confidence or quietly without announcement? And when that certainty disappears, do they carry the same mixture of disappointment and relief that I sometimes recognise in myself?

I’ve stopped looking for definite answers to those questions.

What matters more is noticing that the questions are there at all.

There are days when my mind races ahead of me, producing thoughts faster than I can make sense of them. Years ago, I would have fought them, convinced they needed solving. Now I am beginning to understand that not every thought deserves an answer; some simply deserve a little space.

There is something strangely comforting about allowing uncertainty to sit beside you without demanding that it leaves. I cultivate it through action and harvest it through calm.

Perhaps that is what I was really watching outside my hotel window. Not aeroplanes, not runways, not Heathrow.

Simply movement.

Life carrying on whether I understand it or not. And somehow, that feels enough.

The Captain and The Kia

by

Champions keeping playing until they get it right.

Billie Jean King

A few years ago, if somebody had told me that one day I would be standing in a motorway service station discussing the finer points of a Kia Soul with a retired BOAC captain on his way to do a zipline with his grandson, I would probably have smiled politely and backed away slowly.

Yet there I was this past weekend, somewhere up north, plugged into a charging station, wondering why owning an electric car still feels faintly experimental once you leave civilisation behind.

Around town, it has been splendid, quiet, smooth, and economical. I charge it at home overnight and glide around Brighton feeling terribly futuristic. Long-distance driving, however, is another matter entirely. Britain’s charging infrastructure still seems to operate on the principle of “best of luck, everyone.”

I had stopped at a service station to charge the car, grab a coffee, and allow Todd the opportunity to inspect every blade of grass in the Midlands. When we returned, an elderly gentleman was standing at the front of the car staring at it with the concentration of a man trying to remember whether he had once driven one.

“Is this the Series 3?” he asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” I replied. “I just drive it and hope for the best.”

He nodded immediately.

“Then it’s the Series 3.”

Within moments, we were deep into conversation about electric cars, mysterious dashboard symbols, and the peculiar reputation of the Kia Soul — a vehicle affectionately described by many as a shoebox on wheels. There is something deeply reassuring about two grown men bonding over mutual confusion with technology.

Eventually, he asked what I did for work.

“I’m cabin crew for British Airways.”

His face shifted slightly.

“I flew for BOAC,” he said. “Retired in 1989.”

And just like that, the conversation moved somewhere else entirely.

We spoke about flying, about passengers, about the rhythm of airports and time zones and the strange way aviation people always seem to recognise one another, even decades apart. He told me that after retirement, he joined the police force. Then I asked what had brought him onto the road that weekend.

He explained that he and his wife had shared the same birthday. May 23rd. She passed away last year.

There was a pause then, not awkward, just human.

He told me he had always wanted to do a zipline. She had never wanted to. So now, for the first time, he was travelling with his son and grandson to finally do one.

I remember feeling oddly moved by that. Not because it was dramatic, quite the opposite. It was small, understated, ordinary. The sort of conversation that disappears every day because somebody decides not to ask one extra question.

Before we left, I shook his hand and called him “Captain.” He smiled in a way that suggested he had not heard that word directed at him in quite some time.

Then we carried on with our separate journeys.

That brief encounter stayed with me for the rest of the drive north. It happened because of a car, or curiosity, or timing, or perhaps simply because two people were willing to remain open to interruption.

More and more, I think life speaks quietly, not through grand revelations or cinematic moments, but through these fleeting collisions with strangers who remind us that everybody is carrying a story, a grief, a hope, or a zipline they have not yet taken.

And perhaps that is what I really mean whenever I say:

keep listening.

Putting Fingers to Keyboard

by

“I write to discover what I know”

Flannery O’Connor

I have never considered myself, aspired to be, or had the confidence to call myself a writer. Yet here I am, sitting at my laptop, putting fingers to keyboard — and it is fingers, no thumbs. Should I be using my thumbs? Why am I getting so distracted by this thought?

Six years ago, I set out to prove something to myself. I applied and was accepted to do a Masters. I have spoken about this before, but this was for me. I did not do well at school. From my mid-teens, I was told that there was no such thing as dyslexia and that I was just lazy and stupid, so I should just get on with it. And I believed it.

It took a while to come to the realisation that this was not true. I walked with someone recently, younger than me, who had gone through something similar, and they described it as bullying. I never saw it that way at the time, but I suppose that is exactly what it was. The Masters, at 50 years old, was going to be something that I did for myself. Up until then, I had seen education as a punishment, but I quickly learnt that it could be something entirely different, something encouraging, something that gave back. Out of it came the story pilgrim.

And here I am. Next month, I will be publishing my sixtieth newsletter. One a month. Five years. Five years of writing thoughts, events, and meaningful interactions that I felt I needed to pass on. That is a lot of words. They say that everyone has a book in them, and I suppose this is mine. Then there are the blogs — these blogs — and there is a lot of me in them. I do not know who is reading them. I do not know if anyone is reading them. But I enjoy the process, and the process helps me connect, to myself.

I talk a lot about walking in nature and how that helps me connect, both to it and to myself. Writing does something very similar. It allows those thoughts that sit in the background, the voice that runs constantly, to find a way out. They come through my fingers and appear there, in front of me, on the screen. In some way, by doing that, they become real. They become tangible. I can almost touch them, I can change them, I can read them back.

This week, I went for a walk with William Shakespeare. AI William Shakespeare. A lot of actors and creators are shying away from AI, some even running from it. I am trying to be a little more open-minded. The episode is far from perfect, but it has sparked some thoughtful conversations. I asked AI to write a sonnet for today, a sonnet about our conversation, and I have to admit, it is rather good. The final two lines stopped me:

“So listen to the silence when you can,
For that’s where nature speaks to every man.”

Isn’t that so true?

I am rambling, but I suppose what I am trying to say is this: if there is something in your life that unsettles you, something that brings in that sense of fear or uncertainty about what might happen, it might be worth giving it a go. You never really know where it might lead, and if it carries no real risk, if it is not going to do you any harm, then there is every chance that something good will come of it. I am more convinced of that now than I have ever been.

It has been a while

by

“Pressure is a privilege.”

Billie Jean King

It has been a while since I put pen to paper and blogged. The pessimist inside of me tells me not to bother—no one reads these anyway, so what is the point? But the realist inside of me tells me to go ahead, as if anything, writing this is more for myself, a therapy more than anything else.

I find myself here in LA—well, Torrance, a sub-city within the second largest city in America. I was not expecting to come here; it just happened. Airport standby in my role as cabin crew, Friday morning, and within ten minutes of my shift starting, the phone rang, and preparations for the flight to LA began.

The flight here was packed, completely full, and it also had what we call a “positioning crew” onboard. These are crew members who are flying out to a destination as passengers but will be working a flight back. They were working on an Airbus A380 back, so that meant there were 22 of them, and it was a nightmare. They felt they could come and stand in the galley, open up workspace areas, and get things that they thought they were entitled to, when in reality they were only getting in the way of us, the operating crew, who were there to serve not only them but the actual fare-paying passengers. Too much information? Was I upset? A little. Did I get over it? Yes, I did.

Anyway, I went for a walk this morning. I was intending to walk down to the beach, but something told me not to, so I went for a meander around the local area instead. As I walked, several things came to mind. There are a lot of apartment blocks here, all named “The Mikado”, “San Bonito”, “Spencer Arms”, “Via de Amo”, and many more, and I started to think about America and how it came about—a mishmash of cultures, races, religions, people from all over the world who came to settle and live here. Of course, there are the indigenous people here as well, but what has that meant, what has that made America today?

It is a land full of conflict. Yes, some of it gets violent, but the majority of it is rooted in sport—professional, amateur, and college level. People find their tribe, their team, and then scream from the rooftops for victory. They become so passionate about success for these teams, these tribes that they follow, and it is a huge part of their culture, all stemming from the origins of bringing so many different people together.

I came across a “No Kings” protest demonstration outside the local city hall. Thousands of people had turned out to express their concerns about the land that they live in and how it is being governed. There were many different banners, most of them expressing how upset they are with the current administration and its leader, their President.

Now, I am not one for protesting; I would not normally arrange to be a part of something like this, but today something shifted within me. It was lovely to see people being able to get it out there, to express the concerns that they have, and in their minds, they are doing something about it. I stood there with a smile on my face as I watched their faces and their body language, as they were able to just let it out.

I walked away from the demonstration and immediately came to a small Japanese garden in the local cultural centre—beautiful, serene, a stark contrast to what was happening just a block away. I sat and watched the water cascade down the waterfall in the centre, and I thought about how the water was simply reacting to the environment that it found itself in. It was not resisting, it was not trying to be different, it was just going with the flow, but in doing so it was making a difference. Over time, that water will shape the rocks and the environment around it, it will give life to plants and animals that are able to take advantage of it, and it will make its mark, carving out its own design.

That struck me. We all can make a difference; sometimes it may not be seen, sometimes it may not be immediate, but the truth is, we can make a difference. Something has shifted, and I need to remember that, which is why I am writing this down now.