Category: Daily Prompt
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When am I most happy?
When are you most happy? I’m most happy when I’m on holidays. Not because anything extraordinary is happening, but because nothing needs to be. Time loosens its grip. The days open up. There is space for being with family without watching the clock. Time to read a book properly. To walk without a destination. To…
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Sharing What You Love
What was the last thing you did for play or fun? We went to the Sydney Opera House a few weeks ago to see Paul Dempsey, frontman of Something for Kate, on his Shotgun Karaoke Vol. II national tour. An acoustic concert. Just him and a guitar. At one point he was joined on stage…
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A Well-Stocked Cupboard
List your top 5 grocery store items. I’m a simple soul. I live at a residential college, so most of my meals are taken in the Dining Hall. That has its advantages, but no matter how much effort goes into variety, repetition is part of the deal. One side-effect is that trips to the supermarket…
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The Man Who Sees the Heart of Things
Describe a man who has positively impacted your life. Some people help you by giving advice. Others help you by asking better questions. Neville belongs firmly in the second category. I first met him many years ago when we were both working for a major bank. We were in a lunchtime Bible study together—two people…
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What Arrived This Year
Is your life today what you pictured a year ago? Is my life today what I pictured a year ago? The answer is yes and no. I lived on the beaches for thirty years, so my worldview is shaped by surf culture. One of the first things you learn is that you don’t control the…
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Making Room For Life
What skills or lessons have you learned recently? In the last year I finally signed up to do bush regeneration in our local national park. It was something I’d planned to do for a long time, but COVID put it on hold. When things settled, I took it up. The work is often slow and…
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Cities as Conversations
What cities do you want to visit? I’m not really someone who carries a list of destinations in my head. Places don’t usually attract to me on their own. They arrive through people—through stories, relationships, and small associations that linger. Montreal comes to mind first, though I’ve never been there. My wife travelled there by…
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What I Hope Is Said
Tell us one thing you hope people say about you. When you live and work in a university college, there is always something happening. Life is shared closely. Everything is slightly magnified. People don’t just pass through one another’s days — they live inside them. Because of that, a lot of our work involves helping…
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False Starts
Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc. I was four. Which, in hindsight, explains a lot. There had been no preschool. No gradual introduction to groups or routines or puzzles on low tables. My entire social world consisted of Robert, who lived three doors down. Robert was…
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Finding My Voice
Have you ever performed on stage or given a speech? It’s been a funny journey for me. I’m quiet and reflective by nature, not the sort of person who stands up in public and speaks eloquently with minimal preparation. But somewhere along the way, I discovered that being quiet doesn’t mean having nothing to say.…
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The Most Human Thing I Do
What are your favourite physical activities or exercises? My favourite physical activity is simply walking. I know that sounds very vanilla, but that’s me. I’m not a rock climber. I’m not a gym person. I don’t crave the adrenaline of extreme sports. I just like walking. For more than fifty years I played competitive football.…
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The Komodo Dragon
What is something others do that sparks your admiration? I’ve spent enough years teaching performing artists to know that they move through the world differently. They don’t just perform something—they become it. And that has always sparked my admiration. Music was my first window into this. I’ve watched musicians touch the human soul with a…
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From Bedrock to Bluey
What’s your favourite cartoon? Cartoons have changed a lot since I was a kid. Back then, my favourites lived in a prehistoric suburb called Bedrock. The Flintstones felt clever to me in ways I couldn’t have named at the time — the stone-age gadgets, the dinosaur appliances, the playful send-ups of adult life. But cartoons…
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Doing Less of “More”
What could you do less of? My mother has always said that I do too much. She may be right. If the blog prompt asks what I could do less of, the honest answer is this: I could do less of “more.” There’s something in me—an impulse, a reflex—that thinks I can always add one…
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The Hidden Wins of 2025
What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year? It’s been a tough year in places. My parents are going downhill fast, and my mother is now permanently in a nursing home. It’s stressful for them and stressful for us, yet I’m grateful that the whole family has shown up in…
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The City Is Never Empty
Do you ever see wild animals? One of the quiet joys of living in Australia is discovering how thin the line really is between suburbia and the wild. We talk as if the bush is “out there,” somewhere beyond the edges of our cities, but the truth is that the wild never left. It waits…
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Kanangra Walls
Do you have a favourite place you have visited? Where is it? Some places stay with you long after you leave them. For me, one of those places is Kanangra Walls. It sits in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park, only 200 kilometres west of Sydney, but it always feels quieter and more spacious than its distance…
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Five Things I’m Good At
Share five things you’re good at. Some people’s strengths are loud. Mine have always been quieter—subtle things that don’t announce themselves, but settle into the background of a room, or a team, or a community. They’re not the kind of skills that appear on a résumé, but they’re the ones that shape the way I…
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The Quiet Thread I Would Change
What is one thing you would change about yourself? Someone once told me that when I get up to preach, it’s like watching someone flick a switch. One moment I’m my usual quiet self, and the next I’m fully present—clear, confident, grounded. Here’s the funny thing: that version of me on the platform is the…
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The Ritual of Being a Morning Person
Are you more of a night or morning person? I am definitely a morning person now. It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when I pushed myself late into the night, convinced that productivity came after midnight and that mornings were an inconvenience to be conquered. I would stay up long past what…
The Afterword 