What AFL Football taught me about Experience
When I was studying in the US, after my friends went to bed on Friday nights, I would head to the TV room to watch Australian Rules Football on ESPN. One night, Brian stumbled in. He was from Baltimore, studying for a PhD in either physics or chemistry. He sat down and we watched together […]
What Alone Australia taught me about Experience
Ten people arrive in Arctic Finland. Before the first episode even begins, I started trying to predict who will win. I looked at their experience: military, survival, fishing, hunting, endurance, bushcraft, even previous Arctic experience. Who has the best preparation? But as the series progressed, something strange happened. The more I learnt about the contestants, the less […]
What Travel Taught Me About Experience
Several decades ago I was on a bus trip winding through the Black Hills of South Dakota on the way to Mount Rushmore. On board were twenty-four students from eighteen different countries. It was my first time travelling overseas and my first time spending extended time with people from so many different cultures. I found myself […]
What Mick Jagger Taught Me About Experience
I was listening to David Marchese interview Mick Jagger for The New York Times Interview when one word stopped me: Inhabit. Marchese didn’t ask whether Jagger could still perform songs he’d written fifty years ago; he asked whether he could still inhabit them. That caught my attention because it felt like an unusual but very […]
What an Assassin taught me about Experience
In The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne has no idea who he is. He has amnesia, which means he doesn’t remember his past and can’t figure out why someone wants to kill him. Yet, when he sits down in a roadside cafe he casually says: “I can tell you the license plate numbers of all three cars […]
What a Doctor taught me about Experience
Most people think experience gives us answers, but what happens when our experience fails to answer our questions? When it makes it impossible to continue believing what we know. That’s what happened to Dr Patterson Stark. Patterson was a successful physician in La Jolla, California. He had a waiting list, money in the bank and […]
What My Parents taught me about Experience
During the last few years of Dad’s dementia, when Mum and I would visit him in the Aged Care centre, there was a consistent pattern to the conversations we had. Dad would tell a story and Mum would say, ‘Don’t be silly’. At first, I assumed that Mum was simply correcting him. She knew the […]
What Dementia Taught Me About Experience
My Dad died a couple of years ago after living with dementia. He went from someone who was sharp, practical and reliable to someone who seemed to be living in a different world. What happened to my Dad’s experience? From spending time with my Dad over those last few years, I noticed a couple of things. […]
What a Mindfulness Teacher taught me about Experience
We often expect our experience to predict what will happen. But, what if it doesn’t? I started practicing mindfulness to become calm and manage my stress. But in talking with Mindfulness Teacher Mark Molony (as part of On Experience), I realised this wasn’t what it is about at all. Mindfulness is not really about helping […]
What Rambo Taught Me About Experience
We often think experience accumulates into value automatically. But Rambo shows it doesn’t work that way. I recently rewatched Rambo: First Blood. Like many action films from the 1980s, it’s filled with explosions, car chases and classic one-liners. I’ve probably seen Rambo four or five times. This time I started watching for some easy entertainment, […]