If you have ever felt yourself in the middle of a big shift, you are not alone. Almost everyone I have spoken to lately, including all of us here at Platform 13, has felt some degree of change moving through their lives. Some of it is planned, and some of it arrives uninvited, like an unwanted house guest. The reasons vary, and it isn't really about astrological charts or timing. It is simpler than that: change is always upon us. Much like the waves, changes come and go, cons

Apparently, this is the year of the Great Reset. I keep hearing it. The dotty interpreters of Tarot cards and astrologers I tend to fall asleep to, seem terribly excited about this particular lap around the sun, with various celestial bodies changing signs, cycles ending, cosmic nodes re-aligning and energies shifting with the annual planetary diaspora. These are all apparently conspiring to encourage us to reconsider our relationships, careers, purpose and whether or not we

It is too hot. I know this because I have just returned from the Boulangerie, where everyone was queueing calmly, in the one-time weirdness of being in complete agreement. They were of one mind, chat-jacking each other's stories of "le chaleur" and when in the name of God's holy doughnuts, it will end. Today, the mercury will nudge 39 degrees Celsius - or 102.2 on the Farenheit scale - if you happen to live in a country that has put a man on the moon. Silly that we still use

Somewhere around fifty million years ago - give or take the casual margin of error with which only part-time Paleontologists and sloppy, tropical architects appear comfortable - a small semi-feathered dinosaur looked down at its short little arms and thought... Absolutely nothing at all. It didn't ponder for a second, and ask "are those arms still useful?" Nor was there a debate around them falling off to make room for wings, to serve the higher purpose of flight. It did not

Nostalgia. It's a beautiful soft, sepia-coloured word, isn't it? Comforting, cushioned and universally understood, although in terms of nuance, it punches way above its weight. Unlike terms that refer directly to longing, or regret, nostalgia isn't really about wanting to return to the past, or somehow have the past return to us, but much more subtly, it suggests a profound and meaningful gratitude that the past actually happened at all. Nostalgia has inherently soft edges. I

Somewhere, right now, a figure is sat at a kitchen table before dawn. The house is silent, the coffee beside them is a warm version of hot, and the only light is thrown by the open window of a glowing laptop. The rest of the house is fast asleep... I imagine them being tired. Not because they manage their time poorly, or enjoy working silly hours, but because this piece of personal sacrifice, was the only way to protect something else. Perhaps they promised the afternoon to h

Closure. It's one of those words that sounds like it should solve something. Firm, clinical, faintly medical - the sort of word a doctor might use, or an estate agent. Somewhere between stitches and stitch-ups...It has the satisfying sound of a door shutting properly, seat belt fastened, an attaché case - closed and clicked. We reach for it constantly and perhaps a bit unconsciously. "I just need some closure..." "She never got closure..." "It gave me the closure I was lookin

Yes... we all of us like to imagine that judgement is simply something that other people do. That we don't judge. That our opinions are as neutral as a Swiss watch. We even use qualifiers like "I am not judging here, but..." in celebration of that marvellous expression, "Everything that comes before "but"... is B.S." We are persuaded that it is only other people that are so critical... Other people are so narrow-minded. Other people are sitting somewhere, in deep Facebook, ma

There is something very unsettling about regrets. With me, they have a score of almost zero on the mental, feel-good scale. A bin of despair, out of which we must occasionally haul ourselves, using the ropes of clever mantras and helpful sayings, like "Well if I hadn't have done that, I wouldn't be where I am now" - wordy platitudes, which while indisputably true, barely contain the comfort of a decent slice of chocolate cake. Regrets are our mental, feel-bad reels. Wholesale

Comparisons... just one more item, on an ever-expanding buffet of human habits, capable of turning a perfectly good morning into a very bad one, in the blink of an eye. We might wake up, feeling relatively chipper, coffee in hand, birds-a-chirping, hair acceptable, with a B+ for emotional stability. And then Wham!.. Your online scrolling uncovers some bloke you sort-of-knew at school, standing shirtless and barefoot in a Tuscan lemon grove, beside his perfect CEO wife who res