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All the news the media missed in 2025 fixthenews.com (via Miraz Jordan.)
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“The right kind of optimism is disciplined. It begins with the premise that action changes outcomes, then organizes institutions, incentives, and narratives to make that premise true.” mongabay.com.
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The Sydney I know isn’t like what they’re showing on the news writingslowly.com.
Leonard Koren on Life as an Aesthetic Experience
I’ve never been much of a bathing person. Perhaps that’s due to unpleasantly lingering memories of luke warm water in freezing cold bathrooms in the UK when I was a child. The bath was fine enough, but getting out would be a real test. Even bathing, as an adult, in natural hot springs on Orcas Island in the US Pacific Northwest didn’t really do it for me. That was a little ‘rustic’, and not in a good way.
True, swimming here in Sydney where I live is fabulous, especially in the Summer, when the cool refreshment of the ocean waves is totally restorative. But bathing? Not so much. Until a few months ago, that is, when I visited Japan.
The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne's Missing Commonplace Book
Last month, while my sister was moving house, she discovered a box of papers she’d never seen before. Inside was a collection of documents, decades old, that our parents must have gathered and kept from our childhood. There in a carefully wrapped pile was a sheaf of my sister’s old school reports. And next to them was a set of poems I must have written way back when I was a primary school student.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of venturing into the attic or the basement and finding long-forgotten documents like these. But this chance rediscovery got me thinking about just how much has been lost to time.
Mostly we don’t bother archiving, and even when we do, there are later moments when we decide to spring-clean, rationalise, declutter, or tidy up.
These are all euphemisms for destroying the evidence.
Why your note-making tools don’t quite work the way you want them to - and what to do about it
Every so often I stumble upon a really clear articulation of a concept that makes sense of something I’ve been feeling but didn’t previously have a word for. I knew there was something there but I didn’t have the language to express it.
One of the most interesting articles I’ve come across recently is Artificial memory and orienting infinity by Kei Kreutler.
In this particular case the concept illuminated is the subtle, niggling tension between what I want to use my digital writing tools for and what they actually do. My writing tools, and possibly yours too, nearly do what I want, but not quite. What’s that about? Well, on reading this article, the tension became a whole lot clearer.
The Spiral of Mastery: Why the Greatest Experts Are Serial Beginners
The greatest experts aren’t afraid of starting again
Apparently, my tennis is rusty
Here in Australia the Christmas holidays take place in mid-summer, and my family spent a few days at a house with a tennis court. It was an amazing opportunity, for which we were hardly prepared. I hadn’t played in years. One family member had barely held a racquet before. But we all shared the same problem: our serves were terrible. The ball hit the net, or it veered wildly off court. The serve seemed like some monolithic, unreachable skill you either had or you didn’t.
The view from the court — that was amazing, but the tennis, to say the least, wasn’t flowing.
That was until someone suggested we break it down: grip, swing, ball toss, contact. We stopped trying to play and started drilling. Within a short while, the court was alive with movement and we were laughing instead of frowning with effort. Our natural talent hadn’t changed; it was just that our willingness to break the seemingly impossible into achievable parts made it somehow seem doable. And after a short while, it actually was doable. We were delivering serves that made it over the net, that you could also imagine returning.
This experience was a reminder that expertise is hardly ever about making a single massive effort to achieve something that seems impossible. You don’t get good at tennis all at once. Playing the game well is really a whole portfolio of tiny pieces of expertise you have to master one by one and piece together smoothly before you can reach actual proficiency. And even when you get there, that’s not the end. There’s always something, some element of your play, you can improve. Is mastery a destination to reach and then enjoy forever? No. It’s more like a spiral that requires us to return to the beginning again and again of a long series of micro-skills.
The posts of 2025
I’m much better at writing new stuff than consolidating the old, but it’s time to review what’s been posted here during 2025. Short posts excluded, it’s quite a lot, considering I’m Writing Slowly.
There’s also a list of the posts of 2024 and the posts of 2023 too.
And don’t forget to check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
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Fact checking the good news
I expect 2026 to be a better year than 2025, not through some kind of magic but because millions of people like you and me are working hard to make it so. Since I posted a link to a round-up of the under-reported good news from 2025 someone said ‘some of this was definitely written with ai, so might be worth fact checking 😂’.
I was a bit disappointed, since I wanted the good news to be true, and since I have to admit this could easily make me susceptible to getting taken in by unreliable slop. Well, life’s too short to check all the facts, even if someone is wrong on the Internet (obligatory xkcd link), and that famous cartoon of the guy trying to fix it is actually an accurate drawing of me[^1]. But I thought I should at least do a quick audit. And what did this reveal?
The right kind of optimism in 2026
Happy New Year! May the next 12 months bring you peace and joy and blessing.
Here are a handful of hopeful articles to get your 2026 started on a positive note. I especially recommend the first one which I found deeply inspiring.
The Unity of Pen and Sword: Understanding Bunbu Ichi
My recent book is subtitled “The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters”. But why artists and fighters, and why mention them together?
In medieval Japan, warriors weren’t really expected to choose between intellectual pursuits and martial prowess. Instead they were required to master both. This philosophy is captured in the concept of bunbu ichi (文武一), which literally means “the civil and the martial are one.”
The Sydney I know isn’t like what they’re showing on the news
Tragically my home city has been in the international news for all the wrong reasons and we’re all feeling traumatised and shocked and heartbroken.
What about you?
You only know what you see in the media, like the photo below. So beyond the Harbour and the Opera House, perhaps you don’t know what Sydney is actually like.
I thought I’d show you a snapshot of what it’s really like where I live, on Bidjigal land, the unceded territory of the Eora Nation.
Shu Ha Ri and the philosophy of interior design
The late interior designer Professor Shigeru Uchida discusses the importance of Shu Ha Ri for design:
💬 “The current education system lacks “Shu.” There’s a total absence of the attitude to observe, study, and learn from others. The term “breaking the mold” is common, but without having learned anything from others, one cannot depart from or break away from anything.”
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now in paperback and ebook.