There comes a time when you just have to say, “No!” – to the requests and to the system.

Most of us, at some time or other, get sucked into the lifeless vacuum of work; the cogs of the corporate machine that we keep turning until one day, when we depart this Earth, we may earn the word ‘lubricant’ on our headstone.

The ever-increasing weight of responsibilities that enmeshes our lives keeps us locked into the system. We become the pulse that keeps the beast alive, but the cost is our own lives. The natural world around us shrinks, crushed beneath the suffocating might of work.

There’s no point pretending to be someone or something we’re not.

We should be authentic: the ‘real deal’. Neither a clone nor mimic be.

I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up.