Sydney after Hong Kong

Dawns over the Australian desert are made of fire, like a hellish landscape of incredible and distant beauty. Below, dark clouds like sponges soak up the last drops of  night. From outside,  the plane must look like an angel made of iron making its silent way somewhere important.
As I return to Australia after two weeks away it hits me again how remote and in many ways untouched this place is. It hits me how attached I am getting to it.

The last week in Hong Kong has been fabulous. Asia never fails to charm with its alien beauty, encompassing heat and engaging buzz. Hong Kong is the strange child of China, a world made of skyscrapers stolen from a jungle that still tries to prevail and that licks at the city with its disorderly green tongues. Eagles fly outside the window of my office on the 58th floor.  I wonder if life will take us here.  

The world is changing.

New York after Sydney

I am writing this entry from JFK on my way to Hong Kong after having spent a few days in New York for work. This was perhaps my fifth time in the Big Apple and certainly it has been very different from all my other visits.

All the other times were for pleasure, from London, when I was all about the Big Smoke and the big cities.

This time was a business trip with important meetings and the promise of fun in between.

Firstly, the trip from Sydney is much more epic than the pond cross from London. Door to door it takes about 25 hours, and the time difference is 14 hours. It's is a journey through space and time. Travelling with Qantas and American Airlines helped me feeling absolutely destroyed, defeated and awful by the time I touched down.

I spent the first three days managing a ghastly jetlag that I cannot even begin to describe. It was like being submerged in cold water and trying to make sense of the was going on above the surface. Or like being very hangover on repeat. 

Given that I had a few monumental meetings on the way just meant that the whole first half of the trip had its fair share of fear (TM) and anxiety. The low point was going to bed at 10pm one night, and then waking up two hours later and not being able to fall asleep again. Torture.
 
The other thing that I realised is that how used I have become to the sea breeze and the feeling of space that one gets in Sydney - New York suddenly felt dirty, fat, unhealthy and overwhelming. 

Having to work and try to impress all the big bosses when the only thing I wanted was sleeping and eating comfort food didn't help.

So, if you had asked me on Tuesday I would have told you that my trip was being painful. You would have probably thought also that I am a massive wingy wingey bang bang. I was.

However, as the jetlag subsided the 'switch' happened, in other words that magical spell that means that nobody can leave New York without having fallen in love with it. A lovely dinner at Buddhakan with Jx2Sx2, a fun night in Brooklyn, catching up with DJ, a run in the soft afternoon light in Central Park, an afternoon walk in Chelsea meant that I am leaving with wonderful memories of my time here. Again.

New York is one of those places with a massive personality and a lot of secrets to tell. I am a total outsider there, but the city makes you feel like you want to get to know it better.

In the past I always had that 'destiny feeling' that I would one day live there. It did not happen this time. I guess times move on and life stages take you in different place. I feel excited about being 'East' at the moment and quite excited about going back to that part of the world.

Autumnal Sun

Perhaps because La Ninha has made last summer wetter and cloudier than expected, the recent autumnal sun and crisp blue skies has felt like bliss. Walking down Liverpool Street in the soft morning light makes you feel like the world is slowing down, providing that moment of quiet and respite before another day at work. Sydney in Autumn is beautiful.

There is a feeling that the city is quieting down towards the hibernations of winter. People prefer dinners out with friends over bars after the big summer parties, and it all just feel cosier.
The gyms don't feel as frantic with people buffing up before a trip to North Bondi.
The line in front of Messina (the amazing gelato place on Victoria Road) persists somehow, but it is far from the crazy feeding frenzy of hot summer nights.

Sydney is definitely a place of seasons.

Pebbles

Sometimes it feels like we spend a great deal of our lives trying to balance all the ingredients & things that together will make us happy. Like pebbles on the shore. These do vary somewhat from person to person, but they are likely to include elements like: love, friendships & family, health&body, finances&work, self worth&development. It is an exhausting process and more often than not we find that at one particular point in time we feel like we have mastered some but not all of these elements.

The problem is that these things often work against each other. For instance if we are out there having a great time travelling the world with our mates, we might find that we feel out of shape and broke. Or, if work is going great, we might find that we are not putting a lot of effort in our relationships or we do not have time to cultivate our passions.

This is a bit of a pickle, and might just lead us to keep doing this 'balancing act' throughout our lives, as though there was some sort of mathematical formula of happiness that we are trying to uncover and exploit for the rest of our lives.

In turn this might make us feel that ' we are not quite there yet'.

To make things more complex, the standards that we use to assess success for each of the 'pebbles that make up happiness' changes over time. For instance, what we regard as successful at work, or the value we place or money becomes more demanding as we grow older. If when we started working out the El Dorado was being able to run 5km, by the time we run 5km we feel that we need to run a marathon.

Growing, developing and becoming better people is obviously something positive - however it does make it very hard to ever feel we have fully arrived.

Despite all this there are moments in life where we do feel truly happy and content with what's going on. It might be a great night out with our best friends, or the day of our wedding, or the day we finally achieved that long wanted promotion, etc etc. If we think about it, these are not moments where 'we have it all', where we have achieved that elusive balance of pebbles. More likely, these moments of happiness are just instants where we simply do not wish anything more than we already have.

Expectations play a massive role in the way we perceive happiness. And since we tend to be quite bad at predicting what will make us happy then it is key that we proactively manage our expectations in such a way that we do not set up ourselves objectives that might end up failing to bring us that happiness we had expected them to bring us. For instance, at work we might set up ourselves an objective to become a Managing Director because we believe that we will feel happy from a career perspective once we get there. However, after sweating over it for years and finally getting there we might discover that being an MD did not do anything to make us happier and that we should have focussed more on other things in our lives. We should never second guess happiness.

That is why it is worth spending time understanding what is the baseline of our own happiness, the rough ingredients that bring us happiness. I think that this baseline is less changeable over time, and in many ways it is easier to determine that the end point where we guess we should get to. For instance, whilst the definition of a top holiday will become more demanding over the years, the fact that we love spending time with our best mates has not really changed since we were broke students.

The other thing that I think is important is what I call 'the ten years time test' i.e. asking ourselves how we will feel about something in ten years time. It is fair to say that things like the missed promotion will not seem so important after all, whilst the fact that we did not cultivate our passion for painting is more likely to stick around as a regret. The ten years time test is a great way to determine the baseline of our own happiness.

In practical terms our baseline will include things like determining what is the minimum amount of money that we require to do the things we love, and then accepting that anything above that will please us, but it will not make us happier people (this might be liberating and make us realise that we can change job/career and still be happy).

Happiness then is not about constantly trying to balance a pile of pebbles, it is more like stripping down the expectations that we have imposed on ourselves and live life in such a way that our older self will look back with no regrets.

26

As I get out of my hotel in Singapore and the hot air engulfs me in its tropical embrace, it all feels like everything is different and familiar at the same time. My 5 minutes taxi commute to work could not be farther away from the Jubilee line on a winter morning. Alas, the mental pictures I have taken of both experiences seem to speak to each other, they feel part of the same story. I look out of the window towards the harbour and I marvel once more at the simple fact that I am here. Asia's dawn is so big and enchanting. Some significant truth seem to linger just below the surface, as though somebody has whispered a secret to me, but the colours distract me and I'll never understand. We turn left, then right, quite gently. People wait for a taxi or they are walking. I leave them all behind whilst I press 26.

Euler's Identity

 

The Euler's identity is regarded as one of the most beautiful mathematical formulae and I must say I have always quite liked it myself.

The most important mathematical symbols play their part, from the transcendental numbers e and Pi,  the imaginary number i, the revolutionary 0 from ancient India and the unity 1.
The remarkable thing about this equation is how numbers and symbols that were created in completely different geographies, cultures and centuries come together in this ultimate truism.


I have often thought that life sometimes feels like that :when things come together we suddenly realize how they are linked in the big picture. We might call it 'epiphany', or 'moment of clarity' but ultimately we refer to a sudden understanding of the big picture. No matter how the different experiences, choices we make etc might pull us in different directions - or make it hard for us to understand what's going on - at the end our Euler's identity reveals itself, made of all the bits and bobs that we have picked along the way.

Tasmania

One of my highlights from this summer was without doubt our holiday in Tasmania. When I grew up in Sardinia for me Tasmania was a mystical far away land which existed only in a cartoon I used to watch (yes, THAT one). I would have never imagined that one day I would have ended up going there.

And what a great place it is! From Sydney it takes about 1.5hrs flight to reach Hobart - the main city in the island. A few airlines make the trip several times a day so it is not drama at all to get there. As you land into Hobart ou immediately realise how beautiful the place is and how nature still plays a dominant role in the landscape of this place. A few people compare it to the South island of New Zealand, though i personally thought Tasmania had its own character, landscape and personality. Hobart is beyond charming, with its dramatic natural harbour setting, historical buildings from the convict era, and a passion for amazing food and wine. Manuka honey from Tasmania in unbelievable!

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is such a surprise and definitely one of the best and most interesting museums I have ever visited (you can get there by boat and the whole place is original and full of amazing pieces).

Tasmania is the place where the Brits sent out the worst of their convicts from the XVIII century and there are a plethora of places you can find out more about that history, like in the daunting Port Arthur (2hrs drive from Hobart). It is really worth coming here and spend a few hours exploring this colony and its buildings.

If you like trekking and nature there is a lot to do (I am told the West Coast is wild and beautiful, though we didn't make it there), but if you like me are slightly lazy - a couple of hours trek to Wine Glass bay is an amazing thing to do.

If you add to this amazing wine tasting in the Tamar valley, Tasmania is a real winner and definitely one of the highlights so far of my life Down Under - definitely going back!

For reviews of places where to eat/stay in Tasmania have a look at my Trip Advisor reviews http://www.tripadvisor.com/members-reviews/youngprofessionalUK