What is a Good Life? #64
Making Sense Of This Life with Johnnie Moore
On the 64th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Johnnie Moore. Johnnie is the Founder of Unhurried, a movement to support deeper conversations and connections in work and life, the author of the book Unhurried At Work, a visiting tutor at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, and a guest columnist for Fast Company magazine.
In this insightful conversation, we explore our desire to hold onto stories and perspectives that no longer serve us over engaging with the unknown. Johnnie shares a number of experiences and processes that help him see and seek more possibilities. We discuss shifting from overthinking to experimenting and playing more often, and finally, we explore realisations around awareness of emotions and healthier and more connecting expressions of them.
This episode will give you plenty to contemplate regarding experimenting and playing more frequently, and the wonderful shifts that can occur if we open up to what else is possible in this life. I've spoken with Johnnie several times before, and he consistently leaves me with new perspectives to consider or inspires fresh realisations, and I suspect he’ll do the same for you.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (4 mins), the full podcast (60 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
During this conversation, Johnnie shares a lovely moment he sometimes experiences when he is in between laps in the swimming pool, where he may just be struck by the sense of “what is this life? What is this life I am experiencing? Who is this having this experience?”
I often experience something similar when walking my dog early in the morning and the park seems a little empty, or even just contemplating the strangeness of our behaviour or the fact that we exist at all. I sometimes get the sense I am looking at a movie set in life. It may sound odd, but perhaps not if you’ve had a similar moment of gazing at the world in front of you.
A couple of years ago, when taking the U-Bahn (underground) across the city to Kreuzberg in Berlin, I was with my dog for this trip, who caught the attention of the lady in front of me.
The lady was in her 70s and we exchanged in small talk as she petted my dog until we realised we had some shared experiences in India and travel.
The lady, as it turned out, was a direct student of Osho, an Indian spiritual guru or mystic. Her eyes were extremely alive, and as she shared her stories and perspectives, she was full of energy and power. I felt I was in the presence of someone who knew a lot about life or who experienced life differently.
As the train came to a halt, I was a bit confused as I was at the end of the line. I was so engaged in the conversation I realised I had missed my exit by 5 stops.
She too had missed her stop, and we traveled back in the opposite direction until my destination. We hugged and said goodbye, and I remembered regretting not getting her number.
I went to meet a friend and raved about this conversation I just had; it filled me with energy. Afterward, I tried to write something for a course I was building, but it simply wasn’t happening. So, to clear my mind, I decided for the first time to walk the 9km trip back home with my dog to see if that freed up my mind.
Around the halfway point, I saw the same lady sitting on a bench by the footpath ahead of me. Seeing her stopped me instantly in my tracks. As I stood there for a moment before joining her, I had a very strange sense that I was observing life play out like a movie scene. I had no doubt that my role was to stop and talk with her. I felt that in my entire body, I was supposed to meet her again.
I told the lady I had regretted not getting her number, and she laughed and said that she didn’t want to disturb me earlier but she already knew we were going to meet again that day. While she said it with conviction, I wasn’t sure if she was performing or whether she meant it. She was definitely mischievous, but I believe she meant it.
Regardless, I sat down for around three hours on the bench and had one of the most mesmerising and mind-expanding conversations I have had in my life. She had a rare wisdom about her that I haven’t encountered too often in life.
Afterward, I didn’t quite know what to make of the experience. My mind moved to ideas of entanglement from quantum physics or synchronicity from Carl Jung (whereby internal, psychological events are linked to external world events by meaningful coincidences rather than causal chains), but then I thought it wouldn’t really matter if there were a clear answer; the experience was what it was.
Perhaps if there was an answer, it would exist outside of my capacity to understand, or it would require me to suspend how I perceive the world, that I am, as a human, a blunt instrument in perceiving an overall reality.
I often say it, but my mind regularly goes there, so I’ll say it again: we live in a universe with 95% dark energy and dark matter, which means we have no idea what it is. We live in a world where scientists suggest our universe may be one of an infinite number of universes.
What stuns me about us sometimes is our desire to act like we know so much when we exist within this wider context and also how liberating it is to say “I don’t know” in a world where people are clinging to certainty.
In this podcast with Johnnie, he references how in the group conversations he organises (Unhurried conversations) that don’t have any objectives or outcomes, participants aren’t allowed to interrupt each other, where they aren’t showing up to show off or compete or hide from each other. He says that you often find people sharing experiences that they can’t make sense of.
And very often people either have similar experiences or they have similar experiences in trying to make sense of this life. Of putting the pieces together or sharing how they make sense or meaning.
I find the same with the groups I run each Wednesday evening. The lack of putting on a front or attempting to be certain or an expert about anything just lets people explore and share what their experiences are without needing to provide a solution, an answer. It just allows things to simply exist and broadens what we are willing to share or acknowledge as a legitimate experience.
And it is often in the shared ambiguity of these experiences rather than the clear-cut solutions, or wrapping a neat bow around what we have discussed, or clinging onto brittle certainties allow us to experience a sense of connection or belonging within ourselves, to the group, or the wider whole and life itself.
3. Full Episode - Making Sense Of This Life with Johnnie Moore - What is a Good Life? #64
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4. This week’s Questions
In which area of your life would introducing more playfulness and experimentation be most beneficial?
In the clip above, Johnnie uses the term “brittle certainties”. What certainties do you hold that you suspect are far more brittle than they seem to be?
About Me
I am a Coach based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.
I like your story of meeting the woman. It is interesting how we look for an explanation for something so random and meaningful. I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of what is reality. The standard understanding is that reality is only what we perceive it to be. In essence, we define reality. And we use the writers and doers who have influenced us to make the case for our perception. Over the past decade I’ve thought a lot about this. My mind has changed because I wasn’t satisfied that my knowledge matched my experience. Now, I see reality as all that exists. We are only privileged to experience a small portion of it. Some of it is beautiful and much of it hard and painful. We have spoken of consciousness as our awareness of reality. And in this sense, I’ve discovered there is a belief that consciousness as personal and individual. I no longer see it this way. Instead, consciousness is more the non-verbal language of reality that we interact with in life. It is a more phenomenological experience of embodiment. It isn’t primarily emotional, but sensory. And for this reason, I see it as more spiritual than something we materially possess. To return to your story of the woman, the experience was a gift of connection that can lead to a long term relationship or a momentary experience of mutual contribution worthy of gratitude. If I’m on to something, then we meet people and encounter situations that expand our perception of the world without needing to quantify it as mine. Our stories are ways to communicate this shared existence of reality. Reality, therefore, is real, but not simply real. It is an expansive environment where experiences like yours are available to us every day.