Jan 3rd, 2025: Day 3
I am a big believer in just starting. You’ll figure it out as you go. This isn’t necessarily the best way to be, but it is a way to be. The sky doesn’t actually fall.
This project is simple: release a piece of art into the public domain every day for a year. When you commit to projects like this, there are no other constraints I place upon myself. And that is the beautiful phase of being a beginner.
If a morbidly obese person contacted a personal trainer and asked what training regimen they should get on, the trainer might be wise to simply say: move. When the client asks for more qualifying information, the trainer might repeat: just move your body. This is nowhere near granular enough for an athlete looking to finesse their physique or performance, but there’s humility and opportunity in realising you are in the garden of low-hanging fruit long before you enter the courtroom governed by the law of diminishing returns. Take advantage of that.
I’m talking directly to myself now because—for reasons personal and beyond the scope of this offering—I was conditioned so far away from engaging in creativity that I now have decades of opportunity cost in the rearview mirror. In an artistic sense don’t have to feign beginner’s mind, it is - for now - my visceral default.
I don’t even know what art form I should engage in, and that leaves the door open to engaging in all of them. There are no rules for me yet. If I just keep going, as the obese person should keep moving, the antecedent and platonic ‘form’ will reveal itself from the marble. Stop stepping back every half-second to change chisels—just keep chipping away.
Day one and two were poems. Day one was for my youngest child, Iona, born a week ago. Day two was about the birth of my first child, Leo, on his birthday.
My plan for today’s piece of art was to share a previously written and fairly polished poem I wrote for my wife on our first wedding anniversary. I can’t transcribe that poem today and complete this satisfying little triptych of thanks for my two children and their mother, because I left my little book of completed poems at the office in the city last night after seeing clients.
The best-laid plans go to waste.
There’s a scene in Friends where Phoebe starts dating Paul Rudd’s character, Mike Hannigan, and he tells her he’s a pianist. She asks him to prove it, and he says, “But we’re in a coffee shop—I don’t have my piano with me.” Phoebe replies, “A real pianist wouldn’t let that stop him.”
Mike then expertly riffs on the air piano.
“Wow you are really good” says a deeply impressed Phoebe.
In my world, the metric for being an artist is simple: Did you create and share a piece of work today? If yes, you’re an artist. If not, you aren’t. Forgotten your paintbrush? Microphone broken? Dog ate the transcript? Left your wee book of poems behind? Phoebe was right—I shouldn’t let that stop me.
Instead, I’ll write a little polemic about the vital importance of craic in the therapy and coaching room.
Why you must
have the Craic
If I’m honest—and with the incredible clientele I’m fortunate to work with—I find myself increasingly questioning the primacy of the tactics dominating wellness podcasts and influencers’ feeds: behavioural and cognitive hacks, ice baths, self-help books, mindfulness, dietary tweaks, optimising sleep, and more. These are all essential, and I regularly refer clients to experts in these fields. I co-create retreats where such practices are part of the offering, and I incorporate them into my own life. I am not knocking them. However, I believe these strategies are wonderful servants but terrible masters. The question remains: Why? Why do them? Who or what do they serve?
I think these pursuits often represent a form of deep procrastination—a preternatural and elaborate way to avoid recognising that this worship is of discipline for discipline’s sake. The problem with discipline and willpower is that they are finite resources. Even the most disciplined person eventually falters. Willpower is like a speedboat—fast but unsustainable for the long haul. For an ocean crossing, you need a sailboat. And what fills the sails for my clients—what makes change sustainable and life-altering—is a deep sense of one infinite thing: craic.
“Craic” is often misunderstood as just “fun” or “joy.” But it runs far deeper, tapping into a primordial well of the human psyche. It’s closer to enthusiasm—the kind that means being filled with the joy of life itself. Enthusiasm has taken a hit in recent times. It’s often subtly denigrated: “Oh, he’s very enthusiastic,” implying style over substance. But the word’s original meaning, from the Greek enthousiasmos—“inspiration” or “having a god within”—is profound. Originally referring to divine possession, it evolved to mean passionate excitement or zeal. It’s been bastardised into meaning “a bit much,” and I think we need to re-tether it to its sacred origins. The logical compasses my high-functioning clients have solely relied on often lead them into dreary disasters. Me too. I feel it is perhaps better to trust your enthusiasm and temper it with logic—not the other way around.
Craic, like psychedelics, is ineffable. You have to experience it to understand it. I could describe the taste of honey, or you could simply put a spoonful in your mouth. Craic is not solely Irish, but we have a deep sensibility for it. I see little daylight between craic and the ancient Greek understanding of enthusiasm.
In Irish wake houses, there’s often a room filled with wailing and much gnashing of teeth, and then downstairs in the kitchen, someone hands you a bottle of Heineken and a plate of homemade lasagne you didn’t know you wanted until you are devouring it. Ten minutes later, you’re crying with laughter having the craic with an old friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s hard to describe, but this is not necessarily tactless or poor form. The same tear tracks shift from sorrow to joy. Profundity doesn’t take itself too seriously; craic is the mechanism that interweaves depth and levity.
I’ve always disliked the Southern Californian peddling of Scandinavian concepts like hygge, lykke, and sisu. Not for cultural appropriation reasons but because I doubt you can “get” sisu (a style of Finnish resilience) by reading a book or two. Maybe if I lived in Finland for a decade or worked in their special military operations, I might claim to understand it. The same goes for craic.
Therapy, in its longer-term form, is a way to grasp the sacred mechanism of craic over time. Humour, initially often used as a defence mechanism, evolves into something deeper—levity that a life of depth requires. The better I become as a psychotherapist, the more I realise that therapy isn’t about wielding codified psychological tools; it’s about showing up as a human with another human. Authenticity matters. Clients value truth, shared joy, and genuine responses. Therapy isn’t about “doing the work” as the hyper-individualistic North American therapy model might suggest. It’s about ‘making the play’—having the craic.
The therapeutic process can be unexpectedly hilarious and profoundly transformative. When I’ve allowed clients to see me—flaws and all—the laughter often becomes as healing as the work itself. The inner artist, the child within, isn’t a wounded victim hiding in a corner of the oubliette under the castle. It’s outside the castle, already laughing and playing in the meadow. No matter the betrayal or cruelty of one’s upbringing, this part of us remains untouched, waiting for us to join in.
When my clients and I are deep in the craic, they feel truly seen. Seemingly intractable problems melt away as actionable side steps appear. There’s also always risk in this approach as a coach or therapist - as there is in a wake house. These jokes are not cavalier, and they can be deeply inappropriate if said at the wrong time in front of the wrong person or in the wrong room. There is a deep and metaphysical antenna and mindfulness operating above the heads of everyone in the wake house, and it is a beautiful and sacred thing to be a part of.
Here’s an example: A client may say, “That was such a tough year for me,” and I might say, “How so?” and we might piss ourselves laughing, because we have both held space previously for a deep grief that resulted from an awareness that the year in reference was one in which they were abused. If this makes you bristle as a therapist or wish to report me to someone, please understand that deeply embedded in such shared laughter over incredibly painful things is a deep and inalienable axiom that I am regifting to my clients: “You are not, and never will be again, defined primarily by all the terrible things that shouldn’t have happened to you—you are stronger than that.” But if you say that last wet blanket phrase to them—which is what I used to do and was ostensibly trained to do—they nod along and sniffle as you pass them the tissue. No foul. But no real score either.
If you say, “How so,?” skilfully, appropriately, and bravely, they always laugh in spite of themselves. They always get out of the chair a foot taller. I thought maybe this was my ego in the room; maybe they are in some sort of Stockholm syndrome situation where they wish to curry my favour and are laughing along even though they are—even unbeknownst to them—deeply offended. But I no longer think that, because I think that is quite a demoralised and cynical view of the state of the average human spirit. It is far, far more unsinkable than that. It is so much more internalised and capable than needing a professional listener to say “there, there” to them. Having the craic with clients is a way to transfuse back into them the very thing the word denotes—the divine. This is my job. Craic is sacred, craic is non-negotiable, and ultimately it is restorative and your birthright. You were not born to be sad. You were born to laugh along with everyone else.
This experience of craic I speak of far surpasses the toxic positivity peddled by the wellness machine. My coda, my sacred text, is Seamus Heaney’s Keeping Going. It recounts his brother bringing laughter to children in the kitchen after a nearby shooting in the village during the Troubles, and later showing quiet strength during milking. His brother is both jester and king.
Your inner artist, your inner child, is neither broken nor cowering. It’s laughing, waiting for you to join in. If you are keen to work with me, read this poem, and you can transpose my approach back onto Heaney’s brother. The spirit that possessed him is my spirit, and it’s not Heaney’s brother who is my hero, but rather this energy that animated him. This is the energy I aspire to recapitulate for you, to guide and support you on your journey to creative recovery.
It’s the opposite of a chore for me. I love it. It’s my Dhamma.
Here is the poem in its entirety.
Keeping going
1
The piper coming from far away is you
With a whitewash brush for a sporran
Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair
Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm
Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow,
Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting
With laughter, but keeping up the drone
Interminably between catches of breath.
2
The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing
On the back of the byre door, biding its time
Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket
And a potstick to mix it in with water.
Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled
A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.
But the slop of the actual job
Of brushing walls, the watery grey
Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out
Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.
Where had we come from, what was this kingdom
We knew we'd been restored to? Our shadows
Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered
The full length of the house, a black divide
Like a freshly-opened, pungent, reeking trench.
3
Piss at the gable, the dead will congregate.
But separately. The women after dark,
Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,
The only time the soul was let alone,
The only time that face and body calmed
In the eye of heaven.
Buttermilk and urine,
The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.
We were all together there in a foretime,
In a knowledge that might not translate beyond
Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure
Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay
And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down
You broke your arm. I shared the dread
When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.
4
That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate
In his nightmare - when he meets the hags again
And sees the apparitions in the pot -
I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth,
Steam and ululation, the smoky hair
Curtaining a cheek. `Don't go near bad boys
In that college you're bound for. Do you hear me?
Do you hear me speaking to you? Don't forget.'
And then the potstick quickening the gruel,
The steam crown swirled, everything intimate
And fear-swathed brightening for a moment,
Then going dull and fatal and away.
5
Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood
In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot
Where his head had been, other stains subsumed
In the parched wall he leant his back against
That morning just like any other morning,
Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box.
A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt,
Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped
Level with him, although it was not his lift.
And then he saw an ordinary face
For what it was and a gun in his won face.
His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel
Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady,
So he never moved, just pushed with all his might
Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip,
Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.
6
My dear brother, you have good stamina.
You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor
Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people,
You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep
Old roads open by driving on the new ones.
You called the pipers' sporrans whitewash brushes
And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen.
But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.
I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,
In the milking parlour, holding yourself up
Between two cows until your turn goes past,
Then coming to to the smell of dung again
and wondering, is this all? As it was
In the beginning, is now and shall be?
Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush
Up on the byre door, and keeping going.
Seamus Heaney
Heaney’s final words to his wife, “Noli timere” (“Do not be afraid”), resonate deeply. Beneath the protective armour we wear (which is painted on anyway) lies an unwounded self, ready to have the craic. So stop being so afraid of your creative inner child and let them have some lasagne in the next room for fuck’s sake. They don’t want to be in the room with the corpse in it anymore.