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The hall of a chalet we rented in Chamonix in August, photographed on the last morning.

Two ropes coiled on the bench. Walking poles propped in the corner. A green shell jacket on a hook, still damp. Rucksacks dumped where they were taken off. A pile of quickdraws and carabiners inside the door, a helmet resting on top of it and another on the floor beside a rolled pair of gaiters. Climbing boots.

And the shoe rack. Approach shoes and trail shoes on the lower shelves, hiking boots above them, and on the top shelf two pairs of small boots — one pink, one with purple laces — the smaller of them about the length of my hand.

I took better photographs that week. Glaciers, granite, a valley from three thousand metres.

This is the one I keep coming back to.

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I could not have imagined this room. Not the cost of it. The fact of it — that a hall belonging to people related to me might one day look like this.

To explain why, I have to go back to a house in Dublin in the 1960s with no television in it.

My parents were not mainstream, by the standards of the time.

We kept Christmas, but we were told early and plainly that Santa Claus did not exist and that the modest presents on Christmas morning came from them. One of my first memories is of standing in the yard of the Sacred Heart Convent School on Leeson Street in December, passing this on to my classmates with enormous satisfaction. A few days later I sat beside my mother in the head nun’s office while it was explained to her that whatever the Duggans did at home was their own business, but that the school would not have them dismantling Christmas for everybody else.

We had no television until I was twelve or thirteen. My father held that he did not need to see the newsreader when he could read and could listen to the wireless. In any event TV news was propaganda, and that it made people stupid — an argument I have since heard almost word for word about social media, from people who would be startled to find themselves agreeing with him.

Every summer the school issued two lists. The book list was compulsory. The school treated the reading list as optional. My parents did not. Most weeks I was frog-marched to the library in Rathmines and came home with books I had not chosen, and read them, because there was no version of that week in which I did not.

I was not grateful at the time. I was certain there were more urgent things to be doing. But it is where I met Walter Bonatti and Chris Bonington, and the men who hauled sledges into places that had already killed the people who went before them.

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None of it made me want to go.

That is the part I have only lately understood. The books were not a substitute for the mountains. Nothing in them suggested the mountains were available. They were dispatches from a world running alongside mine that never once touched it, and I read them the way you read Jacques Cousteau describing the sea floor.

In 2013 our son Richard was doing a master’s in Bristol, and we went over to see him. We were driving to Axminster for dinner, stopped at Cheddar Gorge, and he talked me into a route he described, accurately, as easy. It beat me inside ten minutes. I came down and filed it: been there, done that, no need to do it again.

I was fifty-two. I had spent forty-five years reading about men on mountains, and I got off that rock relieved to have the question settled.

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John Muir wrote in 1898 that thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people were beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home. I read that line long before Cheddar Gorge and thought it a fine sentence about somebody else.

What was missing was never information. At eleven I had more information about expeditions than most adults acquire in a lifetime. What was missing was any sense that it had anything to do with me, and there is no reading list for that. My parents handed over the entire appetite, deliberately, and at some cost to their Saturdays. They could not hand over the permission, because they did not have it themselves.

I am not sure anybody can hand it over. Mine took a second attempt, eight years after the first, on a Howling Ridge, on Carrantouhill in Kerry, with the same son belaying from above.

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Which brings me back to the hall.

Everything in that photograph can be bought. The ropes, the helmets, the small boots on the top shelf. It is all equipment, and equipment is the easy part. It is a reading list you can wear.

Our granddaughter started big school two weeks ago. Our grandson is getting his first taste of the same thing in day care. I am not against any of it. The narrowing which has now started is mostly carried out by people doing their jobs well, and my parents, in their strange and serious house, were doing theirs. It runs for twenty years, and there is nothing on that shoe rack that will stop it.

Somebody has to teach a child to sit still.

The boots on the top shelf will not fit her next summer. Somebody will buy the next size, and the size after that, and at some point, she will begin deciding for herself whether they are the sort of thing she wears.

I cannot buy her that, and I cannot bring it forward.

All I can do is leave the hall looking like this and go on being the grandfather who is still going up the hill, badly, at sixty-seven.

It is not much of a plan. I am only recently seeing that it is the one my parents used.

They were a great deal more forceful about it than I intend to be.

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September 3rd, 2026

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When I was diagnosed with cancer at fifty-three, one of the decisions I made early was about who would organise the fight.

There were people who wanted to help. Good people, people who loved me and my wife, who would have stepped in to manage logistics, to coordinate with consultants, to research treatment options, to mobilise the wider network. They offered, and the offers were sincere.

I said no. My wife and I would handle it ourselves, with our doctors, on our own terms. We would not have a committee. We would not be managed. We would not, in the middle of the most personal thing that had ever happened to us, outsource the decisions that were ours to make.

Some people found this difficult to understand. From the outside it looked like stubbornness, or pride, or a failure to accept help gracefully. From the inside it was something else: the knowledge that the decisions we were going to make over the following months would need to come from inside us, not from the preferences and anxieties of the people around us who were also frightened, and whose fear, kindly meant, would have shaped the decisions if we had let it.

This is what I mean by mindful selfishness. Not selfishness in the ordinary sense — not the appropriation of more than your share, not the disregard of other people’s needs, not the indifference to those who matter to you. Mindful selfishness is the deliberate protection of the space in which you know your own mind, in order to live from it.

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I have a lifelong interest in motor sport. It started in early adolescence and has never left. I have never had the budget or the time or the skill to do anything serious with it; I have driven cars at speed on the occasional track day, in the way an enthusiastic amateur does. For most of my working life I went, perhaps once every two or three years, to a Grand Prix, or to a Goodwood weekend.

Each time I planned the trip, I felt guilty. The guilt was not entirely rational — the trips were modest, my work calendar could accommodate them, my family understood why I went. The guilt was the guilt of doing something that was purely for me. I have learned to treat that guilt as information rather than as instruction. The information is: this matters to me. The instruction that used to follow — and so you should not do it, or should do it less, or should apologise for it — was wrong.

There is a friend of mine in her late sixties who took up the cello two years ago. She had played as a teenager, abandoned the instrument when she went to university, and not touched it for forty-five years. Her husband found the new arrangement difficult. The practice took up two evenings a week. It involved a teacher in the house. It involved her in a state of concentration that was, by her own description, the most internally referenced she had been in decades.

Her husband responded with the small, almost imperceptible withdrawals of a person whose pattern is being disrupted. He did not object outright. He did not say stop. He said, slowly and indirectly, the things that long-married people say to indicate that the new arrangement is inconvenient.

She kept playing. She kept the cello time on her calendar in ink. She did not argue, or justify, or stop. Six months later her husband had come, slowly, to find the cello sound a part of the house rather than an intrusion in it. He still does not particularly enjoy it. He has accepted that she does, and that is the part of the accommodation that matters.

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After the rails, the pressure to continue accommodating everyone around you does not diminish. In some ways it intensifies, because the structure that used to provide cover for selective unavailability — the work schedule, the business travel, the professional obligation — is gone, and the people who used to accept those as reasons now see a diary that, to them, looks empty.

The accommodating instinct is not a failure of character. It is the consequence of thirty years on the rails, during which being reliable, available, and responsive to other people’s expectations was precisely what the rails required. The rails rewarded the person who said yes. The rails phase is over. The instinct has not caught up.

The distinction I am drawing is between selfishness and mindful selfishness. Selfishness is the disregard of other people. Mindful selfishness is the honest naming, to yourself first, of what you actually need, followed by the willingness to act on it without performing guilt about it. The cycling I do alone before dinner is not antisocial behaviour. It is the thing that makes the dinner good. The Goodwood weekend is not an abandonment of my family. It is what makes me a more energised, more present, more interesting person to be around for the six months after it.

The question this bearing asks is simple: identify one place in your current life where you have been over-accommodating. Not a major commitment. A small one. Notice the small contraction in the chest that this bearing is interested in. Then do one small thing about it.

Notice what happens in the chest afterwards.

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August 31st, 2026

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This insight was unplanned, but sometimes an experience triggers a memory and the piece just presents itself.

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The room does not announce itself.

You come up a drive outside Abbeyleix, an hour or so south-west of Dublin, to a Victorian house that was a ruin not long ago. The restaurant, when you find it, is low and quiet under a copper roof: pale wood, worn leather, a fire lit early, the kitchen open across a counter and nobody in it hurrying. Nothing in the place asks anything of you.

Then the plates begin to arrive. First an intense tomato tart in a crisp heritage grain pastry. Soon comes the classic Irish salad, familiar but unfamiliar: the egg is there, but different as is the ham and on the plate elderflower, gooseberry, fermented barley. By the fourth plate you understand that the flourish has been withheld on purpose.

We had been looking forward to this for years — my wife and I and three friends. I have followed Cúán Greene’s cooking since long before there was anything to book: six years of building, slowly and in public, and then you walk into the finished thing in its first week and find it exactly as unhurried as promised.

The name is Ómós. It is an Irish word and I have known it all my life: homage, honour, respect. And underneath all three, duty. It was one of those words that had always been in the house, like a chair you have sat in ten thousand times and could not describe with your eyes shut. I had never once weighed it.

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There is a Japanese word I have carried for forty years. Giri. 義理. The first character holds morality, honour, justice, loyalty. The second is reason, logic, truth. The dictionaries give you duty, which will get you through a transaction and no further. Giri is what you owe because of who you are and who has carried you. It does not expire. Nobody enforces it.

I first came across the word at twenty-one, in Japan, and kept it ever since — smugly, the way you keep a foreign word for a thing your own language supposedly cannot say.

I am Irish. I sat all evening in a room called Ómós and it did not occur to me until the following morning, on the road, that we have had the word the whole time.

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A song came on that I have liked for years, one of those you have heard fifty times without ever quite hearing. A man sings about having lost his roots and been knocked about by his own life, and then, very plainly, he refuses to go on with it. He will not take orders. He will not let whatever remains of his future proceed without consulting his own soul.

It stayed with me for half an hour. The radio moved on. I didn’t.

What it left behind was a question. Who was giving the orders?

There is nobody in that song to point at. And somewhere on the road north of Naas it became obvious that there had never been anybody in mine either. There was the mortgage, and the promotion, and the reputation, and the school fees, and the next rung, and the people who would notice if I declined to take it. There was habit. And there was identity, which is the heaviest of the lot, because by the time it arrives you have begun to do the enforcing yourself.

None of them ever issued an order. They didn’t need to. That is what the rails are — a life so thoroughly commanded that no command is ever given.

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Both are duty. That is what I could not see until the two halves of that night ran into one another.

Giri is duty. Ómós is duty. The mortgage and the promotion and the reputation are duty too; we call them responsibilities and we mean the same thing by it. The same word. Much the same weight. One of them I would shoulder again tomorrow. The other simply happened to me — arriving one obligation at a time, each of them reasonable, not one of them refused, until I looked up and found that the sum of them was a life.

So the difference is not the load. The difference is authorship.

Ómós is what you get when someone works out for himself what he owes, and to whom — the makers, the ground, the people who were on that land long before him — and then pays it, week after week, in bones and patience, without being asked and without saying so. Which is why the room does not announce itself. Nobody in it is performing for a judge. The judge is already inside.

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I notice the same shape keeps appearing.

Costello and Smith came first. They are still making the music they want to make, not the music that made them famous. Then a day in deep snow when I re-discovered the feeling of flying.

Different ground. The same movement. And not one of them an escape.

Nobody escapes a life they built themselves, brick by reasonable brick.

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The word I use for that — for letting a life that has quietly narrowed begin to widen again — is unnarrowing, and it has never felt like a destination to me. More like a map that is still being drawn as I walk it. The refusal in that song is the same. It sounds like an arrival. It isn’t. It is a bearing — a direction you take, and then keep taking, especially in weather.

Which is the honest answer to why the song caught me at all. Not because I had borrowed something of his. Because we had come by different roads and arrived at the same room.

Which does not announce itself. You have to come up the drive and find it.

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27th August 2026

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I am writing this from a chalet under the Bossons glacier, in Chamonix, on holiday with our grown children, their partners and two grandchildren.

I have got into the habit of photographing it from roughly the same place each summer.

The walk down to the Mer de Glace from Montenvers takes you past markers showing where the glacier surface stood in a given year, so it is a walk through dates as much as anything else.

I am not going to build an argument on that. Other people are better placed to. I mention it for what it taught me about the eye. Some changes are too slow to see while they are happening, and the only way to see them at all is to hold an old mark up against them.

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I spent a day last week I will not forget on the mountain across the valley — up to Plan Praz, on to the Brévent, back and along the balcony to La Flégère, and down. It was hot and I was struggling, and I did what I always do when I am struggling: stopped attending to myself and started watching other people.

Every age. Every size and shape. Solo walkers, couples. Climbers in harnesses laden with ropes. Mountain runners who seemed oblivious to the terrain that was challenging me. Families strung out along the path with one child sulking at the back. Parties of a dozen with a determined organiser at the front. Four or five languages inside a hundred metres. Some were plainly very fit. A great many were not, and were there anyway.

Another day on the packed cog railway to Montenvers and the gondola to the ice cave with the grandchildren — something in the order of a third of a million people a year make the trip.

The cable car to the Aiguille du Midi — 3,842 metres, high enough that you notice the thin air and your own breathing for the first time in years. Close to half a million people visit the Aiguille every year. Only a small fraction are mountaineers and extreme skiers braving the disappearing snow arête. The rest want, for one afternoon, to stand somewhere they have never been and likely never will again.

Not one of them was there because their ordinary week required it.

Whatever draws so many people to uncomfortable places, it is not rare, and it does not belong to anybody in particular. I have a private word for it, which I will not press on anyone: unnarrowing.

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I have written before about my parents’ approach to holidays, which were a schedule to be beaten, and about coming home early as a form of winning. Until I was in the second half of my twenties I had almost nothing of my own to compare it with. I was working, or studying, or in Japan. Even the honeymoon was arranged just a week before the wedding: a ferry to Cherbourg and a gîte in the Dordogne.

Then the children came and holidays became a focus of the year. Twenty years of West Cork, outdoors in whatever the weather was doing, the children swimming, hiking, learning to surf, a night or two camping on an island. Making friends with people they would not have encountered in south Dublin.

Ryanair did the rest — a great many European towns, cheap rooms, food we did not recognise. And skiing, which I have done since Japan and intend to go on doing.

When the children stopped wanting West Cork and went off to have adventures of their own, my wife and I followed their example and widened ours.

This week the whole thing has folded back on itself. The children are the adults. I am the grandfather in the chalet.

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So what is a holiday for.

For a great many people it is the only stretch of the year in which the choice is theirs. Everything else has been settled in advance — the hours, the route, the people, the ordinary Tuesday. Two or three weeks are handed back, and what a person does with them is the most honest available statement of where they have got to.

None of which is about destinations. Two people can stand on the same beach for the same fortnight and only one of them is anywhere new. The difference is whether it was chosen or inherited.

There are holidays in which no decision is taken. Going where the people we know go, doing there what they do. They are comfortable and they are safe. They are also the same life at a better temperature, and the ones I remember least.

I am not sneering. I have had them, enjoyed them, and will have another.

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Which brings me back to the glacier.

A life narrows at about the speed the ice moves. Nobody notices it in the year it happens. The list of things that are not for us lengthens by one item at a time, each addition perfectly reasonable, and the whole of it stays invisible unless something older is held up against it.

A holiday is one of the few marks we set down and date. Every year, by the decisions we make, without meaning to, we record what we were prepared to attempt.

I have a careful record of where the ice stood last August. It turns out I have one of where I stood, too — not written down, but kept. What I was willing to endure, whom I was willing to be seen struggling in front of, how far up the mountain I was prepared to go before deciding that the view from here was fine.

I hold it up against this year whether or not I mean to. That is what got me to La Flégère.

The ice and I are both being measured.

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Thanks for continuing to read these insights through the summer, I had expected a drop off so the continuing momentum is encouraging. Can I ask you again to share the insights within your circle and suggest to anyone who likes them that they subscribe.

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24th August, 2026

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We are each given a finite amount of time, and we are never told how much. Oliver Burkeman puts the average at four thousand weeks. Written down, the number looks small. Lived, it almost never feels finite at all.

In the exploration years we do not know we have been given anything. Time is simply the water we swim in.

In the conditioning years we begin to notice it, without quite being able to say what we have noticed. A school term and a summer holiday are the same length on the calendar. They are nothing like the same length to a child. One crawls; the other is gone before you have taken hold of it.

On the rails, we stop noticing and start spending. We chase the next quarter, the next promotion, the next milestone, and we bargain — consciously or not — for more. More hours, more speed, more done before the light goes. Sometimes the bargaining appears to work. More often it only feels as though it has.

For some of us, in any of these phases, the account is closed early. Illness, an accident, plain bad luck. Fifteen years ago a cancer was found in me by chance, during investigations for something else. For a while the question stopped being abstract. If what remained was to be measured in months rather than years, how did I want to spend it?

That question does not leave when the danger does. It waits. As the rails end, or begin to, it comes back — quietly, and easy to ignore. It is easier to keep running the formula that has always worked. Easier to believe the marketing, to invest in looking forever young, though youth is not on offer and the pursuit of it is undignified. Easier, above all, to go on bargaining with time — especially when almost everyone around us is doing the same.

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Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer and writer, and among the first people to have reached all three poles — north, south, and the summit of Everest — on foot. Some years ago he was in Dublin for a literary festival, and a handful of us joined him one Sunday morning to walk through Grand Canal Basin, Ringsend and Irishtown.

I have known those streets my whole life. I eat in them, work in them, cycle and drive through them on my way to somewhere else. I was certain they had nothing left to show me.

I have seldom been so wrong. Walking with him, at his pace, I noticed things I had passed a thousand times and never once looked at, never smelled, never heard: wild flowers under the murals on South Dock Road and the ordinary household sounds from O’Rahilly House and Whelan House, on the other side of the Dodder. I had spent, over the years, hundreds of hours in those few streets under the firm impression that I was there. I had not really been there at all.

It took me a while to name what the morning had taught me. Being somewhere is not the same as being present. And the destination — the restaurant, the office, the place I was forever hurrying towards — matters far less than I had allowed myself to believe. What matters is the getting there, which I had spent a lifetime treating as dead time to be crossed as quickly as possible.

There was one more thing, and it surprised me most. We can stretch time, or compress it, simply by choosing to linger or to rush.

I spent years studying mathematics, physics and engineering. Einstein had shown, long before I sat any of those examinations, that time is not the fixed and even thing it pretends to be. I could have proved it on paper. But the lived truth of it had been schooled out of me. Walk a mile, run it, cycle it, ride it on a motorbike, take the train, the boat, the plane — the two ends of the journey are identical. What happens between them could not be more different. The clock measures one thing. The experience is another entirely.

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I wonder whether we can accept that, even when it is not obvious, we almost always have a choice. And I wonder — could we look again?

As small children we linger without deciding to – latterly, my grandchildren show this to me. In the conditioning years we are taught, gently and thoroughly, not to linger. On the rails we forget the choice was ever ours to make.

After the rails, as the finite gift swims back into view, the choice returns with it. Not the choice to have more time — that bargain was never on offer. The choice to be present in the time we have. To slow down enough to see the street we were sure we already knew. To treat the walk, and not only the arrival, as the point of the thing.

Kagge did not tell me what to look at. He simply walked slowly enough that I could see.

It changes almost everything.

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17th August. 2026

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For most of my life Antarctica had been a place I read about. I read Shackleton’s South twice as a boy, in the way boys read books they should not yet be able to read. I read Scott. I read Amundsen. I watched the films, looked at the photographs, learned what there was to learn about the continent from the side of the world I was actually on.

What I had also done, without quite admitting it to myself, was treat the reading as a substitute for the trip. I knew what the inside of a polar tent looked like. I knew the names of the dogs. I knew the chronology of every famous expedition. The knowledge made me feel as though I had been there. It also made it slightly easier never to go.

I do not remember the exact moment I noticed this. I remember the season after it. My wife and I started looking, in earnest, at the practical question of how an ordinary person reaches the Antarctic Peninsula. It is more accessible now than it was for Shackleton; it is also still, by any modern standard, a serious place. The window is small. The weather is real. The cost is not trivial.

We went.

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I will say a little about what I had not been prepared for.

The forty-eight-hour delay in Punta Arenas, waiting for weather that kept every other flight grounded. The ferocity of what met us on King George Island when we finally embarked — wind, rain, snow, hail, and the grey mountains of sea we crossed through the night, racing south to get below the worst of it. Waking to an anchored stillness, the ship surrounded by the sound of whales spouting, and the smell of their breath, which the books had also not described.

The smell of a penguin colony at first light — half a million birds, downwind. The silence of a glacier without wind, which is a quality of silence I had not previously encountered. The huge variety in the shades and textures of white. The sound of water rushing unseen beneath the ice, sometimes roaring, sometimes barely perceptible. The size and unhurried grace of a leopard seal. A group of penguins gathered at the water’s edge, contemplating the dive. A pod of orcas hunting at dusk in the bay below the ship, leopard seals competing for the same prey — among the most undisguisedly evolutionary spectacles I have witnessed. The low percussion a glacier makes when it calves, which you feel before you hear. The remnants of whaling settlements and the lonely graves of men who died far from home.

I will say no more, because this essay is not about Antarctica. I will say only that no amount of reading had prepared me for any of it. The reading had been the rehearsal. The trip was the performance. Until the trip, there had been no performance.

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That distinction — between the rehearsal and the performance — is what I want to stay with, because it has turned out to describe something far beyond Antarctica.

During the rails, information consumption passed for curiosity and mostly got away with it. You read the industry reports, followed the market, kept up with the journals, attended the conferences. The knowing felt like enough, because on the rails it usually was. The rails reward the expert who already knows. They are less interested in the person who is finding out.

After the rails, the same habit — reading about things rather than doing them, accumulating knowledge about experiences rather than having them — is what fills the years without filling the life. The person who has watched all the documentaries, read all the memoirs, listened to all the podcasts, and visited none of the places those things describe is a person doing the rehearsal indefinitely. The rehearsal is comfortable. It is also, eventually, a kind of fraud.

The opposite of this is not recklessness. It is the willingness to accept incompetence as a starting point rather than a disqualification. On the ice, I was a passenger. I knew nothing about polar logistics, maritime navigation, or expedition safety. The people around me knew all of these things and I did not. This is an uncomfortable condition for someone who has spent forty years being the expert in the room. It is also the condition in which real learning happens, as opposed to the annexation of more information about things you already think you understand.

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The curiosity I am describing here is embodied rather than informational. It begins with genuine not-knowing and involves doing something that changes you. Reading about it will not do. Watching a documentary about it will not do. The bearing requires the trip — whatever your trip is. A cooking class in a tradition you have never cooked from. A language you cannot yet speak. A piece of music you cannot yet play. A mountain you have not yet climbed. An early morning in a part of your own city you have never been to.

The opposite of this kind of curiosity is not ignorance. It is the decision, usually made without noticing it, that you have already arrived somewhere and that the arriving is enough. Antarctica was thirty years of arriving. The trip took ten days. They were not the same thing.

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August 10^th 2026

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Songs have always been a catalyst for me — a way into thought and reflection.

Alphaville’s “Forever Young” often surfaces in my mind. Recently I keep returning to the gap between the song and its singer: Marian Gold in 1984, and Marian Gold four decades on. The wish at the centre of the song — to stay forever young — had not aged as well as the melody. Sung by a young man it sounded like longing. Held up against forty years of passing time, it sounded like something else. I still like the song. I no longer believe the wish.

Perhaps that is part of what led me, in Nobody’s Tribute Band, to a flatter conclusion: staying young is not on offer, and the pursuit of it is undignified.

Around me are people entering, or working their way through, their on-the-rails years — achieving things that genuinely matter, and fretting about their thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays. Bargaining, in different ways, with time.

I found myself thinking again about “A Good Year for the Roses,” written by Jerry Chesnut in 1970 and brought to life for me, a decade later, by Elvis Costello. It turns on two images. In one, a man stands in a room a woman has just left, reading her absence in the things she left behind — the lipstick on the cigarettes in the ashtray. In the other, the garden outside carries on without her, the roses still in bloom, the year turning as it always does.

Leonard Cohen put it more hopefully still — that it is the flaw in things, the crack, that lets the light in.

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I can still remember the first time I skied deep powder. I was in my early twenties, living in Japan after university.

More than the memory, I remember the feeling: weightless, airborne — what I imagine flying must feel like.

Over the following decade it returned to me a handful of times, always by accident.

Then, in my early thirties, an accident of a less welcome kind reminded me that I had a wife, children, a mortgage and a promising career. It was time to grow up. I accepted that I would not feel that particular weightlessness again.

I have caught glimpses of it since. Snorkelling once along the edge of a deep ocean ravine off Indonesia, I watched manta rays move through the water — enormous, unhurried — and found myself thinking, again, that this must be what flying feels like. I have spent hours watching glider pilots and paragliders and wingsuit flyers do the real thing, from the safety of the ground, knowing I will never have the nerve to try it myself.

Earlier this year I was offered the chance to ski deep powder in the Canadian backcountry. This was the very thing I had assumed was behind me.

I went enthusiastically but reconciled to the likelihood that I had bitten off more than I could chew, and that the attempt would have to be enough.

At the remote lodge we spent the first afternoon learning to locate mannequins buried in the snow and dig them out. I was quietly questioning my judgement until my guide, Rocco, mentioned that in thirty-eight years he had needed those skills for real exactly twice.

On the first day I was, by some distance, the worst skier in the group. I lost count of how often I fell and held everyone up. When Rocco sent me back to the lodge at midday, I was relieved. Only later did he explain why: if he had let me stay out, I would not have found the confidence to go again the next morning. On the second day I fell only once. I was still the worst skier there. But two or three times, because of a guide I trusted, I felt it again — the weightlessness I had long since filed away as gone.

Flying.

The word that surfaced as I wrote that was rediscovered.

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Most conversations about later life promise reinvention.

I am talking about something plainer: recovery. Recovering capacities, curiosities, and parts of ourselves that adulthood did not destroy — only set aside.

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July 30th 2026

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I was good at mathematics. From the age of eight, that was the most important thing anyone could say about me, and the most important thing I said about myself. The kid who could solve complex equations. The one who would do something technical and important. The path was as clear as anything in a child’s life is allowed to be clear.

I started university with that path in front of me. Within months of beginning the degree, in a drawing office one afternoon, I was staring at a set of equations I had been waiting most of my adolescence to encounter. They had become, suddenly, pointless.

It was not that I could not do them. I could, and the doing was easy. I simply did not want to. The path was clear, and it was the wrong path, and I had only just noticed.

I finished the degree. I am glad I did; the years that followed gave me persistence, structure and analytical discipline I have drawn on for forty years. But I knew, before the end of first year, that I would never be the engineer I had spent a decade preparing to be. What I had been doing, without knowing it, was being certain about a version of myself that did not exist.

That moment — barely eighteen years old, in a drawing office in Dublin, watching certainty come apart in my hands — is, as best as I can locate it, the first time I understood that certainty was a thing I had been doing to myself rather than a thing I had been finding in the world.

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Certainty was useful on the rails. Enormously useful. You cannot raise children in a state of constant inquiry. You cannot run a business by repeatedly questioning whether the business should exist. You cannot commit to a marriage, a mortgage, a country, a career, while continually open to the possibility that you should have committed to something else. Certainty made action possible. It allowed you to specialise, to invest, to take ownership, to be relied upon.

By the time you were forty you had been trained to know things. By fifty you had been trained to know them with confidence. By sixty the muscle of not-knowing had atrophied from decades of disuse. This is not a failure. It is what the rails phase demanded of you, and one of the reasons you have whatever competence you have.

It is also, after the rails, the thing most likely to walk you into a smaller life.

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On the rails, the world is broadly predictable, and certainty maps onto reality and produces results. After the rails, the world becomes less predictable in the specific ways that matter most: who you are now, what you want now, what you are capable of now. The very questions the post-rails phase requires you to engage with are the questions certainty cannot answer.

Certainty about who you are prevents you from becoming someone different. Certainty about what you are capable of prevents you from testing the assumption. Certainty about what you want prevents you from noticing what has changed.

I see this in some of the people I advise — executives who are still certain about how their industry works, how success is achieved, what kind of person they are. The certainty makes them brittle. They are not wrong about the things they are certain of; they are just operating on five-year-old maps in a landscape that has changed. The certainty prevents them from noticing.

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The shift I am describing is not from certainty to doubt. Doubt is not useful. It is from certainty to curiosity. The opposite of certainty, in this context, is not the absence of conviction. It is the willingness to hold conviction lightly enough to be corrected by evidence.

Curiosity is a different muscle from certainty. It has been atrophying since school. It can be rebuilt, but rebuilding it requires practice, and the practice is uncomfortable at first, because incompetence is uncomfortable and curiosity leads to incompetence before it leads anywhere else.

Here is the practical version: count, in the next twenty-four hours, the sentences that begin ‘I am not the kind of person who…’ Notice how many of them were decided thirty years ago and have not been tested since. Pick one. Ask honestly: how would I know if this sentence were wrong?

The answer, almost always, is that you would have to try the thing and see. That is the bearing. Not the trying — the willingness to ask the question that produces the trying.

I was not, it turned out, the kind of person who was a mechanical engineer. I was, it turned out — and this surprised me for years — the kind of person who was curious about almost everything else. The curiosity was there the whole time. The certainty was sitting on top of it.

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July 27^th 2026

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This chain of insights has taken on a life of its own. Each time a destination comes into view, it proves to be another ridge, with more behind it. Perhaps that is the pleasure; I suspect it has quietly become an addiction.

Nobody’s Tribute Band left a simple idea: youth is not available to us, and chasing it is undignified.

Next I wrote an Insight called The Feeling of Flying, meant as the next link in this chain. But I was hurrying, and in the hurry, I stepped over something. So, I have come back. The Feeling of Flying will come later.

Conditioning, and then decades on the rails, burned one idea deep into me: that life is a series of games, each with a beginning, a middle and an end, and each ending in winners and losers. During the conditioning we are told that it matters more to enjoy the game than to win it. We are told this. No one believes it, and nothing in our experience suggests it is true.

A memory surfaces. It was unusual enough to be easy to notice — which makes me think the same thing was happening around me in quieter ways I never saw. It was how my parents approached holidays.

Before I tell you about ours, pause for a moment and think about your own — and about what we all seem to agree a holiday is for.

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Our holidays were always in Ireland. The first time I left the island — the first time I sat on a plane — was when I moved to Japan at barely twenty-one, newly qualified as an engineer and, by some distance, the youngest of my year. That is another story. I mention it only because it tells you how enclosed the world of my childhood was.

Holidays were planned across the winter. My mother was the architect, and, being a teacher, what she designed was educational. She chose the county. She researched its history and drew up a plan that would carry us through every corner of every village, past every monument. Bed and breakfasts were booked — I cannot recall two nights in the same one. Meals were decided months ahead, picnics mostly, the occasional restaurant, booked where booking was needed. Beaches were not in the plan. They were available only if we finished the day’s itinerary.

Most years, over the Whit weekend, the whole plan was tested in a compressed dry run, then tightened and refined.

It was only much later that I understood how unusual this was. And there was one thing stranger still, which I could not see at the time, because I knew only what I knew.

For my parents, a successful holiday meant making up time. Getting ahead of the schedule. Coming home a day or two before the plan allowed.

Winning.

We had a garage down a lane behind the house. I can still feel us creeping down that lane near midnight on a summer Friday, lights low. I remember hiding indoors until Sunday evening, when the neighbours expected us back. I remember slipping out on Sunday morning to Mass in Rathmines rather than our own parish in Beechwood, so as not to be seen home early.

For my parents, a holiday was a finite game.

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In 1986 an obscure academic, James Carse, published Finite and Infinite Games — an idea Simon Sinek has since carried to a wider audience. I read it then and was captivated; I wonder what that says about me.

A finite game has fixed rules, fixed players, a beginning and an end, and a winner. An infinite game has none of these. The point of a finite game is to win it; the point of an infinite game is to keep it going.

The conditioning prepares us for finite games. The rails confirm the lesson every day, at home and at work.

The real insight in Nobody’s Tribute Band, I see now, was this: Elvis Costello is playing an infinite game. Robert Smith is in the same conversation as Olivia Rodrigo — a conversation that began before either of them and will carry on long after all of us are gone.

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I am not complaining, and I am certainly not criticising. I am grateful. My parents’ strange, meticulous holidays shaped me and shaped me well. They handed me tools I still use, and they planted a curiosity that has never once stopped working.

My Mother’s First Three Weeks as a Widow taught me the rest — what attention can become once the rails end and the unnarrowing begins. I learned that noticing is a skill. Like most skills, it is buried during the productive years. And, like most skills, it can be found again.

That is what continuing is.

Not another finite game, played harder.

Jim Collins, a management thinker I return to, calls it the twenty-mile march — a fixed distance held every day, in fair weather and foul; the discipline lies as much in the holding back when the going is easy as in the pressing on when it is hard, and never in racing ahead to bank a day against the plan. It looks, at first, like a way to win a race. It is really a way to be still walking long after the idea of winning has quietly fallen away.

It is the patience to notice that no finishing line was ever painted on the road — and that the horizon has been moving, all along, as fast as we move.

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20th July 2026

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I want to be careful in this essay, because the argument I am making in this newsletter is easy to oversimplify, and the oversimplified version is not only wrong but irritating.

The oversimplified version goes like this: the narrowing is a choice, so unnarrowing is a choice, so if you are living a smaller life than you want, that is on you. Fix your mindset. Take the trip. Stop making excuses.

That version makes me angry when I encounter it, and I encounter it often. It is not what I am arguing.

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I was appointed Chief Executive of a publicly quoted company at thirty-five. I bought a business at forty-three with borrowed money and ran it for twenty-two years. I had financial reserves when crises arrived. I had a spouse who has carried more than her share. I had children who launched into competent adulthood. I had a body that recovered from cancer. By sixty I had the option to design the next phase rather than being forced into one.

Most people do not have all of these. Some people have none of them. I want to be clear about this, because the examples in this newsletter are drawn from my life, and my life is more privileged than most. The hiking is in Kerry; it is also in Patagonia and Bhutan. The food is at home; it is also occasionally at restaurants most people will never eat in.

This newsletter is not asking you to follow my itinerary. It is asking you to look at the underlying behaviour — the willingness to interrupt the narrowing, the willingness to ask what you actually want, the willingness to make a choice from the inside rather than follow the gradient of what is expected. That behaviour is available at every scale. I have watched it at very large scale and very small scale, and the architecture is the same.

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A friend, now in his seventies, spent his working life as a dedicated school teacher. He had always been interested in nature, and before most of the world had caught up, he was already concerned about the impact humans were having on the environment. When he retired, he did not slow into it. He joined environmental groups, then started leading them. He has run national campaigns, built educational programmes for schoolchildren — on the subject he had taught for forty years, now from a different angle. He did not have, on paper, the resources for an unnarrowed life at the scale I am describing. He made one anyway, by following a thread he had been holding his whole working life and pulling harder on it once the working life ended.

The scale is not the point. The act is the point.

What the teacher in his seventies and I have in common is not resources or opportunity or professional background. It is that we both, at the moment the rails ended, made an active decision about what came next rather than letting the decision be made by default. That is the agency I am talking about. It is not the agency to do anything. It is the agency, within whatever constraints actually apply, to choose rather than to drift.

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The honest version of the argument has two parts, and they have to be held together.

The first part: the constraints are real. Caregiving responsibilities, chronic illness, geography, economic precarity, divorce in later life — these are real constraints on agency, not failures of will. Anyone who tells you that the narrowing is always a choice and therefore always avoidable has not thought carefully about the lives of most people, or has not looked honestly at their own.

The second part: within whatever constraints actually apply, most people have more room to choose than they are using. Not infinite room. Not the room to do anything. Real room, inside real limits, that is not being used. The gap between what you could choose and what you do choose is where this newsletter lives.

The question — the only question worth asking, and the one most people defer until it is too late to answer fully — is: within the constraints that are genuinely mine, what do I actually want?

I have been asking it for six years. I am still finding answers I did not expect.

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July 15^th 2026

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In the last couple of weeks I have watched Elvis Costello and Robert Smith perform, a fortnight apart, to venues full of people, many of whom were not born when they wrote the songs everyone had come to hear. It was not the audiences that struck me. It was the two men on the stage. Neither looked remotely interested in preserving the past.

Costello is seventy-one and has beaten cancer. Smith is sixty-seven — as it happens, exactly my age. I had gone half-expecting nostalgia: old triumphs performed carefully for people who wanted them delivered exactly as they remembered. That is not what either man was doing. What filled those venues was not nostalgia. It was relevance — which is a strange thing to find where many of the audience is younger than the songs.

Something has changed since I first heard this music, and it is not only the voices. It is the lives behind them. Every lyric now carries four decades of weight it did not carry the first-time round. Lines that once sounded like the sharp observations of clever young men have become something quieter and harder to shake — reflections shaped by love, failure, illness and time. The songs are the same. The men singing them are not.

What struck me most, though, was what neither of them had allowed himself to become. Neither had become a curator of his own past.

Costello has spent the last two years back inside his earliest songs — but reworking them, not embalming them. His band, he insists, are “nobody’s tribute band.” He treats a song written fifty years ago as unfinished business, something still worth arguing with. Only Costello would have performed a mash-up, not a medley, of It’s Been a Good Year For the Roses, Suspicious Minds and Always On My Mind.

Robert Smith is stranger still. The Cure released a widely praised album in late 2024, and then he walked out onto the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury to sing alongside Olivia Rodrigo, forty years his junior, before following her into a recording studio to make something new. He does not need to do any of this. He does it because he is still interested in where the music is going.

That is the distinction I keep returning to. Costello and Smith are not tending their legacies. They are still building them. Neither is trying to be relevant — trying to be relevant is the surest way to look old. They have simply stayed curious enough that relevance has not yet left them.

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We tend to assume relevance belongs to the young, as if it were a possession handed to whoever happens to be at the front of the queue. But relevance is not really about age. It is about remaining in conversation with a world that will not stop changing — and that conversation does not close simply because you have been in it a long time.

Look at what has actually happened here. Forty years ago Robert Smith gave a generation of uncertain young people a voice for feelings they could not yet name. Today Olivia Rodrigo does the same for people who were not alive when he began. She grew up on his records; on stage she called him a personal hero. And now he stands beside her, singing her words. The conversation has run for forty years. The participants have changed. The thing being passed back and forth between them — some stubborn, unfashionable honesty about what it is to be a person — has not.

Not one generation replacing another, but each adding a line to a conversation that nobody owns and nobody finishes.

I wonder if that is what progress actually looks like.

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There is a lesson in this, and it has very little to do with music.

Life after the rails does not require us to atrophy. Nor does it ask us to throw away everything that made us. It asks something harder and quieter: to stay open enough to keep learning, curious enough to keep listening, and humble enough to accept that something worth knowing might arrive from a person forty years younger than ourselves.

That is not staying young. Staying young is not on offer, and the pursuit of it is undignified, to say the least.

This is something better. It is staying alive to the present — still in the conversation, still adding to it, still willing to be changed by it.

I have come to think the best measure of ageing well is not whether we can still do what we once did. Bodies narrow; that is not a moral failing. The measure is whether we still have something worth saying to people who were not born when we first found our voice — and whether we are still curious enough to want to hear what they will say back.

Costello and Smith plainly do. They are not winding down. In the least sentimental sense of the word, they are still Unnarrowing.

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In May I wrote 16 Insights over two very intense days and planned out their sequence and dates of release, through to November. My intention was to move from weekly insights initially to fortnightly. What has happened and no doubt will happen again, is life intervened and I stumbled on something which I hope you the readers find useful and engaging. This will likely happen again and I hope it does not disrupt the arc of the 16 Insights.

Please continue to like the Insights, to comment, to restack and to encourage your circle to take a few minutes to read aftettherails.substack.com

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July 9th 2026

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Here is the structural fact that makes the rest of this newsletter possible, and also, if you are honest about it, mildly alarming: millions of healthy people will finish their primary careers in their fifties or sixties and still have twenty-five or thirty-five years ahead of them. That is not an epilogue. It is a complete phase of adult life, of a length that was not available to most people fifty years ago.

We have almost no cultural script for it. The dominant model is retirement, a word whose root literally means withdrawal. The implicit instruction — to ourselves, to our families, to our doctors, to our financial advisors — is to wind down, act our age, take it easier. Manage a smaller life well.

I want to suggest that this is not only the wrong instruction but the wrong frame. And to make that case I need to describe the four phases, because the fourth one only becomes visible when you see what came before it.

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The first phase is Exploration, roughly ages zero to five. Watch a four-year-old. My granddaughter spent an afternoon last summer investigating how water behaves on soil versus on concrete, then how gravity behaves on a skateboard. She was not running an experiment. She was investigating reality. Nothing was off-limits, nothing was beneath her, nothing was too hard or too silly to try. The category of ‘things not for me’ had not yet been invented in her brain.

The second phase is Conditioning, roughly ages five to twenty-five. Then we enter the system. School teaches us to sit still, to specialise, to find the one right answer. We learn that some interests are practical and others are hobbies. The boundaries tighten year by year: choose your subjects, your university course, your career path. By the time we emerge, we have been shaped into specialised contributors. We have also been shaped to know what is expected of us, and — most insidiously — what we should want.

The third phase is the Rails, roughly ages twenty-five to sixty. Most adults spend three or four decades here. I call it that because once you are on them, the route feels predetermined. Get the job. Find the partner. Buy the house. Pay the mortgage. Raise the children. Advance the career. Save for retirement. I do not mean this cynically. These years are often rich and meaningful. But the metaphor holds: you are travelling a predetermined route at a predetermined speed, and deviation feels impossible — or at least irresponsible.

The fourth phase has no good name. Retirement is wrong because it implies withdrawal. Post-career is too corporate. Later life is too medical. Second act is too theatrical.

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Here is what the fourth phase actually is: it is the first time since you were four years old that the script is genuinely open. The rails have ended, or are ending. The obligations of the productive phase — the mortgage, the children who needed raising, the career that needed advancing — are behind you or soon will be. For the first time in thirty years, the question of what you want to do with your time is one you are allowed to answer honestly.

Most people, when this moment arrives, do not answer it honestly. They answer it with a smaller version of the rails. They take on advisory work because it resembles what they did before. They fill the diary with obligations because an empty diary makes them uneasy. They do what is expected of someone their age, in their position, with their background. They default, in other words, to the conditioning of the second phase, because the conditioning of the second phase is still running in the background.

I understand why. The rails provide identity, structure, external validation, a reason to get up. The moment they end, all four of those things become questions rather than answers. The temptation is to resolve the questions as quickly as possible by finding something that resembles the rails closely enough to pass.

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The alternative is to treat the fourth phase as what it is: the longest stretch of genuinely free time most of us will ever have. Not free from obligation — there will be obligations; there will be family, health, finance, all the rest. But free, in a way the rails never allowed, to decide which obligations to take on, in what proportion, for what reason.

The word I have been using is unnarrowing. The fourth phase is where unnarrowing either happens or it does not. The rails narrow you, necessarily and productively, for thirty years. The fourth phase is where the narrowing either continues — quietly, unremarkably, until the life you are living is significantly smaller than the life you have appetite for — or where you interrupt it.

The interruption requires a name for what you are doing. ‘Retirement’ will not do it. ‘Unnarrowing’ is what I am offering instead.

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July 6^th 2026

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Over the weekend a friend reminded me of a video, Happiness.

The brilliant Steve Cutts produced this in 2018 - some of you may be familiar with Steve’s work. I had forgotten about it and would encourage you to take 4 minutes to view the video:

When I viewed it again, like Bob Seeger’s Little Boxes, it is another representation of how we necessarily become narrowed. How, while we are ‘on the rails’ we tend to live unconsciously, how we conform socially, how we tend to pursue externally defined success. I think it is a vivid metaphor for lives many people realise they no longer want to live.

The idea of Unnarrowing which I am writing about is exploring why successful, accomplished lives narrow and how to keep expanding in our ‘after the rails’ phase, when it matters most.

Thanks to Steve Cutts for creating this work and to John Smith for reminding me of it.

The next Insight will issue on Monday 6th July around 11.00am.

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June 29th 2026

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My father was a civil engineer. He worked for Dublin Corporation for most of his career, was respected professionally — known as Tunnel Duggan in the circles that knew him — and died younger than he should have. He had taken a risk after graduating that did not work out. By his early thirties he had a large mortgage, three young children, and in reality, very little choice but to stay on the rails he was on. He was a gentle man, deeply interested in and proud of his children. His world narrowed. He became reconciled to it. There was a song by Pete Seeger, Little Boxes, which he thought described his life and the lives of many around him.

My mother was something else.

She grew up one of three sisters in rural Tipperary. Her parents, unusually for the time, were determined that all three girls would go to university. She became a school principal; she was an exception among women of her generation and, to me, an inspiration. She was small, organised, and completely without sentimentality about the difference between a life she had been handed and a life she had decided to live.

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Within three weeks of my father’s sudden and unexpected death, my mother had made a plan for the rest of her life.

She sold the family home. She explained to her three children — clearly, without apology — that she had completed her work, and we were now expected to stand on our own feet. She took early retirement from a job she still loved. And she built, from scratch and without a model, the life she was going to live for the next twenty-five years.

Eschewing others, she built a new circle of friends, many of them young widows like herself. She spent thirty years travelling the world on a very small budget — Europe, Canada, USSR including Russia, China, the Holy Land, Mexico, parts of Central and South America, parts of Africa — places that would have been unthinkable for a woman born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, in 1927. When she was not travelling, she continued to study, continued to write, remained enthusiastically engaged with her carefully chosen circle, explored new interests. Some she kept; some she dropped without emotion or ceremony.

It was not until her late eighties, when dementia began to take her, that her world began to narrow. Even then, knowing she was in a battle she would lose, she fought it.

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I want to be precise about what makes this story striking, because it is not the travel, and it is not the energy, impressive as both were. It is the three weeks.

Most people, in the immediate aftermath of a bereavement — particularly a bereavement that ends a long marriage — are in the grip of shock and grief and the administrative demands that cluster around death. Most people do not, within three weeks, make a complete plan for the rest of their lives. My mother did not do this because she was unusual in temperament. She did it because she understood, immediately and instinctively, that the script she had been living from had ended, and that the alternative to writing a new one was to drift into whatever script presented itself by default.

She did not name it this way. She would have been contemptuous of the vocabulary I am using. But she knew what she was doing. She had decided, in the weeks after my father’s death, that what turned out to be the remaining third of her life was hers to design rather than hers to endure.

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My father did not get the chance to choose. He died on the rails, not unhappily, but on them. My mother was given a choice by circumstance, and she made it, immediately, before grief had time to set the parameters.

Here is what I have learned from watching her. There are no guarantees of life after the productive phase, narrow or not, as my father discovered. For those who are given that life, remaining on a narrowing set of rails is not inevitable. It is a choice — even when it is a choice made by not choosing.

My mother chose. She chose unnarrowing thirty years before I had a name for it. She would have hated the word. She would have recognised the thing.

The question she answered in three weeks is the same question this newsletter is circling: what do you actually want, now that you are free to want it?

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This is a link to Pete Seeger’s Lttle Boxes on Spotify for anyone who is tempted to listen to it - I would urge you to click and listen:

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June 24^th 2026

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In late 2007 I was close to completing an acquisition that would, with the benefit of hindsight, have destroyed us.

The target was a good business serving the automotive sector. Our existing businesses were heavily exposed to construction, which was booming at a level that should have made anyone suspicious; the rationale for the acquisition was diversification. Even in a downturn, I argued, cars still need spare parts. The logic was decent. The terms were fair. By every conventional measure I was doing my job.

Every person around the table wanted the deal done. The vendor wanted it done. The bank wanted it done; they had internal growth targets and our credit extension was, for them, a piece of a larger story. My investors had become used to growth and the deal was the next chapter of it. The corporate finance advisors, the lawyers, the consultants — all of whom were paid only if the deal completed — were unanimous. My internal team was excited. I was excited.

And there was, somewhere below all of that, a small voice that was not excited. The small voice was worried.

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I remember a dinner that quarter, in a large hotel in Dublin, populated by the great and the good of Irish business. The mood was upbeat. The keynote speaker was a leading economist who explained, with charts, that Ireland was building more than eighty thousand houses a year for a population of just over four million, and that there was scope for growth on that number. The room nodded. I did the calculation in my head afterwards. The United Kingdom, with fourteen times the population, was building two hundred thousand houses a year. The numbers did not fit. I could not put my finger on what was wrong with them. The little voice kept saying that something was.

I walked away from the deal. It cost me, in the short term, the goodwill of almost everyone in the room. The bank was annoyed. The advisors were annoyed. The vendor was annoyed. My investors were puzzled. Some of my colleagues openly wondered whether I had lost my nerve. There was no triumphant moment of vindication, because at the point of the decision I had no evidence to share.

The financial crisis arrived a few months later. Our businesses, and the vendor’s business, were within twelve months in serious trouble. Had we completed the deal, taken on the additional debt, stretched our leadership team across a sector we did not yet know — we would not have survived. The decision I made on the basis of a voice I could not justify was the decision that kept the business alive, and kept the three hundred people who worked in it employed through the worst few years of their working lives.

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I want to be careful here, because the story is not a story of triumph. It is a story about two things that have to be held together. I had gathered every external perspective I could. I had weighed them. And in the end I listened to a signal that almost none of those perspectives endorsed.

The two things worth holding together: the external counsel was not wrong to recommend the deal. On the information available, in October 2007, the acquisition made sense. The voice that said otherwise was not operating on better information. It was operating on a different kind of signal entirely — something that lives below the ribcage rather than inside the head.

The question I have spent the years since trying to answer is how you distinguish that signal from the other voice that also lives below the ribcage, which is simply fear. The two have very similar accents and are easily confused. Anxiety about a deal will produce exactly the same physical sensation as genuine intuition about it. The difference, as best as I can describe it, is this: anxiety is about what might go wrong. Intuition is about what is wrong. Anxiety imagines future scenarios. Intuition responds to present reality. Anxiety is loud and tends to escalate. Intuition says its thing once, quietly, and then waits.

The voice in the hotel in Dublin said: the numbers do not fit. It did not say: this will end badly. It said: something here does not add up. That is the texture of it. The texture of anxiety is different: it generates scenarios, catastrophises, repeats. The voice about the acquisition was not catastrophising. It was observing.

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I am not making a case for ignoring professional advice. I took the best professional advice I could get, on this and on every significant decision. The case I am making is narrower: there is a signal available to you that professional advice cannot produce, because professional advice is external and this signal is not. It knows things about you, about your business, about the texture of the moment, that external advisors cannot access.

After the rails, the decisions that matter most are the ones for which there is no external authority to outsource the call to. What to do with the next ten years. Whether to take on this commitment or that one. How to spend finite time. On these questions — the questions the post-rails phase is made of — the voice below the ribcage is the most important piece of information available. The work is learning to hear it.

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June15th 2026

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I did not step down. I did not pursue other opportunities. I was not invited to resign in order to spend more time with my family. I was fired at forty-three, after eight years as Chief Executive of a publicly quoted company. Let me be clear about the language, because the language matters: fired.

What I had not been prepared for was what happened in the days after the shock wore off. The wounded pride I had expected. What I had not expected was what came with it, or rather after it: relief. Profound, almost physical relief.

I had spent eight years managing across continents, living in airport business lounges. I had visited, at a rough count, over seventy countries. On paper it looked like a life of extraordinary range. In reality I was seeing meeting rooms and hotels that could have been anywhere, flying in on a Monday and flying out on a Wednesday, outwardly successful and increasingly aware that I was becoming someone I did not particularly want to be. The firing did the thing I had not been able to do for myself.

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The years on the rails before the firing matter to what happened after it. I had been pursuing the CEO role since I started my MBA at twenty-five. I cannot now remember exactly why I had decided that running a public company was the thing to want. It was partly ambition, partly the logic of what comes next when you are young and competitive and good at your work. The gradient of what was expected of me did the rest. You follow the gradient, mostly, because it is there and because following it is what people like you do.

By the time the firing came I had offers waiting. Other public-company roles, better packages, more prestigious positions. The expected move was to step back onto the rails — a different train, but the same kind of train. I did not take any of them.

Instead I bought a business whose centre of gravity was in Ireland, on the basis that it would let me be present for my wife and my three young children in a way the public-company life had not. The decision defined the next twenty-two years of my work. It was also, I realised later, the first real choice I had made in two decades. It was the first choice that came from inside me rather than from the gradient of what was expected next.

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I do not believe I would have made that decision before being fired. The momentum of the rails is enormous. From the inside, it looks like a series of choices. From the outside — from where I sit now — it is a single track. Most of us, most of the time, do not really decide. We are moved.

The firing interrupted the movement. It was involuntary, humiliating for a week or two, and clarifying in ways I am still discovering. The clarity was this: I had been running a public company for eight years and in that time almost nothing I did had been freely chosen. I had met obligations, delivered to shareholders when I could, managed expectations, executed the strategy the board expected. None of it was wrong. Most of it was necessary. But it was not mine, in the way the decision I made afterwards was mine.

There is a version of this essay that concludes: so getting fired is good, actually. That is not the conclusion. The conclusion is narrower and more uncomfortable. It is that the rails — the years of obligation and structure and doing the expected thing — are not designed to produce freely chosen lives. They are designed to produce reliable, productive ones. Those are not the same thing. And the moment the rails end, by choice or by force, is the moment the question of what you actually want becomes both possible and unavoidable.

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The rails phase has ended, or is ending, or will end soon. For almost everyone reading this, that is true. The question it leaves behind is the same one I was left with at forty-three, having not chosen to be left with it: now what?

I got lucky. I had a small financial cushion, a supportive wife, and a decision that turned out, over twenty-two years, to be the right one. I am not suggesting that being fired is a gift that should be sought out. I am suggesting that the thing the firing gave me — the forced encounter with a choice I had been deferring — is available without the firing. You can arrive at it voluntarily. Most people do not.

The most useful thing anyone could have said to me in the weeks after the firing was also the simplest. You now have to decide what you actually want. Not what comes next on the track. What you actually want.

It took me longer than it should have to understand that this was a gift and not a problem.

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I have spent more than 25 years trying hard to fly below the radar and have eschewed social media. If you think the insights are useful and interesting, please like, comment, restack, talk about them in other forums, for example LinkedIn. Please encourage your family, friends and colleagues to read and subscribe.

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June 8^th 2026

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HALFWAY UP HOWLING RIDGE

Why successful lives narrow — and the word I had to invent for the alternative.

Paul Duggan

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Five years ago, I was sixty-two years old, harnessed in, halfway up a mountain in County Kerry, Ireland, that I had hiked many times but never climbed. My hands were weak. My technique was non-existent. The fear of heights I had spent forty years pretending I didn’t have was, suddenly, very present. My son, who has climbed all his adult life, was belaying me from above. He was patient. He was clear. He was also waiting.

A reasonable person at this point would conclude this isn’t for me, I’m too old, I should stick to what I know. I had been a reasonable person for thirty years. I was quite good at it.

Instead, I thought I have absolutely no idea what I’m capable of here. How interesting.

That sentence — that reframing, fear into curiosity — is, in retrospect, the moment something started to come unstuck. I have spent the five years since trying to work out exactly what.

This newsletter is, in part, that working-out. Let me start with the word that has come to stand at the centre of it: unnarrowing.

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Watch a four-year-old. My granddaughter spent an afternoon last summer investigating how water behaves on soil versus on concrete, then how gravity behaves while she is on a skateboard. She wasn’t running an experiment. She was investigating reality. Nothing was off-limits, nothing was beneath her, nothing was too hard or too silly to try. The category of ‘things not for me’ had not yet been invented in her brain.

Now consider, by contrast, a competent adult who has been running for thirty years on the rails of a productive life. You know the type because you may be the type. School narrowed you. University narrowed you further. The first job narrowed you again. Promotions narrowed you. By forty you were the country expert in the thing you do, which was thrilling for a while and then became the limit of what you were ever going to be. By fifty-five most of your competence was about not getting things wrong. By sixty-two — if you were quite successful and quite tired — you were one of those people whose family and friends had quietly started using the phrase ‘act your age.’

This is the narrowing. It does not hit you all at once. It does not feel like loss. It feels like maturity, like sensible behaviour, like the appropriate management of a finite life. Each individual decision to skip the new thing, decline the awkward conversation, avoid the embarrassing first attempt — each one is reasonable. The cumulative effect is a life that gets quietly smaller every year while everyone congratulates you on how settled you are.

Here is what nobody told me, and what I am beginning to think nobody told most of the people I know: the narrowing was useful, once. It served the rails phase. The rails phase has ended, or is ending, or will end soon. And the same instincts that made you a good professional in your forties will, if you do not interrupt them, walk you straight into a life half the size you have the appetite for.

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I started using the word unnarrowing about three years ago, mostly in conversation with my wife, partly to amuse her. It stuck because there was no other word. Reinvention is too dramatic and tends to mean someone is leaving their marriage. Retirement is the wrong direction altogether — its root literally means withdrawal. Second act is too theatrical. Renewal sounds like a vitamin.

What I needed was a word for the deliberate, undramatic, often-uncomfortable widening that must happen if the back third of an adult life is going to be a phase, not an epilogue. Unnarrowing is what fell out.

It is not a new self. It is not throwing away who you were. It is the work of letting the shape of you grow back to something closer to the shape it had at four — without forgetting any of the hard-earned competence at twenty-four, thirty-four, forty-four. It is curiosity reinstated. It is permission, given to yourself rather than waited for. It is the tactical refusal to be quietly small.

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I will write here, every week or two, about what unnarrowing has looked like in practice — for me, my wife, the people we have travelled with, the executives I advise, the friends I have watched do it brilliantly, and the friends I have watched not do it at all. I will write about the seven bearings I have come to use as a rough compass. I will write about the mistakes. I will write, occasionally, about food and motorbikes and Antarctica because these are the things I know.

If any of this resonates — if you have caught yourself recently in the act of declining something, automatically, because of your age or your back or your reputation or simply because you have stopped — you might want to stay for the next one.

Halfway up Howling Ridge, my son said: “Try it anyway.”

It turned out to be the most useful three words anyone has said to me in twenty years.

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1^st June 2026

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