What gives you direction in life?
Or rather who? I thought I Had None!
For years, I’ve described myself as rudderless, a Jack of all trades, ADHD.
Enthusiasms come and go, curiosity pulls me this way and that, and I’ve rarely felt the need to impose a rigid direction on my life. If anything, I’ve resisted it.
But when I stop and look across decades a different picture emerges.
If falling in love counts as an enthusiasm, that gave me direction then that’s the one. Thirty-six years ago, to this very day, I asked a young woman I’d been spending time with whether we might “go out with each other.” I don’t remember the exact words, but that was the essence. Within days, I wanted to take it further. She urged patience. I waited three weeks. We got engaged. Three years later we married. Three years after that, our daughter was born, and our son followed a couple of years later. We’re still together. I count today as an anniversary. She waits for the day we got engaged! We do it properly and go out with the children for a meal on our wedding anniversary.
So if I guess, I am guided by the desire to be a husband and a father. It’s the fixed point around which the rest of my life moves.
Beyond that, there is something else that has been just as persistent: a need to make sense of things.
As a teenager, I was drawn to interpreting dreams. I read enough of Carl Jung to begin trying it for myself. In the 1990s, I developed a sheet of twenty-seven probing questions to work through a dream systematically. Now, I find myself using AI to do something similar—still grounded in Jungian best practice, still spiralling towards meaning, but with a new kind of dialogue.
That word—spiralling—feels right.
Because when I map my enthusiasms over time, they don’t scatter randomly. They return. Again and again, I come back to the same things: diaries, memoir, writing fiction, life drawing, French, and the authors who absorb me completely for a time. Each return is slightly deeper, slightly more informed.
It’s not a straight path. It’s a spiral.
I’ve often said I don’t reflect on what I’ve done. That’s not entirely true. I do reflect—very precisely—on my swim coaching. I analyse sessions, adjust them, refine them. They improve as a result. There is a feedback loop there: action, reflection, improvement.
What I haven’t done, at least not consistently, is apply that same level of structured reflection to the rest of my life and work. The writing, the diaries, the creative projects—they accumulate, they evolve, but they don’t always get the same deliberate scrutiny.
And yet those are the things I return to most reliably. Those are the deep curiosities, as opposed to the passing sparks.
Goals, when I’ve had them, have also given me direction. Getting into an Oxbridge college. Living and working in France. Learning to ski well. Each of those had a clear endpoint, a structure, a way of measuring progress. They suited me. They worked.
But they were never the whole story.
Because underneath them all is something more consistent: a drive to observe, to interpret, and to express experience. Whether through writing, drawing, coaching, or conversation, I seem always to be doing some version of the same thing.
So perhaps I’m not rudderless after all.
Perhaps my direction comes from three sources:
Love, which anchors me.
Curiosity, which moves me.
And seeking meaning, which helps me understand where I’ve been and where I might go next.
The real question now is not whether I have direction.
It’s whether I can apply the same discipline of reflection—so effective in my coaching—to these deeper, long-running threads in my life. Because if I can do that, then the spiral might not just continue.
It might tighten.
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