What's this all about

This is about trying to make sense of an anxiety.

As Stephen Batchelor (www.stephenbatchelor.org) observes (to paraphrase): Death is a certainty, its timing is unknown, the afterlife a hypothesis - so what should I do now?

For now I manage a farm - I even have the privilege to 'own' a good proportion of what I am trying to manage.

When I came to the farm I had goals. About sustainability, about reconnecting people with where their food came from, about being innovative, progressive and influential. They were goals aimed at making this world a better place, my community a better community, and my family a better family. They were also goals that played to my ego.

When I came to the farm I also had questions. About what it was to lead a fulfilled life, a right life. About how I should conduct my relationship with the world.

Obviously these goals and questions were interconnected. Obviously I had to find some reference point for what was 'better' and what was 'right'.

Between 2001 and 2009 we ran a family dairy and cheese business. My parents, my wife and our children. We succeeded in so many ways (achieved the goals we had set ourselves). But I failed in one, the critical one. I was so busy working on and in the business that my relationships with the world, my community and my family had become distorted. The energy derived from my desire to be successful, and my fears of failing was causing all sorts of suffering. My ego had not taken over, but it had become an anchor.

Then we had another baby - and he helped us to make a change.

I had already read stoic philosophy and a number of westernised treatments of Buddhism. They had become my standards for 'better' and 'right'. They were also the seeds for change - the baby was the precipitating factor.

Since then I have been asking the question - what should I do now? My anxiety is driven by my inability to adequately answer that question.

For four years the farm has been in transition - with no definite goals, only insubstantial aspirations based on a slowly shifting philosophical foundation.

This blog will be an ongoing attempt to answer the question - what should I do now? How should I live in a world where I am not in control - a world of impermanence and interdependence. A world where I have responsibilities that I will not abandon. A world where our existential suffering can be transcended, but where so much of what I am inclined to do, what I have been taught to do and what I am encouraged to do, seems only to add to suffering.

It will focus on farming because that is my primary interaction with the wider world.