I've Been Asking the Wrong Question

For a long time I thought I needed to focus more, which meant choosing between the things I love to do and talk about. Then I realised they were never separate in the first place.

For the past year, I’ve been trying to answer what felt like an important question.

Should I focus on dogs? Or on personal growth? On relationships? On nature? On holistic wellbeing? On creativity?

The more I searched for the answer, the more complicated it became.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I realised I’d been asking the wrong question.

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

I’ve spent a surprising amount of time trying to answer questions that never really belonged to me.

What is it that I actually do?
What is my purpose?
What direction should I take?

At different times I wondered whether I should focus on dogs, or on supporting women through life challenges and change. Whether I should talk about behaviour, relationships, nervous systems, holistic wellbeing, nature, or personal growth. My creative side kept wanting to share art, photography, writing and all the little moments of beauty that so often stop me in my tracks.

Part of me worried it all looked too scattered.

Until I realised that the only thing scattered was the way I was trying to organise it.

Life has never asked us to separate ourselves into neat little categories.

Nature certainly doesn’t. A forest isn’t made up of isolated parts competing for attention. Every tree, stream, bird, flower, insect and changing season exists in relationship with everything else. Each influences the whole, while the whole supports each part.

And, we are no different.

The more I sat with this, the more I recognised that everything I write about belongs to the same living ecosystem.

The dogs.

The people who share their lives with them.

Our physical and emotional wellbeing.

The changing seasons of life.

Nature’s quiet wisdom.

Grief and joy.

Connection.

Ageing.

Curiosity.

Creativity.

Conscious awareness.

The relationships we build with those we love.

The relationship we have with ourselves.

None of these stand alone.

They are constantly shaping one another.

I’ve seen it countless times. A person begins to understand themselves more deeply and their relationship with their dog changes. Someone spends more time in nature and discovers a little more patience. A family learns to communicate differently and their home feels calmer. We make space for creativity, por painting, writing, gardening, music, cooking or simply noticing beauty, and something inside us comes alive again.

Everything touches everything else. Everything is interconnected.

That is how living systems work.

It’s also why I’ve never been comfortable offering formulas or one-size-fits-all answers. Every person, every dog and every family lives within their own unique ecosystem of relationships. No two are ever quite the same.

Perhaps that’s why my work has never fitted neatly into one box.

Because it isn’t really about dogs, or personal and spiritual growth, or behaviour, or wellbeing or creativity.

They are all different expressions of the same invitation.

To become more deeply alive through the quality of our relationships.

With ourselves.

With our dogs.

With each other.

With nature.

With our own creative spirit.

With our connection to Source / God / The Divine

And with life itself.

So if you follow my work, you’ll continue to find all of those threads woven together.

One day it may be something my dogs reflected back to me on a morning walk.

Another day it may be a story about the forest, a conversation about emotional wellbeing, a photograph that captured a fleeting moment of beauty, or something I’ve been creating with my hands.

To me, they are not different conversations.

They are all ways of exploring what it means to live in relationship with everything and everyone.

And perhaps that’s what we’re all longing for. Not another system to master, but a deeper sense of belonging within the living, breathing ecosystem of life itself.

"What if life was never asking us to choose? What if wholeness was always found in the relationships between the parts?

I’d love to hear from you - can you see the relationship and connection between all the parts of yourself, your life, your career and your environment?