Category Archives: psychology

by | October 19, 2026 · 2:03 pm

Walking the Thin Places

I have often been asked why I feel the need to go on a pilgrimage nearly every year. Why leave the comforts of home, carry everything I need in a small backpack, and spend weeks walking day after day along dusty paths, through forests, across mountains, and into unfamiliar landscapes? What is it that draws me back, time and again, to this seemingly simple act of putting one foot in front of the other?

The answer is not always easy to explain, because the most important things that happen on a deep walk are experiential and difficult to put into words. They are not necessarily found in the places visited or in the distance covered but in the gradual transformation of the relationship to the self on the one hand and the external world on the other.

During the first few days of a pilgrimage, my mind is often still occupied by the noise of the outside world. Thoughts about unfinished tasks, personal concerns, news headlines, and the countless demands of everyday life follow me onto the trail. Even though I may be walking through a beautiful landscape, I barely notice it. My attention remains fixed on the path immediately ahead, on the kilometers still to be covered, the next village, or the place where I will spend the night. My body is walking, but my mind would be elsewhere.

Then, almost imperceptibly, something begins to change.

After several days of walking, the constant chatter of the mind starts to subside. Nature starts moving closer. The landscape that had seemed little more than a backdrop gradually comes alive. I begin to hear the clicking of grasshoppers in the grass and the gentle buzzing of bees among the wildflowers. I no longer merely hear the birds; I begin to see them, to recognize their movements, and sometimes to identify their songs. A robin appears on a low branch, a skylark rises and hovers in the open sky, and a blackbird searches for food ahead of me.

I start noticing the different formations of clouds drifting across the blue sky, the changing contours of the mountains, and the distinct character of the peaks ahead. The air carries the scent of damp earth, wild herbs, and freshly mown grass. I become aware of the warmth of the sun on my skin, the coolness of a forest path, and the rhythm of my own footsteps. My breathing gradually settles into a natural cadence, and I begin to feel my body again. It is not something to be managed or pushed through the day but becomes an integral part of the world in which I am moving.

Nothing extraordinary has happened to the landscape. It is my perception that has changed.

The world has not suddenly become more beautiful. I have simply become more available to its beauty.

Perhaps this transformation is comparable to the experience of reading a good book. When we read, our imagination creates an inner world of images, voices, landscapes, and emotions. Each reader brings something unique to the experience, drawing upon memories, feelings, and associations that no filmmaker could entirely reproduce. This is why we are sometimes disappointed when a favorite book is adapted for the screen. The images presented to us may be compelling, even beautiful, but they cannot fully replace the private world that our own imagination has created and experienced.

A deep walk offers something similar. It allows an inner world to emerge, not through the images we consume, but through the attention we give to what is already there. The more fully we attend to the world, the more it reveals itself. We begin to see what was always present but remained unnoticed because the mind was elsewhere.

Perhaps this is one of the great paradoxes of modern life: we have access to more information, images, and experiences than any generation before us, yet we often struggle to be fully present to the miracle of life unfolding directly in front of us. We are physically here but mentally somewhere else, anticipating the future, revisiting the past, comparing ourselves with others, or reacting to a continuous stream of events over which we have little control.

A pilgrimage interrupts this pattern. For a few weeks, the familiar structures of everyday life fall away. There are fewer decisions to make, fewer possessions to maintain, and fewer distractions demanding our attention. Life becomes simpler. You walk, eat, rest and sleep. You encounter other people, sometimes sharing a conversation, sometimes exchanging no more than a greeting. You learn to accept the weather, the terrain, and the limits of the body. You cannot always control what the day brings, but you can learn to meet it as it comes.

This simplicity creates the space where you can begin to hear what has been drowned out by the noise of ordinary life.

I have come to understand that living fully is, in many ways, an act of deep presence. It is not enough to pass through the days, completing tasks and accumulating experiences. You must also be available to them. You must allow yourself to feel the warmth of the sun, to listen without immediately responding, to look without needing to name or judge everything you see, and to recognize the quiet movements of your inner life.

For me, this quality of presence is difficult to sustain in everyday surroundings. I can practice it at home, on a familiar walk, or during a moment of silence, but the habits of daily life have a way of reclaiming my attention. The mind returns to its familiar concerns, and the world becomes a collection of things to accomplish rather than a reality to encounter.

That is why I return to the pilgrimage trail. Walking for several weeks gives me the time and space to move beyond the surface of my habitual thoughts. It feels like a kind of detoxification of the mind. It is not an escape from the world but a gradual release from the compulsive need to react to it. As the mental noise recedes, something begins to realign. My priorities become clearer. What matters and what does not matter quite so much become easier to distinguish. I find myself less concerned with controlling life and more willing to participate in it.

And sometimes, in those moments of stillness that emerge through movement, I sense something for which I have never found an entirely satisfactory name.

It is as though a narrow crack begins to open onto a deeper dimension of existence, a window into what I might call the soul. I do not mean this in any necessarily religious sense. I mean the possibility of experiencing life beyond the familiar boundaries of the thinking mind and the separate self, the part that is so occupied with defining, evaluating, and defending itself that it can lose sight of its connection with everything else.

The more you train your attention to rest in the present moment, the wider this opening seems to become. You begin to experience yourself not merely as an individual moving through a landscape, but as a participant in a complex living whole. The wind, the earth, the trees, the birds and your breathing are no longer entirely separate but different expressions of the same unfolding reality.

When I walk long enough, and with sufficient openness, I sometimes begin to feel this truth rather than merely think about it.

That, ultimately, is why I keep walking. Not to arrive somewhere, but to become more fully present to the life that has always been there and is carrying me along.

This does not mean that the boundaries between ourselves and the world disappear. Rather, those boundaries become less absolute. For a moment, we no longer feel like isolated observers standing outside nature and looking in. We recognise that we belong to it. We have always belonged to it.

Perhaps this is what draws me back to the Camino year after year. It is not simply the physical challenge, the beauty of the landscapes, or the encounters with fellow pilgrims, although all of these have their place. It is the opportunity to rediscover a way of being that is easily lost amid the demands and distractions of modern life. Walking reminds me that I do not need to travel somewhere extraordinary to encounter something sacred. I need to become sufficiently present to recognize what is already here.

My greatest realization has been that spending time in nature can open our senses to a presence far greater than our individual concerns. Whether we call it the sacred, the mystery of existence, the natural order of things, or simply life itself is perhaps less important than the experience. We are not separate from this greater whole. We are one part of it, inseparably woven into its fabric.

And when I walk long enough, quietly enough, and with sufficient openness, I sometimes begin to feel this truth rather than merely think about it.

That, ultimately, is why I keep walking. Not to arrive somewhere, but to become more fully present to the life that is already carrying me along.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | October 12, 2026 · 11:00 am

The Crusade Against Empathy: Why Compassion Is a Human Strength, Not a Weakness

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Maya Angelou

There is something deeply troubling about the growing tendency to portray empathy as a weakness. In parts of today’s political and cultural debate, compassion is dismissed as sentimentality, and caring for the vulnerable is framed as a liability rather than a strength. This growing contempt for empathy strikes at the heart of the very values on which free and humane societies are built: human dignity, mutual respect, solidarity, and the recognition that our strength as a society lies not only in individual achievement, but also in how we care for one another.

This is particularly evident in the rhetoric of Elon Musk and other wealthy and influential figures who argue that excessive empathy threatens Western civilization. The same argument has gained traction in popular intellectual discourse. Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, in his book Suicidal Empathy, portrays what he considers misguided empathy as a threat to Western societies, while psychologist Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy challenges the assumption that empathy is always a reliable guide to moral judgment. Both works have found a growing audience among readers questioning the role of emotion in public life, although their arguments and conclusions differ. Saad, in particular, criticises what he sees as the elevation of empathy above reason.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the limits of empathy. Emotions can cloud judgment. Compassion can be manipulated. The desire to please everyone can prevent us from making difficult decisions.

But none of this establishes that empathy itself is a weakness. It establishes that, like any human capacity, empathy needs to be balanced with reason, discernment, and boundaries.

The real question is not whether we should abandon empathy, but what kind of society we create when we begin to treat it with contempt.

Empathy is an evolutionary advantage

The popular image of evolution as a ruthless struggle in which only the strongest survive owes much to an oversimplified understanding of Darwinian theory. Survival has never depended on physical strength or individual competition alone. Cooperation, social bonds, mutual support and the ability to respond to the needs of others have been key aspects of our evolution as a species.

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mothers and Others (2009), explores how cooperative child-rearing and shared caregiving helped shape human sociality. Human children are exceptionally dependent, and our ancestors’ capacity to cooperate in raising and protecting them was a significant evolutionary advantage.

Our species did not flourish simply because some individuals defeated others. We also survived because people cared for children, supported injured members of their communities, shared knowledge and worked together in the face of danger.

Empathy is not the only explanation for these behaviours, and cooperation should not be confused with unconditional self-sacrifice. But the evidence challenges the simplistic notion that ruthlessness is the natural foundation of human success.

Our ability to care for one another is part of what has made us human.

The difference between empathy and weakness

One of the problems with the current backlash against empathy is that it often conflates several different things: emotional identification, compassion, people-pleasing, moral judgment and the willingness to tolerate harmful behaviour.

They are not the same.

Empathy allows us to understand something of another person’s experience. Compassion motivates us to respond to suffering. Neither requires us to agree with everyone, excuse wrongdoing or abandon our own interests.

We can empathize with someone without endorsing their actions. We can understand the circumstances that lead a person to behave destructively without excusing the harm they cause. And we can establish firm boundaries while treating another human being with dignity.

This is not weakness. It is emotional maturity.

The strongest form of empathy is not indiscriminate agreement. It is the ability to remain open to another person’s humanity while retaining the capacity to think critically.

Why empathetic leadership works

Research on leadership and organisational behaviour has repeatedly associated empathy with better interpersonal relationships, stronger trust and more effective collaboration.

The Center for Creative Leadership has reported associations between empathetic leadership and job performance. Research into ethical leadership likewise suggests that the ability to understand other people’s perspectives can help leaders recognise the human consequences of their decisions.

Empathy does not guarantee good judgment, and it cannot replace competence. But leaders who understand how their decisions affect others are better placed to build trust, address conflict and create environments in which people feel able to contribute.

The Businessolver State of Workplace Empathy reports have also documented a persistent gap between the importance employees attach to empathy and how much empathy they believe their workplaces demonstrate.

These findings challenge the assumption that compassion is incompatible with effectiveness. In many settings, understanding people is not an alternative to achieving results. It is part of how sustainable results are achieved.

What kind of society do we want?

The implications extend far beyond the workplace.

A society organised around the idea that the strongest, wealthiest and most powerful deserve the greatest respect risks confusing success with moral worth. It can begin to treat poverty as personal failure, vulnerability as inadequacy and social support as an undeserved concession.

This is the danger of Social Darwinism: not evolutionary biology itself, but the attempt to turn a selective interpretation of nature into a justification for social inequality and indifference.

A humane society does not have to deny personal responsibility, reward effort or discourage ambition. It can value all these things while recognising that people do not begin life with equal opportunities, equal resources or equal capacities. Illness, disability, bereavement and economic hardship can affect anyone.

How we respond to these realities reveals something fundamental about our collective values.

Many of the moral traditions that have shaped Western civilisation, including Christianity, place care for the sick, the poor, the stranger and the vulnerable near the centre of ethical life. The Good Samaritan is remembered not because he demonstrated superior power, but because he stopped to help someone whom others had passed by.

That principle is not exclusively Christian, of course. It appears in different forms across religious, philosophical and humanist traditions.

The point is that a society’s moral strength is measured not only by what its most successful members achieve, but also by how it treats those who are struggling.

Empathy, trust and human flourishing

Consider Finland and the other Nordic countries, which have consistently ranked highly in international assessments of life satisfaction. Their experience suggests that social trust, reliable public institutions, economic security and a strong sense of collective responsibility can contribute to human well-being.

Empathy alone does not explain these outcomes. Nor should the Nordic model be romanticised or treated as a perfect society. But these examples challenge the notion that a healthy society must be built primarily on ruthless competition and individual self-interest.

When people believe that others can be trusted, that institutions will generally treat them fairly and that hardship will not necessarily leave them abandoned, social cooperation becomes easier. Trust encourages participation; participation can strengthen community; and a sense of belonging can help protect people against isolation.

At the level of everyday life, the same principle applies. Feeling understood can ease loneliness, strengthen relationships and make difficult experiences more bearable. Empathy cannot solve every problem, but it can change how people experience the problems they face.

The real strength is to care without losing yourself

There is a danger in turning empathy into an unquestionable virtue. We can become overwhelmed by the suffering of others. We can favour people who resemble us, overlook the needs of strangers or allow emotion to override evidence. Empathy needs the guidance of reason, fairness and ethical principles.

But the answer to these limitations is not to wage a crusade against empathy. It is to develop a more mature understanding of it.

We need the courage to confront wrongdoing, the clarity to distinguish facts from feelings, the discipline to set boundaries and the compassion to recognise suffering even when it is inconvenient.

These qualities are not mutually exclusive.

In a world increasingly shaped by political polarisation, economic insecurity and the temptation to regard opponents as less than fully human, empathy may be more important than ever. It allows us to disagree without dehumanising, to hold people accountable without denying their dignity, and to recognise that another person’s suffering matters even when it does not directly affect us.

The question raised by the current backlash against empathy is ultimately a question about the kind of civilisation we wish to build.

Do we want a world in which power determines whose suffering matters? Or one in which strength includes the willingness to protect those who have less of it?

Empathy is not the abandonment of reason. It is the recognition that reason without humanity can become an instrument of indifference.

A society that celebrates power while ridiculing compassion may become more competitive, but it will not necessarily become wiser, healthier or happier.

The measure of your humanity is not how successful you distance yourself from weakness. It is whether you can recognize vulnerability in others and in yourself.

Because in the end, the question is not whether we can afford empathy. It is what we stand to lose when we no longer value it.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | September 15, 2026 · 10:38 am

Where the Earth feels thin

There are places in the world where the boundary between the ordinary and something deeper feels remarkably thin.

Ancient peoples understood this instinctively. Long before maps, property boundaries and modern planning regulations, they paid careful attention to where they built their temples, sacred groves and places of worship. Certain springs, mountains, caves, rocks, forests and hilltops were regarded as places where the human world came closer to the divine. The location itself mattered. Sacredness was not simply something that could be brought into a building; sometimes it was already present in the landscape.

We might call this a thin place—a place where the distance between the visible and invisible worlds seems diminished.

I have often wondered whether we have lost something of this sensitivity.

There is, of course, another side to it. Some places seem to carry the opposite quality. Landscapes marked by violence, suffering or tragedy can retain an atmosphere that is difficult to explain rationally. A battlefield, an abandoned concentration camp, a house where terrible things happened, a village emptied by war—these places can seem to hold an echo of what occurred there.

Perhaps this is memory embedded in landscape. Perhaps it is our own imagination responding to what we know happened. Perhaps there is something more subtle.

I don’t pretend to know.

But I have noticed something while walking.

On my pilgrimage journeys, I have sometimes entered a village and experienced an almost immediate sense of lightness. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no revelation, no voice from heaven, no mystical apparition. Simply a feeling that the place was alive.

The streets were clean and cared for. Flowers appeared in window boxes. Doors were open. People greeted the pilgrim with a smile. There were small cafés, benches, churches and places where people could pause and meet one another. Children played. Someone was tending a garden. Life seemed to flow naturally.

And then, sometimes, I would enter another place and feel quite different.

The shutters were closed. Houses appeared empty even when they were occupied. There were few places where people could gather. Gardens were neglected. Buildings were deteriorating. The streets seemed strangely silent. It was as though life had withdrawn.

I cannot prove that these impressions have anything to do with a measurable “energy frequency.” Nor do I think we need to turn every intuitive response into a supernatural explanation.

But I have learned to pay attention to such feelings.

Walking slows you down sufficiently to notice things that you would normally rush past. You see the quality of a village not simply through its architecture but through the way people inhabit it. You notice whether people sit outside their houses, whether they greet strangers, whether children have somewhere to play, whether churches are open, whether gardens are cultivated, whether there is a sense of care.

Perhaps what youvexperience as the “energy” of a place is sometimes the accumulated expression of the people who live there.

And perhaps the relationship works in both directions: you shape a place, and a place shapes you.

This has also made me think about why certain landscapes seem to have inspired some of humanity’s greatest thinkers, painters, poets and writers.

We tend to imagine inspiration as something that happens inside the individual mind. The genius sits at a desk, picks up a brush or opens a notebook, and creates something extraordinary.

But perhaps creativity is also a conversation with place.

Recently, walking through the countryside around Chawton, I found myself thinking about Jane Austen.

There is something about that landscape that makes her books feel less abstract. The lanes, hedgerows, fields, wooded paths and gently rolling countryside provide a physical world in which her characters seem entirely at home. Walking through what is called Jane Austen country, one begins to understand why this particular landscape could have nourished such a precise observer of human nature.

Austen did not simply write about people. She wrote about people in relationship to place—houses, estates, gardens, villages, drawing rooms, roads and landscapes. Social life and landscape were inseparable.

And perhaps that is true of creativity generally.

Think of the painters who were transformed by particular landscapes, the poets who returned again and again to the same hills or rivers, composers like Bach who found inspiration in the countryside, or the writers like Dickens who needed to walk before they could write.

Maybe the landscape doesn’t simply provide a backdrop but participates.

There is an old idea that certain places are “charged” with something greater. We might describe that in religious language, psychological language, ecological language or simply as a heightened sensitivity to beauty and history.

I am increasingly comfortable leaving the question open.

For me, pilgrimage is partly about learning to enter that openness.

When you walk, you surrender some of your usual control. You move at the speed of your feet. You become attentive to weather, trees, birdsong, stone walls, ancient paths and the changing light. You begin to sense that the landscape is not merely scenery through which you are passing.

It becomes a participant in the journey.

And occasionally, without quite knowing why, you enter a place and feel something shift within you.

The world seems a little more spacious. The mind becomes quieter and the heart feels lighter.

Nothing has necessarily changed, except the capacity to be more present.

Perhaps that is what a thin place really is.

Not necessarily a place where heaven breaks through into earth, but a place where you become thin enough to notice what has always been there.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | September 7, 2026 · 2:08 pm

Walking into Silence: What pilgrimage taught me about uncertainty, and trust

There are moments on a long walk when you stop thinking about where you are going and simply walk.You simply hear the rhythm of your feet. The landscape changes slowly. Your breathing settles. The noise in your head begins to diminish.I experienced something of that on a recent walk on the Pilgrims’ Way, from Winchester.

But before I took my first steps, I went into Winchester Cathedral. I sat down and was silent during a morning prayer ceremony with only a handful of people. For a few minutes I sat in that extraordinary building, surrounded by centuries of history, and thought about all the people who had come here before me.

Wonchester Cathedral

People who had stood exactly where I was standing and wondered what life meant.I set out on this walk with contemplations from the great Mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich.

Julian lived in fourteenth-century England, during one of the darkest periods of European history – the Black Death.She knew all about illness, death and uncertainty. During a serious illness in 1373, when she believed she was dying, she experienced a series of visions that became the basis of her Revelations of Divine Love. And from Julian came those extraordinary words:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Julian said this living in a world in which almost everything was not well, and at the same time offering hope. She was saying that we may not understand what is happening in the world but we can still trust that love is deeper than suffering.

That is a very different kind of hope. We cannot plan and control the journey. Life happens in unpredictable ways while we try to protect ourselves against uncertainty.When we’re young, we often imagine that if we make the right choices, life will eventually become predictable.

People and pets we love become ill and die. Relationships change and fail. Homes and jobs change. Your body begins to remind you that you are not going to be here forever.

You begin to realize that you cannot control the journey. You can only walk and adapt to circumstances beyond your control.That thought stayed with me during the first hours of my walk during the unspoilt Itchen valley. 

The first kilometres are always slightly deceptive. You are still thinking about the destination. You look at the map. You calculate how far you have to go.

But gradually, something changes.

You stop thinking about the end.

You begin to pay attention to the next step.

And then the step after that.

That is one of the great gifts of walking.

It brings you back into the present moment. You hear the birds. You stand in awe before ancient trees. The Pilgrims’ Way takes you through landscapes that seem to exist outside ordinary time. There are stretches where ancient trees form tunnels over the path.You walk beneath them and suddenly feel very small.

The trees don’t know your worries. They simply stand there and some of them have been standing there for hundreds of years.And I found myself wondering how many people had walked beneath those same branches.

Medieval pilgrims walked these same old paths, possibly with the same questions as pulgrims today. And now they are gone.

The trees remain and there is something humbling and comforting about that. 

In the bigger order of things one lifespan is fleetingly small. The gravestones around the chapels, some dating back to the 12th century, are a stark reminder of that. You walk into a chapel after several hours on the trail and the experience can be almost startling. Outside, the modern world continues.

Inside, time seems to have stopped. The stones are old and the light is different.

And these are the moments when the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred really does feel a little thinner.A thin place isn’t necessarily a destination to an ancient sacred site but something that happens within.

St Augustine wrote about discovering God not by endlessly looking outward but by turning inward.Meister Eckhart later spoke about becoming empty — letting go of the endless accumulation of thoughts, desires and attachments that fill the mind.

And Julian of Norwich arrives at another extraordinary insight:beneath everything is love. Three different voices pointing towards the same thing. Turn inward. Become quiet and listen.

The longer you walk, the less important the things that seemed so urgent that morning can become.

You begin to notice the magic of life. The small things. The movement of leaves, the creaking of tree branches, the smell of moist earth in the forest, the taste of juicy wild blackberries and thoughts.

Not the thoughts you are trying to manufacture, but the ones that rise naturally when the noise becomes quiet.

That, too, is pilgrimage.

  • How do you deal with uncertainty?
  • How do you live when you don’t know what happens next?
  • How do you cope with the things you cannot control?

Julian’s answer is surprisingly simple. 

Certainty says:

I know how this is going to turn out.

Trust says:

I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but I can take the next step anyway.

That may be one of the most important lessons of a pilgrimage walk.

You don’t need to see the entire road.

You only need to see enough of it to take the next step and keep walking, leaving everything behind you but they remain as memories.

Perhaps that is what happens on all journeys.

And perhaps the same is true of the people we meet, the experiences we endure and the questions we never will answer.

So I keep coming back to Julian.

“All shall be well.”

I don’t hear those words anymore as a promise that everything will work out exactly as I want it to.

I hear them as an invitation to trust.

To accept that some things will remain unresolved and that life contains suffering as well as joy.

Beneath all the noise, all the uncertainty and all the attempts to control life, there may be something much more subtle.

Not travelling towards a place where you hope to find the sacred. But discovering that the sacred has been travelling with you all along and that all shall be well just by taking the next step.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | September 1, 2026 · 5:46 pm

When Things Fall Apart

The very first small things that go wrong often tell us far more than we realise. They can pinpoint the beginning of the slow decline of a company, a neighbourhood, a town or even a country.

The other day, after a walk in Dorset, we decided to stop for coffee in a nearby locality. It was by no means a bad area. In fact, we chose it precisely because it seemed quieter and less crowded than the place next door.

Perhaps that should have been our first warning sign.

We went into what appeared to be an upmarket restaurant. When we ordered coffee, the waitress asked whether takeaway cups would be acceptable because they were apparently out of clean mugs. We agreed. Then we waited. And waited. About ten minutes later, the coffee finally arrived, and the cups were only half full.

I asked for some brown sugar. The waitress returned with a straw.

They were out of spoons.

It was almost comical, but then we noticed a customer being served the wrong meal. Curious, we looked at the restaurant’s Google reviews.

That was when the pattern became apparent.

The ratings had begun falling sharply about five months earlier. The comments told a familiar story: owners apparently turning up intoxicated, increasingly long waits for food, staff arguing with one another, customers being ignored and orders repeatedly getting wrong.

None of these things, taken individually, would necessarily destroy a restaurant. A broken coffee cup, a missing spoon, a delayed meal or an unhappy employee can happen anywhere.

But collectively they tell a different story.

They are symptoms.

What struck me was how quickly a perfectly viable business can begin to unravel once small failures become normal. Standards slip. Nobody taking responsibility. Customers become frustrated. Good employees leave. Management becomes reactive rather than proactive. The remaining staff become demoralised. More things go wrong. And eventually customers stop coming.

By the time the doors finally close, the collapse may look sudden.

But it wasn’t.

It began months or perhaps years earlier, with small things that nobody considered important enough to fix.

Ernest Hemingway captured this remarkably well when he wrote:

“Gradually and then suddenly.”

He was describing bankruptcy, but the observation applies to so much more than money.

Think about a neighbourhood. The first street lamp stops working and isn’t repaired. Then a pothole appears and remains for months. Rubbish begins accumulating around overflowing bins. Graffiti isn’t removed. A vacant property deteriorates. A once-busy shop closes and isn’t replaced. Public spaces become neglected.

None of these things means a neighbourhood is collapsing.

But they can be early indicators that something underneath the surface is no longer working as it should.

The same is true of companies and institutions. A missed deadline. A call that isn’t returned. A customer complaint that isn’t taken seriously. A manager who repeatedly behaves badly but is protected because of their position. A small deterioration in standards that everyone notices but nobody addresses.

Eventually, people stop expecting things to work.

And that may be the most dangerous stage of all.

We become accustomed to dysfunction. We explain it away. That’s just how things are now. We make excuses for poor behaviour. We lower our expectations. We tolerate what we would once have considered unacceptable.

And once a society, an organisation or a relationship begins lowering its standards, decline can become self-perpetuating.

Relationships are no different.

A friendship rarely ends because of one isolated irritation. More often, it is a succession of small disappointments: the phone call that never comes, the promise that isn’t kept, the insensitive remark that goes unchallenged, the recurring behaviour we keep excusing.

We tell ourselves it doesn’t matter.

Until it does.

Small resentments accumulate. They become a reservoir of unspoken anger. And then, one day, something apparently insignificant triggers an emotional outburst that brings years of accumulated frustration to the surface.

To an outsider, the reaction may seem disproportionate.

But the outburst isn’t really about the final incident.

It is about everything that came before it.

This is why we should pay more attention to the small things.

The first broken street lamp.
The first pothole left unrepaired.
The first customer complaint ignored.
The first promise broken.
The first time someone behaves badly and we decide it isn’t worth confronting.

These are not necessarily signs of impending collapse. But they are signals.

And signals are useful precisely because they give us a chance to act before the damage becomes irreversible.

Things rarely fall apart all at once.

First, something stops working.

Then another thing.

Then another.

We adapt. We excuse. We tolerate.

And eventually we look back and wonder how everything changed so completely.

The frightening thing about decline is that it is often almost invisible while it is happening.

The hopeful thing is that the same is true of repair.

A pothole can be fixed. A lamp can be replaced. A customer can be listened to. An apology can be made. A standard can be restored.

Sometimes the difference between decline and renewal is simply whether somebody notices the first small thing that has gone wrong, and cares enough to do something about it before its too late.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | July 14, 2026 · 2:51 pm

What We Lose When We Stop Reading

I recently came across a thought-provoking article in The Atlantic that stopped me in my tracks. It reported that, in 2022, fewer than half of all adults in the United States read a single book of any kind. Even more striking, the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day has fallen dramatically—from 28 per cent in 2004 to just 16 per cent in 2023.

These figures tell a story that extends far beyond changing reading habits. It invites the question: What happens to a society when it loses the habit of sustained attention, deep reflection, and the companionship of books?

The decline in reading cuts across every age group, gender, and education level. The result: basic reading skills are eroding. In an era of information overload, short text messages and textual fragments, our capacity for sustained attention — the kind longer, complex works demand — is shrinking.

The article quotes Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, who argues that people aren’t forgetting how to decode words. What they’re losing are the higher-order skills of comprehension and synthesis — the ability to hold a complicated argument in mind long enough to weigh it.

Why reading matters

This isn’t just about nostalgia. Deep reading trains a particular kind of mind. Following an argument across three hundred pages — tracking its turns, holding contradictions in tension, revising your judgement as new evidence appears — is a rehearsal for democratic life itself. It’s the same muscle you need to weigh competing claims in an election, or sit with a problem that has no easy answer. Skimming a headline or a ten-second video trains the opposite reflex: snap judgement, then move on. A society that reads less doesn’t just know less. It loses practice in the patient, the uncomfortable work of changing its mind.

Reading also builds something harder to measure: the habit of inhabiting another consciousness. A good novel forces you to live inside a character’s way of thinking for hours at a stretch — to feel why they act as they do, even when you’d choose differently. That’s a rehearsal for empathy that no summary or excerpt can substitute for. Lose the habit, and you don’t just lose stories. You lose the practice in imagining anyone unlike yourself.

Are we, then, entering a post-literate society — one growing less able to grasp complex issues, and, in plain language, more susceptible to loud, brash voices peddling simple answers to complicated problems?

Is a free, democratic society itself at risk when a growing number of people become functionally illiterate, or simply hand the work of thinking in complexity over to someone else?

Photo by Nitin Arya on Pexels.com

Literacy forms the foundation of a free society

For most of human history, literacy belonged to a small educated elite that ruled over the masses. The ability to read and write opened up a whole world to millions and became the foundation of a free society. It changed consciousness. It changed the political order.

“More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness,” wrote Walter J. Ong, the historian and Jesuit priest. Neil Postman went further, arguing that reading and writing were the preconditions for philosophy, modern science, history, and academic life as we know them.

I’ve been fascinated by books since childhood. I grew up in South Africa in the early 1960s, in a country without television, where a trip to the cinema was a rare event. In that rigid, joyless world inhabited by Calvinist doctrine, I found refuge in books.

They became my escape, carrying me far beyond the streets of my hometown in rural KwaZulu-Natal. I must have read King Solomon’s Mines half a dozen times, wandering in imagination through the vast African interior.

Later, it was the classics that held me — thanks to our English teacher, Andy Towert. He had a gift for breathing life into prescribed texts and for setting essay questions that were anything but safe. His entrance into the classroom was a performance in itself: he’d toss his bag into the air, sending it into a perfect somersault before it landed square on the desk. From that moment, he had our full attention.

Towert didn’t just teach literature — he ignited it. He made us believe that books weren’t relics of the past but living voices, speaking directly into our own lives. Those hours were never mere diversions. They were seeds of a lifelong calling, planted quietly within the narrow conformities of a small-town childhood.

Some books have changed my life outright. Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage sent me on my first walk to Santiago and more than a dozen pilgrimages since. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara reshaped how I think about lived, experiential spirituality.

Early reading and teachers like Andy Towert planted the seeds of my own writing life. Having just finished the manuscript of my fifth book, I can’t imagine stopping. While writing my novel Sages, Saints and Sinners, I became so immersed in the two central characters and their love story that I fell for them myself — and was almost sorry to have to bring their story to an end.

So pick up a book. I did, once, in a small town with nothing else to offer — and it changed everything.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading one of my four books, available where all good books are sold.

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by | June 24, 2026 · 8:53 am

The Age of Everything—and the Hunger for Meaning

We live in an age saturated with ideologies.

Whether political, cultural, religious, or social, ideology is always trying to tell you who you should be and how you should behave. It defines identity by drawing boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. In a world that feels fragmented, uncertain, and complex, ideology offers certainty—but usually at the cost of curiosity, nuance, and human connection.

Almost every ideology shares another trait: it idealises the past.

The drumbeat is that there was once a golden age when people were happier, communities were stronger, society was safer, and life was somehow better. History tells a different story.

As I write this from London on a beautiful summer day, the sky is blue, the air is fresh, and birds are singing in the park outside my window. It is easy to forget that only fifty years ago, many of Europe’s great cities were shrouded in traffic fumes and industrial smog.

Go back further, and the contrast becomes starker still. Few of us would choose to live in the Middle Ages, when life expectancy was dramatically lower, disease was widespread, famine was common, and countless women died in childbirth while men perished in wars or from illnesses that are now treatable.

By many measurable standards, humanity is living through an era of extraordinary progress. Millions have been lifted out of poverty. Freedom has expanded across much of the world. Medical science stands on the threshold of breakthroughs that may one day conquer diseases such as cancer.

And yet something seems deeply unsettled.

Why does grievance feel so widespread? Why do anxiety, loneliness, and depression continue to rise? Why do so many people feel disconnected in the most interconnected age in history?

Perhaps because meaning cannot be manufactured by prosperity alone.

A healthy life is not one without difficulty. It is the capacity to navigate life’s inevitable cycles of gain and loss, joy and sorrow, certainty and doubt. Yet the world around us constantly sends a different message—that happiness depends on external validation, social approval, achievement, possessions, or carefully curated identities.

At the same time, many of the institutions that once offered a framework for meaning have lost credibility or struggle to speak in ways that resonate with contemporary life.

Deeper questions surface as a result:

  • Where have I come from?
  • Where am I going with the years I have left?
  • Who am I beyond my career, income, gender, age, or social status?
  • What remains when the labels fall away?

These questions have come up repeatedly in my podcast conversations, workshops, and personal encounters over recent months. Beneath the noise of current events, I sense a growing hunger—not for more information, but for wisdom. Not for certainty, but for deeper understanding.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S. In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about Letters from the Threshold, a Sunday letter where I explore many of these themes in greater depth. For those who find value in thoughtful reflection and deeper inquiry, there will soon be an opportunity to subscribe.

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by | June 16, 2026 · 10:01 am

The Marketplace of Meaning

For most of human history, meaning was inherited. People were born into a family, a culture, a faith tradition, and a set of expectations. Whether one agreed with them or not, there was a framework.

Today, meaning has become a marketplace where thousands of voices compete for your attention. Coaches, influencers, therapists, spiritual teachers, political commentators, podcasters, and self-help experts all offer explanations for why you might feel lost and promises for how to find your way.

Many provide genuine value. Some are insightful guides. But the sheer volume of competing narratives creates a new problem: paralysis. When everyone claims to possess the answer, how do you know whom to trust?

The Seduction of Certainty

Human beings have always been uncomfortable with uncertainty in times of rapid social change, economic instability, political division, and technological disruption; certainty becomes a highly desirable product. But the individuals who gain the largest audiences are often not those who ask the best questions but those who provide the simplest answers.

Complexity rarely goes viral. Certainty does. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that simplistic explanations rarely survive contact with reality. The world is too nuanced, human beings too contradictory, and life too unpredictable to fit neatly into slogans and soundbites. Discernment and depth require patience.

The Difference Between Guidance and Dependency

There is nothing wrong with seeking wisdom from teachers, mentors, therapists, or spiritual guides. The problem arises when guidance turns into dependence. A good teacher helps people think for themselves. A dangerous teacher trains people to stop thinking altogether and to blindly follow.

One of the quiet tragedies of modern life is watching intelligent, capable people gradually surrender their own judgment. Every decision must be approved by the guru. Every life choice must be interpreted through the framework of the therapist. Every uncertainty requires external validation. The result is often a dangerous form of mind captivity.

The same pattern can often be observed in dysfunctional relationships, where one partner gradually surrenders their independence and begins to define their identity entirely through the other. Decisions, values, and even self-worth become filtered through the relationship. What may initially appear as devotion can ultimately become a loss of self, replacing personal agency with emotional dependence

Outsourcing the Work of Living

Perhaps the greatest temptation of our age is to outsource the difficult work of self-examination. It is easier to follow a celebrity’s life than to confront your own. Easier to consume endless content than to sit quietly with uncomfortable questions. Easier to adopt someone else’s beliefs than to wrestle honestly with your own doubts and issues of faith.

Yet purpose is not something another person can hand to you on a silver platter. No influencer, teacher, author, or spiritual leader can ultimately answer the questions that belong uniquely to your own life. That is something you can only discover.

They can illuminate the path, but nobody can walk it for you.

Living With Questions

I suspect that wisdom is less about possessing answers and more about developing the capacity to live with important questions.

  • Who am I becoming?
  • What matters most?
  • What kind of life is worth living?

These questions can only be revisited repeatedly throughout life. Perhaps maturity begins when you stop searching for someone who will think for you and start cultivating the courage to think deeply for yourself. Not in isolation, but with humility. Not with certainty, but with curiosity. Not seeking a guru to follow, but seeking the wisdom to discern.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S. In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about Letter from the Threshold, a Sunday letter where I explore many of these themes in greater depth. For those who find value in thoughtful reflection and deeper inquiry, there will soon be an opportunity to subscribe.

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by | June 1, 2026 · 8:54 am

Embracing Self-Love on the Camino de Santiago

While walking the Camino de Santiago, I sometimes encountered pilgrims who seemed to confuse pilgrimage with an act of self-punishment. Despite their bodies sending unmistakable signals—painful blisters, swollen joints, and deep exhaustion—that it was time to rest, they would continue pushing forward. Determined to conquer the path at all costs, they ignored their physical limits until, inevitably, they were forced to abandon their journey altogether.

There is a saying I learned from another pilgrim on the way. “If you don’t learn to approach the path with humility, it will teach you humility.”

Others approached the Camino very differently. I remember older pilgrims, some well into their eighties, who walked slowly and with intention. They moved at their own pace, stopping occasionally to admire the landscape, sitting quietly in contemplation, or choosing to walk only half a stage in a day. Rather than measuring success by distance covered, they seemed to delight in the journey itself. Remarkably, many of these pilgrims completed the entire 800-kilometre route to Santiago. Even more striking was the vitality they radiated. They appeared youthful, not because of physical strength alone, but because they had learned the wisdom of walking in harmony with themselves.

Pilgrimage offers many lessons about life, but one of its most important teachings is the often misunderstood art of self-love.

Modern psychology increasingly confirms what many spiritual traditions have taught for centuries: self-love is not a luxury but a necessity for human flourishing. Research on self-compassion, pioneered by psychologist Dr Kristin Neff, shows that people who treat themselves with kindness during times of difficulty tend to be more resilient, emotionally balanced, and motivated than those who constantly criticise themselves.

Contrary to popular belief, harsh self-judgment, especially negative self-talk, does not produce stronger or more successful people. Instead, it often leads to anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, and emotional exhaustion.

Self-love, in psychological terms, means relating to oneself with the same care and understanding that one would naturally offer a good friend. It involves recognising one’s limitations without shame and acknowledging one’s worth without needing constant external validation. Such an attitude fosters emotional well-being and enables people to respond more constructively to life’s inevitable challenges.

These findings resonate deeply with the teachings of the 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart. Eckhart believed that what turns human beings into compulsive graspers—unable to let go of possessions, status, relationships, or beliefs—is ultimately a lack of trust. Beneath our attachments lies a profound insecurity, a fear that we are somehow incomplete or unworthy.

For Eckhart, self-love and trust in the divine are inseparable. Compassion arises from confidence in the goodness that lies at the heart of existence, while compulsive striving grows from the belief that we are fundamentally lacking or flawed. The person who learns to “let be” and at the same time allows themselves to be is expressing a deep confidence in the creative source of life.

Eckhart writes: “If you do not know how to love yourself, how is it possible that you will love God? There can be no love of neighbour without love of self.” To love oneself, in his understanding, is not an obstacle to spiritual growth but one of its essential foundations.

Such ideas were controversial in Eckhart’s time. Many theologians were preoccupied with sin, moral regulation, and the strict enforcement of doctrine. God was often portrayed as an authoritarian ruler who rewarded obedience and punished transgression. Shame and guilt became powerful tools of religious instruction—a dynamic that continues to influence some religious traditions today.

The divine potential in every person

Yet Eckhart offered a radically different vision. Rather than beginning with fear, he began with trust. Rather than emphasising human depravity, he pointed toward the divine potential present within every person.

This brings us to an important distinction: self-love is not the same as ego.

The ego seeks validation, superiority, and control. It constantly compares itself with others and measures its worth through achievement, status, or recognition. Ego asks, “How can I become more important?” Self-love asks, “How can I become more fully myself?”

The ego is rooted in insecurity and therefore always needs more. Self-love arises from a deeper acceptance and therefore has nothing to prove. The ego separates; self-love connects. The ego grasps; self-love releases. The ego seeks to protect an image; self-love nurtures a living reality.

Far from encouraging selfishness, genuine self-love often leads to greater compassion. People who are at peace with themselves generally have a greater capacity to listen, empathise, forgive, and care for others. They are not depleted by the endless struggle to earn their own worth.

The spiritual path, whether on the Camino or in everyday life, invites you to confront your fears, loosen your attachments, and ultimately learn the difficult art of letting go. This includes letting go of the false stories you tell yourself about who you should be.

At the heart of Eckhart’s teaching is a beautiful image. The essence of the divine, he says, is “birthing”—a continual process of creation and emergence. Life is not a static state to be achieved but an ongoing unfolding into what we are meant to become. We are not passive observers of this process but active participants in it.

Perhaps this is one of the Camino’s greatest lessons. The journey is not won by those who push themselves the hardest. It is completed by those who learn to walk with wisdom, humility, and kindness toward themselves. In learning to love yourself, you discover that you are not separate from the sacred journey but part of its unfolding.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S. Over the years, my own Camino journeys have inspired two books exploring the deeper inner dimension of pilgrimage and transformational walking: Deep Walking for Body, Mind and Soul and the newly revised edition of Walking on Edge. Both reflect on the Camino not merely as a physical journey, but as a path of inner change, reflection, and rediscovery.

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by | May 17, 2026 · 6:01 am

The Lost Art of Stillness: Awakening Your Inner Self

In an age shaped by scrolling screens and shrinking attention spans, something profound is happening beneath the surface. Recent studies suggest that nearly two-thirds of young people struggle to remain engaged with content lasting longer than a minute. Yet, paradoxically, this same generation is searching intensely for meaning, transcendence, and spiritual grounding. The hunger for depth has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more urgent.

The difficulty is that our modern world is designed for speed rather than contemplation. We are conditioned to expect instant answers, simplified narratives, and constant stimulation. But the deepest truths of existence cannot be reduced to sound bites or algorithms. Mystery does not reveal itself in haste.

The ancient mystics understood this well. They approached the human soul with reverence, knowing that the divine cannot be encountered amid endless distraction and noise. The sacred unfolds quietly. Only in silence, solitude, and contemplation does the veil begin to lift, allowing fleeting glimpses of a reality greater than yourself.

As the 14th-century mystic Meister Eckhart wrote:

“Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.”

Those words may be more relevant now than ever before.

You did not arrive here by accident. Your very existence is astonishingly improbable. Consider how different your life might have been had you been born in another country, another culture, another language, another body, or another century. None of those things were within your control. And yet, within the boundaries of circumstance, you have been given the extraordinary freedom to choose how you respond to life.

Your external conditions shape you, but they do not define the deepest essence of who you are.

It is by fully entering the depth of life’s journey that you awaken to purpose, resilience, and meaning. But this awakening becomes difficult when the mind is continually fragmented by external distraction. Much of the anxiety and emotional exhaustion of modern life emerges from this loss of alignment — a growing disconnect between the soul and its deeper calling.

We lose ourselves when we settle for the illusion of safety in mediocrity, silencing the inner voice that calls toward courage, creativity, and transformation. In doing so, there is a drift away from the very source of vitality.

Nature has always offered a path back.

The silence of mountains, forests, rivers, and open skies reveals something ancient and expansive. Birdsong, wind through trees, flowing water — all of it speaks of an intricate web of interconnectedness that modern life often obscures. In nature, you are reminded that you belong to something far greater than your schedules, anxieties, and ambitions.

It is no coincidence that many of humanity’s sacred places are found in forests, caves, deserts, and mountain summits. Nature slows our breathing, quiets stress, restores attention, and gently reconnects you to the rhythm of being itself.

Perhaps this is why time spent in nature often feels less like escape and more like remembrance.

To live well is not merely to chase future goals or external validation. It is to recover the lost art of presence — to live not only to achieve, but Living to BE.

And perhaps, in the stillness that you so often avoid, you may rediscover the deeper purpose for which you were born.

Reino Gevers – Host of the LivingToBe podcast

P.S: If you enjoyed this article you might be interested in reading: Sages, Saints and Sinners Get it today on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and where all good books are sold.

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