Enough

Learning to Live with the Victory

Chapter 2 – The Relentless Push for More

I have slept a full 9 hours, but wake feeling tired still. My feet are cold, I must wear socks to bed tonight in a bid to ensure longer comfort. Looking at the clock it is 5.30am. The first strains of light are peeking around the curtains. I am warm without feeling comfortable, and with words to pour from my fingers, I rise, dress and head to the dining room where my laptop is set up, just waiting to be plunged into action.

Roosters crow eventually as the rotation of the earth heralds the start of another day, albeit with the curvature of the earth in its axis, at a later time than the seasons prior. This time of the day is the most productive for me. The words have dammed up over night and need to be released.

Not just that there is a multitude of “work” built up just to keep me engaged. The drudgery of the monotonous push for more. A cross bearing for one with ideas that need to be fulfilled but without the resources of someone to tidily wrap the ideas and turn them into reality. It’s not a complaint as such, it’s a realisation of my lot in life. There must be more, there must be “real” success, but ideas simple potential, is not enough. So there is the relentless push.

Today will be a fishing day and everyone knows who knows, a day fishing no matter how unproductive is far better than any day of work. First we need a spot and my young cousin has promised one. His mate, who has emigrated for the moment to Cairns for his children’s education and sporting potential, has left his property, adjacent to the river unattended for the moment with Mitch looking after it from a mowing and weeding point of view.

It’s close to town, in fact it is just by the turn off for the bypass we use to get to the Prairie without dissecting the town. I have been there before, it looks the part. There is a dam that supposedly has impoundment fish in it and it backs onto a creek that runs into Galari. I know the lay of the land, the only thing is I need access and Mitch has it. So we wait.

Being a Saturday he has slept in as he is only interested in his stressors of the day which just happen to be the local golf day. His tee off time is 11.30am and he and his partner have taken the chance at a sleep in and it is not before 9.00am that we see him and we head for the spot.

We potter around the farm with Kerre talking about issues of the animals. A horse has a leg issue and we will need to assist her with. The plan will be to take Trevor and myself to tip the horse much like the tractors in the movie Cars (2006 – Buena Vista Pictures), to allow Kerre to investigate the issue hopefully just a stone bruise with the hoof of the gelding.

She is a farmer in the best sense. She is one with the land and the animals that call it home. This little part of Australia they call their own has been under their stewardship for in excess of 45 years now, and along with taking animals to the local elderly residential care facilities shows how she likes to give back as a part of life.

We will be looking at avenues that might peak her interest as we delve into later days when I will seek to extract anecdotes for a book I want to write about her journey through life. The Unwitting Matriarch promises to be a tome of epic proportions even though the subject being so humble there does not feel there is anything worthy of print, or even contemplation She is so wrong.

But that is later. Now we wait for Mitchell and the chance to be shown the way into a property, presently on the market, and accessible only by him as the gardener and the real estate agent presently trying to sell it.

He comes at the appointed time, having slept in on Saturday as if his want, given the hard work they both put in during the working week. The dogs herald his arrival and we are soon talking all things Condobolin, including a potential investment in a property presently on the market, being sold by an almost family member. There are possibilities here with all sorts of options for rental of dongers for the new gold mine and a solar farm that could be a cash cow if the numbers are right. A project for later in the week.

Now, today, we are in fishing mode with the direction of the conversation and the travelling of the vehicles towards the supposed fishing spot. Out along the road and past the potential property investment, just to quickly check it out and then to the property of his mate, through the gate and down to the creek.

It’s a place clearly used often as it has a barbecue set up beside the river as well as some plastic chairs. Although one is broken, making me reach for the small ones in the Cruiser for seating for me during the day.

We are soon rigged, baited and fishing. The scene is surreal in its nature. A creek the size of a river, flowing enough to require thought as to what weight in sinkers one might use and a view of cumbungee on the other side of the water course which might just hide some of our quarry.

Settling in, I take some pictures, panoramas, taking in as much of the vista as possible and thinking of the place, abhorrent in the sense of home, hidden in someone else’s place, but enough of a place to give the sheer magnitude of Galari as it is.

There are no bites in the initial stages. Nothing at all. The movement of the waterway, taking the adequately weighted baits along the reeds and out into the open water.

Why should one want more? The setting is idyllic, we are not working, and that has to be a bonus, although both our phones ding with the expectation of clients wanting answers to questions that are required now, not in the time we return from our time or rest and relaxation. Such in the life of the small business operator.

The morning wears on. Baits are lost, but not to bites but the pressure of the water, until a rod moves unusually. Then, all of a sudden, there is the call, “fish on” and I am in competition with something in the water that does not want to be seen, let alone beached.

Trevor joins me and immediately, because of the setting, suggests I have hooked a carp, and the first roll of the fish visible from our vantage point suggests no difference, a pest and the bane of any fisherman of the inland waterways of Australia. He suggests I just “skull drag” it to the bank, but I have hooked the fish on my lightest gear and that is not really an option.

All of a sudden we get another roll and the real nature of the fish on the hook materialises. It’s a cod and a nice one. Much more care will be required to land it. When I finally have it to the edge of the bank and Trevor nets it, we see I have only just hooked it and skull dragging would sure have lost it.

Once the obligatory pictures are taken, the fish is placed in the keeper net and returned to the water to keep it fresh, and we return to the endless wait for the next bite. In the meantime the pictures start making the rounds of family and friends, especially Trevor’s, with appropriate sledging, which will surely come back to bite me, but for now I am one up and letting the world know it.

The biggest bite comes from his oldest daughter who inter alia suggests a dose of humility from time to time will do him good. Big worlds for the first born, and more ammunition for the banter between us.

The day continues, the biting stops. Trevor, who is still yet to catch his first cod, settles in far better than I as a leisure event unfolds, whereas I am keen to entice yet another bite and attack another fish.

Among my sledging, I also engage with a cousin in Mackay who I am wanting to ensure realises we might be dropping in when a Coroners Inquest hands down its findings, important to my wife’s family. He suggests it will be their pleasure to have us. Her wife and mine are among the favourite “outsiders” my Aunty Kerre has to deal with, she says.

I also ask about pictures he sent in texts recently about captures of the same fish we are chasing, asking after the spot. He confirms it’s a spot I took him to last time we were together here at “home”, more his as he was born here, rather than mine. I talk to him about the need to go walkabout and find myself again. He notes he does the same thing and looks forward to returning “home”. He, like me, lives far from here but has a spiritual relationship with the place.

He talks of a jaunt next Easter where he might just find a spot to camp on the river and seek out the ancestors, if not the fish.

I can’t join him, I suggest as Easter is a time too near my birthday and not having complete control of my own time, I might need to give others in the family a chance to do something that settles their need to be together. Pulled from post to post, it’s the way of us it seems.

The day draws on. The sun drops and reflects on the reeds, shimmering the ripples of the water on the green shoots from the water on the adjacent bank. An animal, either lizard or some form of marsupial quickly emerges from the reeds, douses itself in water and scrambles back to the protection of the grasses. The sun is going, taking another layer away as we think of heading home.

One thinks of the scene in terms of Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and the raft cruise prior to “the Storm”. Drops of spray reflecting here and there forming luminous points in the eddy created by the raft, in the scenery being created by the sunset. It’s almost euphoric and had there been more action on the rods, perhaps we may have stayed, but the oncoming cold, the loss of the midday meal and the potential of a hot feed of fish and depression steaks is far too much to knock back and we pack up and head home.

Cleaning the fish is left to Trevor as I hunted, he can prepare. For me I am quickly shown the barbeque and the lamb chops as Uncle Lionel takes to the fish. Depression steaks as I referred to them are normally legs of lamb cut into steak like slabs. Tonight’s fare is actually forequarter chops. Not lamb like you might get in a butcher shop “in the city”, hogget, a little older, not quite thawed when I put them on, making them chewy, certainly not a melt in your mouth experience.

Kerre adds mashed potato, carrots and the beans from home and we have a meal fit for a king if not the presentation or the petiteness of a silver service affair, having our meals on our knees in front of the television, but certainly a meal of substance.

A Saturday on the river. A check of the emails sees several work related “emergency” communications, that will simply have to wait, until, if not tomorrow, until a time when I feel predisposed to deal with them. My agreement with my clients refers to “reasonable access” and while I have been known to work weekends when the need arises, tonight is not a time I feel anything like predisposed to give a damn.

Whilst getting away from work is nowhere near the main driver, it’s one of the reasons I am here.

Tomorrow is a wood day. Mitch has a repository of timber that may be of use to me and the Mens Shed we want to investigate, a pile of railway sleeper offcuts that might just foot the bill and take all sorts of pressure off slabbing other large logs in the wood heap, collected thinking we can make use of them.

First though, assuming Trevor gets up when I do, will be a jaunt to a spot, the one Daryl confirmed was the place of success on his last visit here in Easter, and a spot I have had success with in the last couple of times in Condo. We will need to ensure we are back by 11.00am but that would be hard, especially if the fish are biting like they were today.

Have I found myself today? No is the short answer, although perhaps that is not really the question any longer. The conversations, even those conducted through the impersonal medium of text messages, have opened avenues of thought requiring further exploration. They have nudged at doors I have spent years carefully keeping closed. They have suggested that perhaps the floodgates need to open, not all at once and not for everyone, but in my own way and on my own terms.

It reminds me of T’Challa in Black Panther (2018 – Walt Disney Pictures). Before assuming the mantle of king, he undergoes a ritual where he seeks the counsel of the ancestors. The answers are not handed to him. The path is not illuminated by some divine spotlight. Instead, he is given perspective. He is given context. He is reminded that he is part of something larger than himself. The ancestors do not fix his problems. They simply help him understand them. That, I suspect, is far closer to what I am seeking than any neat solution or dramatic revelation.

I cannot really talk to Robyn about this. I cannot talk to Trevor about it either. That is not a criticism of either of them. Quite the opposite. They care deeply, which is perhaps part of the problem. The moment people care about you, they naturally want to help. They want solutions. They want actions. They want progress. They want the darkness removed and the light restored. The difficulty is that some problems are not mechanical. They are not broken fan belts or carburettor bowls that can be replaced from a donor machine. Some things require exploration rather than repair, reflection rather than action, and understanding rather than intervention.

The challenge is that I have spent most of my life becoming the person others bring their problems to. As an accountant, business adviser, mentor, father, husband, committee member, and professional fixer of things, I have built an identity around solutions. People arrive with uncertainty and leave with direction. They arrive with confusion and leave with clarity. Somewhere along the line I became very good at helping other people navigate their storms. What I never became particularly good at was revealing my own.

The exterior appears strong enough. It always has. It is built on promise. Built on potential. Built on the belief that tomorrow can be better than today if enough effort is applied. It is the same mentality that built businesses, survived setbacks, weathered failures, and continually pushed toward the next horizon. Yet there is a difference between strength and invulnerability. There is also a difference between optimism and certainty. Looking back, I wonder how much of that exterior was fertilised by illusion.

Not deliberate deception. Not dishonesty. Simply the illusion that achievement eventually brings contentment. The illusion that success eventually creates security. The illusion that reaching the next destination finally provides permission to stop searching. Each milestone seemed to promise exactly that. Build the business. Raise the family. Pay off the debt. Buy the property. Reach retirement. Yet each destination, once reached, quietly transformed into another starting point. The horizon moved. The questions changed. The search continued. The promise of arrival somehow always remained one step further down the road.

Perhaps that is why the walls I described earlier feel so oppressive at times. From the outside they appear solid and protective. From the inside they can feel like confinement. The same characteristics that allowed me to endure difficult periods of life may also have become barriers preventing deeper understanding. Strength can become stubbornness. Independence can become isolation. Resilience can become emotional distance. The armour that protects us from injury can, over time, also prevent us from feeling the things we need to feel.

Maybe that is why I keep thinking about the woman at the Business Blueprint Retreat all those years ago. She did not solve anything. She did not analyse me. She did not provide a framework, a strategy, or a twelve-step action plan. She simply listened. In a world obsessed with solutions, listening can feel almost revolutionary. There was no attempt to steer the conversation toward an outcome. No pressure to improve. No expectation that something productive needed to emerge. She simply provided space, and in that space thoughts began organising themselves. The answers, if there were answers, emerged naturally rather than being forced.

That is what I find myself craving now. Not advice. Not diagnosis. Not correction. Space. Space to hear my own thoughts. Space to examine the questions without immediately demanding answers. Space to understand why the Black Dog remains lurking around the edges despite all the reasons he should have wandered off years ago. Space to explore the possibility that perhaps he is not the problem at all, merely the symptom of questions left unanswered for too long.

My daughter found something similar at Kata Tjuta. She spoke about the wind moving through the chasms between the rocks, carrying something difficult to explain. It was not a voice. It was not a revelation. Yet it spoke to her nonetheless. It suggested direction. Not a destination, merely a direction. It reminded her there were pathways beyond the obvious academic and professional ones she had been taught to pursue. The experience did not tell her exactly what to do. It simply showed her there were possibilities she had not previously considered.

Perhaps that is what I am searching for as well. Not a destination. A direction. The walkabout was never really about fishing. It was never really about timber. It was never really about escaping home. Those things merely provided acceptable explanations for a deeper need I could not adequately describe. Somewhere beneath the surface I was searching for permission to ask questions without demanding immediate answers. I was searching for a place where uncertainty was allowed to exist without being treated as a problem requiring urgent correction.

The irony, of course, is that I may already be receiving the answers I seek. Like the man on the roof waiting for a miracle, perhaps I keep overlooking the boats sent to rescue me because they do not resemble the helicopter I expected. Perhaps the conversations, the dreams, the landscapes, the people, the silences, and the reflections are themselves the answers. Perhaps they are not telling me where to go. Perhaps they are teaching me how to listen.

And maybe that is the conundrum of being me. I have spent so much of my life focused on promise that I struggle to recognise fulfillment. I have spent so much time pursuing potential that I sometimes overlook achievement. I have spent decades helping others find direction while becoming increasingly uncertain of my own. The exterior remains strong enough for the world to see, but perhaps it has become brittle in places, sustained by assumptions that no longer serve me. If that is true, then this walkabout is not really about finding a new version of myself. It is about stripping away enough illusion to recognise the person who has been here all along, waiting patiently beneath the expectations, the responsibilities, the ambitions, and the endless search for the next horizon.

Perhaps that recognition will not arrive dramatically. Perhaps there will be no thunderbolt, no grand revelation, and no moment where everything suddenly makes perfect sense. Perhaps, like the ancestors speaking to T’Challa, or the wind whispering through Kata Tjuta to my daughter, it will arrive quietly. It will arrive through understanding rather than instruction. It will arrive through acceptance rather than discovery. And perhaps when it finally arrives, I will realise that what I was seeking was never an answer at all, but permission to keep travelling without needing one.

The big question is will I understand when the voices come, or be able to not just listen but to hear them. For now though, a shower and an early bedtime is on the cards.