Talking while doing has always felt safer than talking while sitting still, because stillness tends to create space for honesty, and honesty can be an inconvenient travelling companion.
Again, I did not sleep “well” last night. Either early onset cold or hay fever was taking over. I managed to finally get to sleep only to wake 2 hours later and then when I did wake, it was already late for the fishing we had planned before the wood investigations we were aiming for.
We get going quickly and head towards a spot where I have caught fish in previous ventures to the centre of the state. As we leave for the spot, my cousin Daryl calls to check in, knowing I am here and, perhaps more importantly, knowing why I am here. As much as he wants to talk about the subject akin to the walkabout nature of the visit, he reverts instead to discussions of fishing exploits. He recounts his last trip to Condobolin and the very stretch of river we are heading toward, talking of fish caught, fish lost, and all the little details fishermen somehow manage to remember years after the event. He never pushes the conversation beyond that envelope, and that restraint is appreciated more than he probably realises.
There is a difference between understanding somebody and interrogating them. Too often people assume concern requires questions. They assume support requires solutions. They assume caring means probing deeper. Daryl seems instinctively aware that some journeys need room to breathe. He knows enough about me to understand that if I want to talk about what is really happening, I will. Equally, he knows enough about himself to recognise there are times when simply being present is far more valuable than attempting to drag a conversation somewhere it is not yet ready to go.
What makes that understanding interesting is that, in many ways, Daryl and I occupy remarkably similar territory, even if the landscapes look completely different from the outside. We are both men, like most men, who have spent much of our lives carrying responsibility. We are both products of family expectations, hard work, resilience, and the peculiar burden that comes from being the person others often rely upon. We have both experienced success. We have both experienced disappointment. We have both discovered that age does not magically deliver wisdom so much as it delivers a growing list of questions accompanied by fewer certainties.
Yet the paths we have travelled remain distinctly our own. His struggles are not mine and mine are not his. The details differ. The pressures differ. The circumstances differ. What remains familiar is the emotional geography. There is a recognition that comes from seeing somebody wrestling with questions similar to your own, even when the specifics bear little resemblance. It is the difference between reading the same book and living the same life. The stories are different, yet somehow the themes overlap. You recognise the frustration. You recognise the doubt. You recognise the moments where purpose seems just beyond reach. Most importantly, you recognise the tendency to continue moving forward regardless because stopping is rarely viewed as a viable option.
Perhaps that is why he picked up the phone. Not because he needed information. Not because he wanted an update. Not because he expected answers. He simply understood enough to know that sometimes a person on a walkabout needs to know somebody is quietly standing on the edge of the journey, watching without interfering. There is comfort in that sort of connection because it arrives without obligation. The conversation never becomes heavy. It never descends into emotional excavation. Instead we talk about fish. We talk about places. We talk about memories attached to bends in rivers and stretches of bank that most people would drive past without noticing. Yet beneath the surface there is another conversation occurring entirely, one conducted through what remains unsaid rather than what is spoken.
I suspect many men communicate that way because the world often criticises men for not discussing emotions openly enough, and there is undoubtedly truth in that observation. Yet there is another side to it as well. Sometimes men discuss emotions through shared experiences rather than direct disclosure. Fishing becomes the conversation. The river becomes the conversation. The memory becomes the conversation. The words themselves are merely the vehicle carrying something deeper beneath them. What appears to be a discussion about fish and riverbanks often carries far more emotional freight than either party would openly admit.
When Daryl talks about fishing the same stretch of river years earlier, he is not really talking about fishing at all. He is talking about understanding. He is talking about belonging. He is talking about connection to a place. He is talking about memory. Most of all, he is talking about recognising why somebody might need to be there. The river simply provides the language through which those things can be discussed without ever needing to be named directly.
That understanding is confirmed later through a simple text message: “It has that effect on you.” The words themselves are almost laughably brief, yet their power lies in what they acknowledge. He understands that there is something about the river, Little Prairie, Aunty Kerre, and the wider landscape that reaches beneath the surface. He understands that this place is not merely geography. It is a memory. It is history. It is identity. It is a place where the noise of ordinary life seems to fade just enough for deeper thoughts to become audible.
Perhaps that is why the message resonates so strongly because he is not explaining the feeling. He is not analysing it. He is not trying to solve it. He is simply acknowledging its existence. That may be one of the rarest gifts one person can offer another. Not agreement. Not advice. Not solutions. Recognition. The simple act of saying, in effect, “I see it too.”
As the call ends and we continue towards the river, I find myself thinking that perhaps Daryl understands more than either of us is willing to openly admit. Our lives have been different. Our journeys have been different. Yet somewhere along the way we have both arrived at a similar place, standing on the edge of middle and later life, looking back at what has been achieved and forward at what remains, both quietly wondering what it all means. We may ask different questions and arrive carrying different burdens, but the search itself feels remarkably familiar.
Perhaps that is why he never pushes the conversation. Perhaps he already knows there are some questions that cannot be answered through discussion. They cannot be solved through logic, explained through analysis, or neatly packaged into advice. They can only be lived. And perhaps he also knows that places like this, rivers like this, and people like Aunty Kerre sometimes provide answers not because they speak, but because they allow you to finally hear yourself. In that sense, his phone call may have achieved exactly what was needed. Not a solution. Not a breakthrough. Simply the quiet reassurance that somebody else understands why the journey matters, even if neither of us can fully explain it.
Although I have been to this spot a couple of times, I miss the turn off, but not by much, although the gravel road, not being in my memory, heralds, I need to turn around and try again, looking for a machinery graveyard I missed first up.
It is these small indignities of ageing that frustrate me most. Not the dramatic failures, nor the cinematic moments where some invisible curtain suddenly falls, but the quieter betrayals that creep into ordinary life without invitation. The word that sits just beyond reach while I stand mid-sentence, knowing precisely what I want to say but unable to summon the correct collection of syllables to deliver it. The familiar face whose name has temporarily wandered off, only to return triumphantly three hours later while I am buttering toast, standing in the shower, or halfway through an entirely unrelated conversation. These are the moments that whisper their cruellest questions.
Is this normal? Is this simply age doing what age inevitably does? Or is this the first soft knock at a far more frightening door, one none of us wish to open?
Dementia has a way of haunting the imagination long before it ever enters the room. Every forgotten name feels like evidence. Every misplaced thought becomes an exhibit in a private prosecution conducted somewhere in the darker corners of the mind, where logic is quickly overruled by fear. Yet perhaps there is another explanation, one less sinister and, dare I say, almost comforting.
Maybe this is not so much a system failing as one overflowing.
After all, there was a time when the filing cabinet upstairs held only a few modest drawers. Childhood memories. Schoolyard embarrassments. The names of teachers who seemed ancient at the time but were probably younger then than I am now. Sporting heroes whose posters adorned bedroom walls. Songs from crackling radios. Which paddock had the dodgy gate and which cousin could be trusted not to dob you in. Life was simpler partly because there was simply less of it requiring storage.
Now the shelves are groaning under the weight of accumulated existence.
Decades of clients and their stories. Tax legislation that has come and gone in various disguises. Business dramas that once felt world-ending and now barely warrant a shrug. Golf scores I would rather forget but somehow remain crystal clear. Family birthdays, snippets of conversations, movie quotes, song lyrics, long drives, wrong turns, victories, humiliations, moments of grief, moments of joy, and thousands upon thousands of observations that lodged themselves somewhere in the mental archives without ever seeking permission. Perhaps the problem is not that the librarian has abandoned his post. Perhaps he is simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material demanding retrieval.
That is not to make light of dementia, nor to pretend it is some overblown bogeyman invented by anxious older people. It is real. Cruelly so. Some minds are taken far too early, stripped of names, faces, histories, and ultimately identity itself, leaving families to grieve someone still physically present. I have seen enough of life to understand that reality deserves respect, not dismissal.
But not every hesitation is evidence of collapse.
Not every forgotten word is the beginning of the end. Sometimes the machine is not broken. Sometimes it is merely congested. A lifetime properly lived creates clutter. Richness has a storage cost, and perhaps this is simply the interest payable on decades of accumulation.
And perhaps that, more than anything, explains why I write.
I do not write because I am surrendering to some inevitable decline, desperately trying to pin butterflies to a board before they escape. I write because the stories deserve somewhere more orderly to live. To leave them rattling around inside my head feels wasteful, like being caretaker of a magnificent library while refusing to open the doors. Writing becomes less an act of defence against forgetting and more an organised overflow valve. A way of saying, here, take this one. This mattered. Let it breathe outside of me for a while.
For now, I function perfectly well. I think, I reflect, I remember enough to know what shaped me, even if the occasional name takes the scenic route before finally arriving with all the confidence of someone who believes they were never late in the first place.
If my mind is overflowing rather than failing, perhaps that is not entirely a tragedy.
Perhaps it is evidence that there was simply plenty worth storing in the first place.
Once entrenched in the fishing spot we sit. The cockatoos reminding us that this a land shared, not a land owned as the silence transforms into a cacophony of noise and then returns leaving the silence then only broken by galahs and parrots as the noisier ones go on their way.
The smell of a fox drifts across the air. In days gone by I would have been looking for a rifle and gone for a stealth walk and tried to track the animal down, but today, sitting on the bank of Galari aiming to simply slow down, the memory of the days gone by is enough.
The lines are set, the baits in areas where fish should be, and nothing. Nothing at all in fact until one rod twitches, almost imperceptably, but enough to peak interest. I take the line from the holder and continue the wait. A flutter feels on my finger, a tighten of the line and I am on. The fight begins. The fish takes off, well hooked and initially I feel like it might be another cod like the one from yesterday, especially as it heads immediately for a snag to seek cover. But glee becomes far less as the fish breaks the surface and is clearly a crap. A large one but definitely a pest.
I call for Trevor and the net, but he sees the tackle I am using, although the fish is sizeable, will be suitable to simply drag the fish up the bank. The fish is disposed of as is the law in New South Wales and pictures are taken and posted on Facebook on Australian Carp Slayers site for prosperity alongside my No 10 boot.
For now, in the week of fishing away from home, I am two-nil up on my companion, and I take a photo of him looking as though he is sitting there somewhere between sulking and deep philosophical reflection beside his line, waiting for at least a bite to justify his continued optimism. I send a copy to his daughter, who immediately responds that I should not remove my foot from her father’s neck now that I am in front. It is exactly the sort of giggle response it was intended to provoke, understood perfectly by all involved.
It is this type of sledging that makes the experience what it is.
Fishing, like golf, is never really just about the fishing. If it were, half of us would have packed up the rods years ago and taken up something with a more reliable return on emotional investment. The fish are almost secondary. What matters is the theatre built around the possibility of success, and within that theatre, sledging plays a starring role.
There is something uniquely Australian about the art of giving a mate absolutely no peace whatsoever while still making it abundantly clear that affection sits beneath every barb. It is not cruelty. It is not malice. It is, in its own strange and often juvenile way, a form of companionship. A language between friends where silence is considered suspicious and kindness is best disguised as ridicule.
A true mate does not simply celebrate your victories. A true mate reminds you, repeatedly and with unnecessary embellishment, of every failure that preceded them. He notes poor casting technique, questions lure selection, offers entirely unqualified advice at precisely the wrong moment, and should you finally land something respectable, immediately points out it was probably suicidal.
The beauty of it is that everyone knows the rules.
No offence is intended because no offence is available for purchase in that particular emotional marketplace. It is all part of the rhythm. The banter fills the spaces between bites, between beers, between the long stretches where nothing much is happening except the passing of time and the quiet satisfaction of being somewhere other than where responsibility usually expects you to be.
In many ways, sledging is shorthand for comfort. You do not mercilessly mock strangers. That level of emotional investment is reserved for friends, for brothers, for people who know your weaknesses well enough to weaponise them creatively but love you enough never to draw blood.
And perhaps that is what makes these trips memorable.
Years from now, I may struggle to remember exactly what I caught, where the boat was anchored, or whether the weather was as good as I currently imagine it to have been. But I will remember the laughter. I will remember the mock despair on a grown man’s face as his daughter effectively sanctioned my continued psychological warfare. I will remember the ridiculous scoreline that mattered far more to us than any sane person would understand.
Because the fish are the excuse. The friendship is the catch.
A call comes through. Unlike the original plan, which was to be back at 11.00am for wood carting exploration, things have changed and we are asked to be back an hour earlier. We have had one bite and one bite only, so the “annoyance” of the change is not a big thing.
The alarm goes off, we pack up and head back to the house thinking we will be off again in another direction with another plan.
Mitch is ready for us as we unload the Cruiser. We don’t even wander inside, such is the urgency to get to the property where the wood on the ground, offcuts of railway sleepers as Mitch suggests, might be the answer to one of the questions of why we are here.
Soon we are on the way, heading to a property on the Parkes Road, where permission has been given to accumulate wood for the winter, which for us might mean timber suitable for the Mens Shed. Kangaroos, sheep and cattle are all parts of the vista as we venture in through the cotton fields to the lignin scrub where the offcuts and dead trees might lurk to satisfy our adventure.
As well as Mitch, his mate Lachlan, a share farmer who has planted grain crops on Mitch’s property in an attempt to get ahead, joins us looking for firewood to heat a home through the fierce winter of the western plains.
We head to a pile of offcuts which I had confidently perceived to be large stacks of neatly squared timber, the sort of forgotten treasure trove that exists in the imagination of every amateur woodworker convinced that hidden amongst the scraps lies the exact material required for the next masterpiece. Instead, what greeted me was something entirely abhorrent to my needs, a chaotic mess of shapes and sizes that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the orderly vision I had already constructed in my mind. To me, it was irrelevant to purpose, an immediate and rather emphatic failure against expectation.
Mitch, unsurprisingly, was entirely unperturbed by my disappointment. He understood something I was, once again, being gently reminded of. Perception is not reality simply because we happen to be the ones perceiving it. He knew of other stashes, other piles, other opportunities, and before long we were dismantling a different heap, pulling pieces free, turning them over, assessing possibilities, and searching for timber that might best serve what I believed I needed. This second pile was certainly closer to the vision in my head, enough so that I could already see the vague outline of purpose beginning to emerge. In my mind, these random lengths of discarded timber were no longer waste but raw material awaiting transformation, future projects for the Men’s Shed, useful objects just waiting for my intervention and imagination.
At least, that was the story I was telling myself.
And therein lies one of life’s more dangerous little habits.
The phrase “I think it, therefore it is” has become one of the more seductive afflictions of modern thinking. Not in the grand philosophical Descartes sense, where existence itself is the issue under debate, but in the far more ordinary human tendency to mistake internal certainty for objective truth. We build elaborate structures in our own minds, complete with logic, expectation, emotional investment, and imagined outcomes, and by the time reality gets a chance to introduce itself, we have already emotionally moved in and started rearranging the furniture.
The timber pile itself was, in truth, just timber. It was neither useful nor useless until purpose was genuinely applied, yet I had already judged it with absolute certainty. The first pile was a failure because it did not conform to the picture in my head. The second was a success because it aligned more closely with the private narrative I had already drafted. Neither conclusion was necessarily accurate. Another woodworker might have walked straight past my so-called perfect pile and headed directly for the one I had dismissed with near theatrical disgust. What I saw as rubbish, someone else might see as possibility. What I considered obvious potential genius might be viewed by others as little more than enthusiastic hoarding with delusions of craftsmanship.
That truth stretches well beyond timber yards and Men’s Sheds.
How often do we answer life’s questions not based on reality itself, but based on a perception so heavily filtered through our own expectations that we cease to distinguish between the two? A business owner launches what they believe is a visionary initiative because in their own mind it is bold, disruptive, and long overdue, while the staff quietly regard it as impractical nonsense that creates work without delivering value. Someone prides themselves on being brutally honest, convinced they are providing authenticity and truth, while the recipient experiences little more than unnecessary cruelty dressed up as virtue. A person convinces themselves they are helping, leading, contributing, inspiring, when from another vantage point they are meddling, controlling, interrupting, or simply making life more complicated.
The danger of perception is not that it exists. We could not function without it. The danger lies in assuming perception constitutes proof. That because something feels logical, sensible, or emotionally certain inside our own heads, it must therefore survive external scrutiny untouched.
The “I think it therefore it is” approach can be dangerously attractive because certainty feels decisive. Confidence has a peculiar way of making even fragile ideas appear solid, particularly when the audience most easily convinced is ourselves. Yet certainty untethered from alternative perspectives is often little more than self-endorsed fiction wearing a respectable jacket.
I may well turn that timber into something useful for the Men’s Shed. Equally, I may wander back in a fortnight, look at exactly the same pile with fresher eyes, and wonder what on earth I thought I was seeing at the time.
Both possibilities remain entirely, and rather amusingly, available.
With the “me” part of the venture. “satisfied” it’s off to load two trailers with wood sawn into billets, ready for splitting by the mechanical machinery at home to bring the large round section of timber chainsawed by the two young men. First we have to find a suitable dead tree.
We wander through the paddocks before finding one which Mitch had earmarked, and soon we are bringing several of the larger bough pieces down, Lachlan, scaling it and, with Mitch’s chainsaw, dropping branches to the ground where he and Mitch can create billets that me and Trevor, for now at least can fill trailers.
Having already “filled” the trailer with offcuts of old railway sleepers, there was, at least in my own mind, a satisfying sense of mission accomplished. The order from the Men’s Shed had been interpreted with the usual blend of enthusiasm and broad assumption that tends to accompany these sorts of salvage operations, where the objective is less engineering specification and more that looks like it might come in handy one day. Timber had been collected, weight had been added to the trailer, muscles had been reminded of their advancing years, and I had mentally awarded us a pass mark for effort and execution.
Of course, progress has a curious habit of refusing to remain static, particularly when imagination is involved.
It was, in that in-between moment, when the body begins preparing to leave but the eyes continue scanning the landscape out of habit rather than intention, that I noticed what was lying on the ground nearby. Lengths of timber that, only moments earlier, had been dismissed as background clutter suddenly appeared in an entirely different light. That shift fascinated me, because nothing about the timber itself had changed. It remained precisely what it had always been. The only variable that had altered, was my perception. Once the immediate objective appeared complete, my mind suddenly created space to see possibility where previously it had seen inconvenience.
What lay there was hardly effortless. These were not neat little decorative pieces one might casually tuck under an arm with a jaunty sense of competence. They were substantial, awkward, the sort of timber that reminds a man his back keeps detailed records of previous overconfidence. Yet I could already see how, sliced appropriately, they might become an ideal adjunct to what we had already collected. Not a replacement strategy, but an enhancement. A useful extension of the original plan. The trailer might have been notionally full, but the order in my head had already evolved, and this new material seemed capable of elevating the outcome from merely functional to genuinely worthwhile.
Mitch, thankfully, is wired rather differently. Where I tend to mentally leap ahead to finished products, future praise, and the warm satisfaction of imagined utility, Mitch operates in the here and now. He assesses weight, practicality, grain, effort, and usefulness without needing the sort of internal motivational speech I seem to require. While I am already seeing Men’s Shed projects emerging from rough timber like some woodworking prophet, Mitch has simply taken to the billets, working out whether something genuinely useful can be extracted from them rather than merely admired in theory.
Then there was the redwood, which in the late afternoon sun almost sparkled with a richness that felt almost theatrical. That may sound like a man romanticising discarded timber, and perhaps it is, but certain materials do carry presence. The grain glowed with that deep warmth only aged timber seems capable of producing, a reminder that these pieces had once stood upright, rooted and alive, before finding themselves reduced to forgotten stock in somebody else’s pile. There is something oddly moving about quality material awaiting rediscovery, particularly when you are old enough to wonder whether the same might occasionally be said of yourself.
And just like that, the plan changed, not because the original plan had failed, but because a better one had quietly introduced itself. As the dead tree falls, first from above with menacing boughs of a “widow maker” as these giants are apt to be known, are relieved of attachment to the trunk, then the mid spine itself revealing the prize within, the fulfillment of the initial destination comes to the fore.
That distinction matters far more than we often admit. Too many people interpret any pivot as evidence of earlier failure, as though changing direction somehow invalidates the thinking that got them to the current point. Business is full of that sort of stubbornness. So is life. We become emotionally attached to Plan A not because it remains the best option, but because it was our option. Ego has a curious tendency to confuse authorship with accuracy.
Yet some of the best outcomes in life emerge not from rigid commitment to original intent, but from the willingness to recognise when new information improves the landscape. Had we simply admired our already loaded trailer, congratulated ourselves on efficiency, and headed home, nobody would have called the exercise a failure. The mission would have been accomplished according to the original brief. But opportunity rarely announces itself according to prearranged schedules. Sometimes it appears only after you believe the work is complete, requiring enough flexibility to acknowledge that completion may have been premature.
The irony, of course, is that we have not even yet attacked the assembled stockpile at Little Prairie. That remains the true motherlode, the larger promise still sitting patiently in the wings while we busy ourselves with what may ultimately prove to be the supporting act. This entire exercise may yet be overtaken by something vastly superior once that timber heap is properly explored. Yet even before reaching that point, perception has already reshaped the plan, improved the likely outcome, and reminded me once again that certainty is often little more than a temporary draft rather than a final conclusion.
Perhaps that is one of the quieter gifts of experience. Not wisdom exactly, because wisdom suggests a level of consistency I am not prepared to claim, but a growing comfort with adaptation. The recognition that changing your mind in the face of better possibilities is not weakness, nor indecision, nor evidence that you misunderstood the assignment. Sometimes it is simply proof that you kept looking long enough to see something better.
The boys saw, the tree becomes lines of billets on the ground, Trevor and I load. Casey, Mitch’s partner collects offcuts suitable for bonfires rather than combustion stoves and everyone is happy, content in the fact everyone has had their expectations filled. We head home, vehicles straining under loads on trailers they were not designed to accomplish but are forced to comply without overly stressing the machinery.
That is until another thought springs to light and Mitch, rather than cutting across the branches, is quickly sawing along them, slicing the timber along the grain creating slats of red and orange ochres of solid timber. His execution with the chainsaw, although not perfection, certainly provides models to work with, far more advanced than the sleeper offcuts already in the trailer.
Several logs are sliced, giving me more than enough starting points without really impacting on the five or so tonnes of timber eventually loaded into the trailers ready to be transferred to the log splitter at home. Some of the pieces are almost too large to lift so I grab the axe from the back of the ute and seek to halve them and reduce the weight. The axe simply bounces off much to the hysterical joy of the crowd.
Hardwood it is, and unfortunately hard wood it will remain for now until in excess of 40 tonnes of pressure is provided by the mechanical splitter to create hearth sized pieces for the wood fired heaters in houses through the colder winter months to come.
There is still another “chore” that needs to be attacked on this sabbath, as the work never really ends for families struggling to make ends meet, even though there is no real danger of starvation or loss of lifestyle. It’s simply something that needs to be done.
Trevor and I want to ensure we have everything we need to “slab” the logs Mitch has accumulated for me, so on arriving back at his place we begin the hunt for the cradle and the assorted equipment required for the job. The thinking is typical bloke logic at its finest: if we can run a successful sample slice through one of the logs, and it vaguely resembles what we had imagined in our heads, we will undoubtedly declare ourselves sufficiently qualified to tackle the rest. Confidence, as history repeatedly proves, often arrives well before competence.
It is here that the ripple begins, although I am entirely blind to it at the time, because what appears to me as simple momentum is, in reality, quietly becoming something rather different for someone else.
One of the more curious unintended consequences of arriving somewhere with purpose is that your purpose can quietly become another person’s obligation, even when no words are spoken to make that happen. Pressure does not always announce itself in obvious ways. Sometimes it arrives simply because bodies are present, expectations exist, and momentum has already begun to gather. What sits in your own mind as this could be done can very quickly become, in somebody else’s mind, this needs to be done, and the emotional difference between those two positions is enormous.
Unbeknown to me, Mitch is not feeling well, and what I had casually interpreted throughout the day as nothing more than the natural pauses of physical work was something far more significant. He had taken multiple breaks, moments that should perhaps have prompted more curiosity from me than they did, but enthusiasm has a remarkable ability to narrow perception when the day seems otherwise productive. Apparently he is heading to Orange on Tuesday for a CT scan, a multi-hour round trip not undertaken for convenience, nor idle curiosity, but because something sufficiently concerning sits in the background requiring investigation. Yet despite that reality, he continues to help, continues to locate equipment, continues to participate in a project that, if absolute honesty is applied, had no urgent deadline attached to it whatsoever.
That is where the bitterness begins to creep in, not because the work itself is problematic, but because the context changes the emotional equation entirely.
Productive people, particularly men of a certain generation, are hardwired to keep moving when there is a task in front of them, often without stopping to properly assess whether movement is actually necessary. Something needs lifting, shifting, fixing, locating, or assembling, and the default response is action rather than reflection. I understand that instinct intimately because I have lived inside it for decades. What unsettles me here is the subtle transformation of optional activity into perceived necessity simply because Trevor and I have turned up with intent, energy, and the visible expectation that progress is about to occur.
Had we not been there, nothing remotely disastrous would have unfolded, because the cradle would still have existed tomorrow, the logs would not have mysteriously disappeared into the night, and the concept of a sample cut would have remained available at any future time common sense might have suggested. There was no timber emergency unfolding in regional New South Wales. No Men’s Shed crisis meeting waiting on our engineering brilliance. No deadline other than the entirely artificial one created by our own enthusiasm and physical presence.
Decent people, however, have an unfortunate tendency to manufacture obligation where no objective obligation exists, particularly when others are standing in front of them waiting for momentum to continue.
I suspect Mitch is exactly that sort of person, because our arrival likely altered the internal calculation without any of us consciously acknowledging it. What might otherwise have been measured against his health, energy, and capacity to simply say not today instead became something to be pushed through because the social equation had shifted. “The blokes are here now”, is a deceptively powerful sentence, even when it is never actually spoken aloud. It carries with it a sense of expectation, responsibility, and that peculiar Australian male instinct not to let others down, even when common sense might suggest preserving your own wellbeing should take precedence.
That is what sits so badly with me, because practical success achieved at someone else’s quiet expense never tastes quite as satisfying once the context becomes clear.
People like Mitch rarely complain in the moment, largely because complaint feels foreign to the way they are built. They take a breather, gather themselves, wave off concern, and return to the work because that is what capable, practical men have trained themselves to do over a lifetime. It is only later, once additional information catches up with events, that the shape of the day begins to look rather different. Satisfaction gives way to self-examination, and the questions arrive with irritating clarity.
Should I have noticed more? Should I have asked better questions? Should I have recognised that repeated pauses might represent more than ordinary fatigue? Those questions are, of course, wonderfully convenient after the fact, when the work is done and introspection costs nothing.
Then comes the beer, that simple Australian full stop at the end of physical labour, less about alcohol and more about symbolism, gratitude, and shared decompression after effort. Offering a beer is not really about the drink. It is shorthand for thanks, mate, for recognition, for camaraderie, for the shared understanding that work has been done and effort acknowledged. Yet when Mitch refuses even that modest gesture, declining quietly rather than dramatically, the emotional tone of the afternoon shifts in an instant.
What had earlier felt like shared productivity suddenly risks feeling uncomfortably like extraction, because here is a man not feeling well, carrying the uncertainty of an upcoming CT scan, still helping with my projects, still pushing through because circumstances have subtly suggested that is what decent people do, and when the symbolic thank you arrives, he has nothing left even for that small ritual of mateship.
What lingers with me is not the timber, nor the cradle, nor the imagined Men’s Shed projects that may eventually emerge from the day’s efforts, but the uneasy recognition that enthusiasm, however well intentioned, can sometimes quietly rob another person of their right to preserve choice. The most dangerous obligations are often not the ones imposed by force or demand, but the ones created by expectation, assumption, and the silent belief that because something can be done, it somehow must be done.
Trevor and I take a last chore before retiring, we realign the driving lights. For too long they have been ineffective as a tool to brighten the road and need adjustment. There is also an issue with one of the fog lights, but its loose fitting is unable to be sourced and fixed with the tools we have available.
The day ends with another “simple” repast, the sort of meal rustled together not from some glossy cookbook interpretation of hospitality, but from the far more authentic realm of what my aunt and uncle like to provide. There is no pretence in it, no carefully arranged plating designed for admiration, no performative flourish intended to impress imaginary judges armed with scoring paddles and opinions about reduction sauces. There is simply food, prepared in the way they know, offered in the spirit they understand, and placed on the table because that is what decent people do when others are under their roof.
The meat, in this case chicken legs, are cooked with the sort of thoroughness that suggests any microscopic lifeform contemplating survival had its ambitions comprehensively extinguished somewhere around an hour earlier. By certain contemporary culinary standards, where some chefs seem to regard heat as a passing acquaintance rather than a meaningful relationship, such poultry might be viewed with suspicion. Yet no one complains, nor should they, because to do so would entirely misunderstand what is actually being offered, which is not merely food, but care in its most practical form.
Hospitality has never been a technical exercise where outcomes are judged against some universal benchmark of perfection, although modern life increasingly seems to encourage precisely that sort of nonsense. Somewhere along the line, people began confusing personal preference with objective truth. Their version of normal became, in their minds, the accepted global standard against which everything else should be measured. Chicken should be cooked this way. Vegetables should retain that degree of firmness. Gravy should possess some exact consistency apparently agreed upon by an invisible international panel of culinary experts. Anything outside those definitions becomes, to them, evidence of failure rather than simply difference.
The arrogance of that sort of thinking becomes rather extraordinary once you stop long enough to properly examine it, because normal is one of the most deceptive words in the English language. It pretends to describe objective fact when more often it is merely autobiography dressed up as certainty. What is perfectly normal in one household is utterly foreign in another. Some families cook meat until it appears to have signed a formal surrender document. Others serve it in a state suggesting it merely had a stern conversation with a source of heat before arriving at the plate. Some believe vegetables should retain enough crunch to remind you they were recently in a paddock. Others favour a softness indicating complete capitulation occurred well before serving time. None of these approaches are inherently right or wrong. They are simply familiar to the people doing them.
That, I suspect, is where so much unnecessary criticism is born, because familiarity has an unfortunate habit of masquerading as authority. We become so comfortable with our own patterns that we begin to assume they represent correctness, rather than merely habit. The person who criticises lovingly offered food because it does not align with their own domestic standard is not displaying discernment. They are revealing a remarkable failure of perspective, because they have become so focused on execution that they entirely miss intention.
A meal provided in love occupies an entirely different category from a meal purchased in a restaurant, ordered from a menu, or assessed as a commercial transaction. The plate in front of you is not simply a delivery system for calories. It is affection made practical. It is generosity translated into something warm and filling. It is the unspoken declaration that somebody thought enough of your presence to spend time, effort, ingredients, and energy ensuring you would not go hungry. To sit in judgement over moisture levels or seasoning as though you are some suburban incarnation of a celebrity chef is to fundamentally misunderstand the exchange.
The old adage about never looking a gift horse in the mouth survives because it captures exactly this truth. A gift is not diminished because it arrives in wrapping paper you would not personally have chosen, nor does generosity become invalid because it takes a form different from your own preferences. The value lies in the act itself, in the thought behind it, in the intention that prompted it to exist at all. Complaining about such things feels akin to receiving a handwritten birthday card and criticising the handwriting. Technically possible, certainly, but socially tone-deaf to the point of absurdity.
So yes, the chicken may have been cooked with an enthusiasm that rendered tenderness something of a nostalgic concept. That is hardly the point, because what arrived at the table was something infinitely richer than culinary perfection. It was familiarity, effort, generosity, and that wonderfully uncomplicated rural form of hospitality where affection is rarely spoken aloud, but regularly appears in practical form on a dinner plate. If someone cannot recognise the difference between a lovingly offered meal and a technical cooking assessment, then the deficiency is unlikely to be found in the kitchen.
So what did we achieve today? On the surface, not much really, although that depends entirely on which truth you choose to examine. Facts are wonderfully obedient little things, sitting exactly where they are placed and capable of being arranged to support almost any conclusion the storyteller wishes to draw. Yes, we fished. Yes, we collected wood. Yes, there was movement, effort, laughter, practical outcomes, and enough physical exertion to justify the occasional involuntary groan when rising from a chair. By the measurable standards of a day not wasted, there is a perfectly respectable argument to suggest we could pack the car in the morning, head home, and confidently declare the trip an unqualified success, with the evidence neatly stacked to support the claim.
And factually, nobody could mount much of an argument against that conclusion, because the facts themselves are not in dispute. The rods were cast, the timber was collected, the conversations happened, the kilometres were travelled, and the day was filled with enough activity to make idleness an impossible accusation. If one were preparing a witness statement for the defence of productive use of time, the case would be compelling enough to secure an easy acquittal.
But facts and truth are not always close relatives, and that distinction becomes increasingly fascinating the older one gets. The observable face of an action and its underlying meaning are often only loosely acquainted, despite our tendency to assume otherwise. Two people can look at precisely the same day and arrive at entirely different conclusions depending on whether they are counting visible activity or attempting to interpret underlying intent. From one angle, this has been a productive country escape filled with companionship, practical accomplishment, and enough anecdotal material to justify the diesel consumed getting here. From another, it has been an elaborate choreography of perfectly legitimate distraction, a dance of movement perhaps less concerned with solving anything than with avoiding prolonged eye contact with the thing that actually brought us here.
Because activity can be a magnificent disguise, and humans are remarkably talented at confusing motion with progress. Movement feels reassuring. If things are happening, then surely something meaningful must be occurring. Timber is being loaded. Fishing rods are being cast. Meals are being shared. Conversations are unfolding. Plans are being imagined. Bodies are moving through space with apparent purpose. The visual evidence suggests productivity, and visual evidence is seductive because it appears measurable, objective, and somehow immune from emotional interpretation.
Undertone, however, asks rather less comfortable questions, because undertone is interested not in what happened, but in what those happenings actually meant. Why are we really here? What conversation remains stubbornly untouched despite all the perfectly acceptable distractions? What truth sits quietly in the corner while everyone politely rearranges practical activity around it? Sometimes the face of action is little more than camouflage. The fishing happened. The wood collection was entirely real. The laughter was genuine enough. Yet none of those facts automatically mean the emotional objective of the trip has shifted even slightly closer to resolution.
That is where truth becomes far slipperier than fact, because fact says we spent the day doing things, while truth asks whether any of those things mattered to the actual purpose of being here. Those are not remotely the same question, although we often behave as though they are because facts are easy to catalogue while truth requires interpretation, and interpretation carries the uncomfortable risk of emotional honesty. It is far simpler to point at visible achievement than to interrogate invisible intent.
It reminds me of business meetings attended over decades where everyone leaves visibly exhausted, having discussed budgets, staffing, workflow, software, opportunities, risks, and a dozen other entirely relevant matters, only for somebody to quietly realise the actual issue requiring resolution was never once directly addressed. The meeting occurred. The agenda was full. Time was consumed. Facts confirm productivity beyond question. Truth, meanwhile, sits in the corner with a raised eyebrow, unimpressed by the theatre of movement.
Life is often alarmingly similar, particularly when the issues carrying emotional weight are the ones least likely to be confronted head-on. Fishing is easier than vulnerability. Timber is easier than difficult conversation. Shared activity provides companionship without necessarily demanding emotional exposure, which is perhaps why men have long perfected the art of existing side by side in meaningful proximity while discussing everything except the thing that actually matters. Talking while doing has always felt safer than talking while sitting still, because stillness tends to create space for honesty, and honesty can be an inconvenient travelling companion.
Perhaps, of course, that is not evidence of failure at all, but part of the mechanism itself. Maybe the ancillary activities are not distractions, but emotional scaffolding designed to eventually support the real conversation. Men have long mastered the art of saying important things while ostensibly discussing something entirely unrelated. A conversation about timber dimensions can quietly become a conversation about ageing. A fishing trip can morph into grief therapy with bait attached. Shared labour can create emotional safety in ways a formal sit-down discussion across a table with uninterrupted eye contact never could. Perhaps the purpose is not to confront the issue directly, but to allow it to emerge naturally through the rhythm of ordinary things.
Or perhaps that interpretation is simply a generous rebranding of collective avoidance, because viewed less romantically, it remains entirely possible we have spent the day beautifully circling the issue without ever meaningfully approaching it. That is the maddening thing about truth and perception. Facts offer comfort because they are tangible, visible, and easy to defend. Undertones are elusive because they require interpretation, and interpretation is inevitably coloured by what we hope, fear, suspect, or quietly wish to avoid acknowledging.
So yes, we achieved things today, and the ledger of visible accomplishment is respectable enough to justify satisfaction. Whether we achieved the thing remains a very different question entirely, and one far less comfortably answered by counting fishing casts and trailer loads of timber.
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