The In-Between

Back in Bali, ten years on

Apr 01, 2026

The first thing I feel is the humidity. It clings. Not quite hot yoga. But just enough to remind me I’m not in control of the tempo here.

I'm in Umalas — a place that used to feel like a quiet edge of the island, where I was one of a few foreigners. Today, it spills over with nomad cafés and gymfluencers documenting their morning routines. The rice fields are breakfast joints now, each serving its version of smashed avocado. I've indulged in most of them. But the ocean still moves the same way.

I lost my flip-flops yesterday. Again. It's how I know I've arrived.

Life is funny like that. Same island. Same me. Different story.

The Last Time

I spent twelve years in London. It gave me a lot, until it didn’t.

Burnout has a quiet way of arriving. Not all at once, but slowly enough that one day you realise the thing that used to energise you is now draining you. I went back to school. Rebuilt myself through work, relationships, and stubbornness. I’d tried to reinvent myself without leaving — same city, new chapter. It wasn’t enough.

I needed a scene change. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. What I really needed was a different relationship with time.

The Balinese have a phrase: Jam Karet — rubber time. Time that stretches, bends, refuses to behave like you’re used to. I first came here a decade ago to write a book about how work was changing. I swapped London Town bustle for expansive beaches, sunsets, surf, and jungle.

The story I was carrying was that I had it figured out. That the writing would come easily. That clarity would arrive on schedule.

It didn’t. The page stayed blank.

The Decade

Here’s what happened instead: I wrote. I got lost. I found my rhythm. I lost it again. I started coaching people through their own transitions, which felt absurd at the time, though maybe that was the point.

I kept moving. Japan. Portugal. South America — a dozen other places I couldn’t have predicted from that first flight. I surfed when things got loud. I ran when they got louder — sometimes towards my problems, sometimes away from them.

There were seasons of clarity, and seasons where nothing made sense at all. Relationships that formed me, and ones that cracked me open.

And through all of it, I kept writing. Asking better questions.

Writing became the bridge. That process became my first book, Shapers. Reinventing the way I worked was the medicine I needed at the time. It was published during the peak of the pandemic, when the world itself was being remade.

Book Two

This time, I’m not writing about work. I’m writing about what sits beneath it.

Identity. Connection. The invisible architectures that shape how we meet the world, and unravel.

Work doesn’t exist in isolation. It only makes sense in the context of a life. And life, at its core, is relational. We don’t remember people for what they produced. We remember them for how they made us feel.

This book is less about what we do. More about who we are while we're doing it.

We are always inside a story. A story about who we are, what we deserve, what’s possible, and what’s over. Transitions begin the moment a story stops working. Not always cleanly, and not necessarily all at once. But enough to know that you can’t keep living it the same way. Eventually, the next chapter starts asking to be written.

The gap — that in-between — is where most people rush. It’s also where most of the real work is done. The book is a relational field guide for the in-between — for not sprinting past the threshold, for sitting in liminality long enough to notice something profound.

The book project is structured in three parts: Endings, The In-Between, and New Beginnings. Here’s a snippet from the foreword:

Something happens. The mind makes a story. The story creates an emotion. The emotion lives in the body. The body drives action. The action reinforces the story.
Round and round we go.
Transitions themselves — the job loss, the breakup, the move, the burnout — are rarely what keeps you stuck. What keeps you stuck is the story the mind wraps around it. The one that says you should have known better. The one that says you should have seen it coming. The one that says this is proof of something you already suspected about yourself.
Viktor Frankl called it the space between stimulus and response. In that space, he said, lies our freedom.
This book is about finding that space — and staying in it long enough to choose differently.

I’ve been living this book for a decade — through heartbreaks and burnouts, career deaths and creative rebirths, and openings that arrived cleverly disguised as crises. The stories we tell ourselves in the middle of a transition will either keep us stuck or set us free.

I’ve seen both play out. In my own life, and in the lives of the people I work with. The same event, interpreted differently, can lead to completely different futures. Not because the circumstances change, but because the relationship to them does.

The impulse is to rush through transitions. The invitation is to stay in them.

Before I go

When I ask folks what they would do with an extra hour in their day, the answers often surprise them. Dancing. More time with their kids. A walk. Nothing at all.

Not more productivity. Just more presence.

That's what transitions tend to reveal. Not just what's changing, but what was always there, waiting to be noticed. Attending to what matters with the quiet awareness that it won't last forever.

If you were granted your own Jam Karet moment (time that bends in your favour), what would you stop rushing toward? What might you loosen your grip on? Where would you finally slow down?

I started writing to find my way.

Now I’m writing because I trust that something is already unfolding — and the work is to stay with it long enough to understand what it’s asking of me.

And maybe that’s true for you too.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?