I have been struggling with zazen recently. While I am still sitting, my real meditation these days is to visit a stream near my house nearly every day.

Since my last blog post, where I stated, ‘I’m not a morning person’ I’ve been trying to let go of the labels I’ve gathered and glued firmly to myself over the years. It’s taken me time to realise how unhelpful they are and this new blog post was supposed to focus on this very topic.

These were paradoxes: healthy, useful discussions where both sides of an ideological divide had a valid point and the country was better off when compromise landed in the middle.

I want to remind you who you are. Part energy, part matter. Part divine, part conventional. Part universal, part differentiated. Part interbeing with all of existence, part condensed into a seemingly separate self.

Last Christmas, my family and I were deeply ensconced in life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We decided to visit family in the U.K. for six weeks at the end of January. And here we are 11 months later still in the U.K. looking out of our window on a bleak midwinter scene of rain and bare trees in the City of Coventry, a place that we never had any intention of visiting, let alone living.

Have you heard it, too?  People are looking forward to getting back to normal. I smell a problem. You cannot “look forward” and “go back.”

If you had to sum up this year in one word, what would that word be? For me, based on what I keep bumping into regularly, that word would be ‘overwhelmed’. While the press often refer to the impact of these times as the worst in ‘peacetime’, these are not peaceful times.

Steve Jobs, Mu, Ma and Zen: Andy Robins explores something quite removed from the news of the day.

I write on the cusp of the biggest presidential election of my lifetime – and I’ve lived a long time.