Going Back to the Wardrobe

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Everything.

This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

As always, thanks for being here.

Whether this is your first week or your hundredth, I appreciate you making time to add a little optimism to your life.

This week’s edition is a love letter to reading for fun.

The books that swallowed up whole afternoons when we were kids, but also the ones waiting patiently on the shelf for us to pick them up.

We look at why I, and many others, stopped reading for pleasure, along with what the research indicates we gain by resuming the habit.

Sticking with the theme, I recommend a novel that sat on my list for more than twenty years before I finally read it.

We also meet an 80-year-old farmer with a massive heart and an abundance of pumpkins, and we explore why sometimes being the weakest in the room can be a good thing.

So grab your cuppa and settle in ☕️

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

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Many of us remember the feeling.

Lying on the bed, a book propped on your chest, completely absorbed in a story and lost in another world.

Someone calls out your name for dinner and you don't hear it.

Or you do, and you pretend you don't, because you need to know what happens next.

During these moments time didn't pass so much as it disappeared completely.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us have lost that, myself included.

We still read.

Self help, textbooks, emails, reports, articles, the news.

The endless pursuit to stay informed.

But reading purely for the joy of it?

For many adults, that has slowly slipped away as the black mirrors in our hands became more powerful and many never noticed it leave.

As a kid growing up in Australia, books were my escape hatch.

Throughout my early teens, I devoured Stephen King novels.

I recieved a box set of classic novels like Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe one Christmas that I devoured before the turn of the New Year.

I walked through the wardrobe into Narnia more times than I can count and I collected Choose Your Own Adventure books treating them like they were treasure.

If you've never read one, the concept is both simple and brilliant.

At the bottom of the page you have to make a decision.

Turn to page 42 to open the door.

Or turn to page 67 to run.

You were the hero, and the story bent itself to align with the choices you made.

I'd reach an unsatisfying ending, then flip back to my thumb which was still holding the page, and try again.

I read them because I loved where my mind would take me.

I read them over and over, learning that stories can have a variety of endings depending on the choices we make.

Then I grew up.

As a young adult, my studies took over and my approach to reading began to change shape.

It became something I did to learn.

To get ahead.

To know and understand more.

I don't regret that for a second.

Reading to grow my knowledge has shaped my outlook, my career and so much of how I think.

I’ve read countless works in the realms of psychology and behavioural science, and a lot of what you read in this newsletter stems from those learnings.

What I do regret, is letting the balance tip too far in one direction.

Every book needed a purpose.

Every page needed to pay me back with something useful.

And without ever consciously deciding to, I read less for fun.

Reading purely for fun took a back seat to all other aspects of life.

I still enjoyed it and I still wanted to do it, I just told myself I didn't have the time.

Silly sausage.

I'm not alone in drifting away.

A study from the University of Florida and University College London analysed more than 236,000 Americans over twenty years.

Between 2003 and 2023, the share of people reading for pleasure on any given day fell by more than 40%.

In the U.K., regular reading has also slipped.

It’d be easy to shrug that off as just another casualty of screens but a new review published in Psychological Medicine suggests we shouldn’t be so quick to do so.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, and her colleague Dr Christelle Langley looked at the research on reading for pleasure across every stage of life.

In a study of more than 10,000 children in the U.S., kids who read for pleasure early had better attention, memory and academic results later on.

They showed fewer mental health problems, slept more and spent less time on screens, whatever the background of their family.

And adults who read?

They reported feeling less lonely and more empathetic.

For older adults, the findings are even more striking.

A study in Taiwan followed people aged 64 and over for 14 years.

Those who read just once a week had a significantly lower risk of cognitive decline, no matter their level of education.

And a Yale study of 3,600 adults over 50 found that book readers lived almost two years longer, on average, than non-readers.

Two years.

The quote above is from George R.R Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series, from his book A Dance with Dragons.

I’ve seen it shared so often that it’s super easy to see it, nod along and scroll past.

I think it deserves a closer look.

Each of us gets one life.

One set of eyes.

One childhood.

One family, one hometown, one run of lucky breaks and hard knocks.

Everything we believe about the world is filtered through that single lens, and that lens is narrower than we think.

Travelling through and exploring other cultures shined a beaming light on that for me.

I learned that my normal isn’t THE normal.

So many things I'd assumed were how the world worked turned out to be simply how my corner of the world worked.

Reflections of my own limited experience.

Travel, and more specifically curiosity, widens that lens.

So do conversations with people who've lived differently.

Books offer the same experience, without the need to purchase a plane ticket.

Keith Oatley, a psychologist and novelist at the University of Toronto, has spent decades studying what fiction does to us.

He cleverly compares it to a pilot’s training.

If you're learning to fly, it's a good idea to spend time in a flight simulator.

Fiction, he argues, is a simulator for the social world, letting us rehearse being someone else, facing choices we've never faced and carrying consequences we'll never live through.

It makes perfect sense, and the research backs him up.

In one study from his team, people who read mostly fiction were noticeably better than mostly non-fiction readers at recognising what others were feeling just by looking at their eyes.

Researchers at Emory University scanned people's brains while they read a novel over several nights.

The changes in connectivity lingered for days after the last page was read, as though their brains had been there.

That's what the concept of a thousand lives looks like.

Every novel hands you another set of eyes for a period of time.

When you give them back, you keep a little of what you saw.

There's a reason that matters today.

In Hope for Cynics, a book I recently read and recommended in this newsletter, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki outlines how cynicism shrinks our view of people.

We assume the worst, stop trusting, and stop looking closely enough to be proven wrong.

Then we actively look for the actions and behaviours that support our cynical view.

Stories work in the opposite direction.

They ask you to look closely, and to understand WHY someone did what they did before you decide what YOU think of them.

I've written many times about choosing curiosity over judgement and reading fiction might be the most enjoyable practice to train this muscle I've found.

A person who never reads lives only one life.

They also see everyone else through that one lens of life.

Something else Sahakian said resonated with me.

She astutely compares reading to mindfulness.

When you're absorbed in a story, your attention sits on the page and leaves everything else that’s competing for it.

The worries about tomorrow, the endless scroll, the unanswered messages, the endless mental to-do list.

They all go quiet, for a little while.

The Cambridge team also points to research showing that a few minutes of fiction can meaningfully lower stress, and that more people now turn to a book for comfort than to a glass of wine.

When boredom strikes, our hands tend to reach for our phones the moment there's a pause.

Because a phone fills the gap.

Simply having a book close by gives you somewhere else to go.

A few years ago, I started finding my way back.

There was no big moment or a particular book that fell off a shelf and changed everything for me.

It was nothing more than the realisation that I had the time.

I'd always had the time.

I'd just been handing that time to everything else first.

Once I carved out space specifically for reading, the story I'd been telling myself fell apart, and the rewards turned out to be so much greater than the minutes it cost.

So I made a simple change.

I started rotating between a non-fiction book and a fiction book.

One to learn.

Then one to wander (and wonder).

The factual, followed by the fantastical.

It sounds simple and that’s because it is.

It’s had a greater impact than anything else I've added to my regular routine.

I've noticed it most clearly within my focus.

Sitting with a novel for thirty minutes has rebuilt the patience my attention had been losing.

Sorry, no let’s be honest here, it rebuilt the patience that I’d lost.

I've also noticed it in my thinking.

Ideas from a novel would collide with something from non-fiction book I’d read earlier, and I'll approach problems from angles I wouldn't have found otherwise.

The last three books I’ve read provide a good example of that range.

Zaki's Hope for Cynics sat in the middle.

Either side of it, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

A father and son walking through an apocalyptic burnt-out world, holding on to each other and focused purely on their survival, making decisions I wouldn’t in my current state of mind, but faced with theirs, I absolutely see their rationale.

A barefoot boy growing up on the Mississippi, conning his friends into whitewashing a fence, taking risks and finding fun in ways that, while very different, reminded me of my days growing up in regional Australia.

Two lives I'll never live, and both of them left something behind for me to carry forward with me.

Now I read every day without fail.

I look forward to it the same way I did as a kid.

And best of all, I tend to pick up the book before I pick up the phone.

As a kid, I read my favourite books so many times the spines gave out.

I'm rereading again now, and something happens now in my forties that never happened at fourteen.

While the books haven't changed a single word.

I have.

The first time through a story, naturally I read it as the kid.

I was the one on the adventure, and the adults were background, there to set the rules and get in the way.

Now I notice the adults.

As a parent, I feel the worry that sits underneath each scene where a child wanders off.

As a husband, I pick up on the subtle compromises two people make to keep their life running smoothly.

As a grown son, I read the mums and dads in these stories with far more grace than I did back then.

Take Tom Sawyer.

Read it at twelve and Tom is a hero, outsmarting every grown-up in town.

Read it as a parent and you find yourself siding with Aunt Polly, the woman trying to raise a boy who won't stay put.

Same story.

Different perspective.

Researchers Cristel Russell and Sidney Levy interviewed people about why they reread books, rewatch films and revisit places.

Those readers came away with a deeper understanding of the book, and a clearer picture of how much they had grown.

A book you read years ago acts like a pencil mark we draw on the doorframe to measure our kids height.

You come back to it, stand in the same spot and see how far you've come.

While those thousand lives let you visit everyone else’s perspective.

Rereading lets you visit your own.

If reading for pleasure has drifted out of your life, getting it back doesn't take much more than commitment.

Try a rotation: If you're wired for non-fiction like I was, alternate. You keep learning AND you get to play. I now really look forward to reading fiction once again.

Keep your book where your phone lives: The nightstand, the kitchen bench, the bag you carry every day. Make it visible and accessible.

Give yourself permission to read something just because you want to: A thriller, a fantasy series, a romance, a book you loved at fourteen. Whatever pulls you in counts and the lessons will come anyway.

Start smaller than you think: Ten pages before bed is a great start, but the research on older adults shows benefits from reading just once a week. A 10 minute commitment tends to extend well beyond.

Reread an old favourite: Pick something you loved as a kid and read it again as the person you are now. You'll be surprised by what's waiting for you on the other side.

Hit up your local library: Most people forget it's even there. Physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, all free. Put a hold on the one you want and they'll email you when it's ready.

For too long, I believed reading had to earn its place in my life.

If a book wasn't making me smarter or better at something, it felt like time I should be spending elsewhere.

I had it backwards.

So backwards.

The books I now read for joy have given me back things I didn't know I'd lost.

Focus.

Calm.

Creativity.

And most powerfully, a much wider view of the people I share this world with

Along with a sense of wonder that is reaching levels I last felt as a teenager.

That kid didn't need a reason to read, he just wanted to go somewhere and I'm so grateful I found my way back to him.

So here's my invitation 📩

Tonight, before you reach for your phone, reach for a book instead.

Choose your own adventure.

And see where where the story takes you.

If you have six minutes, check out Lisa Bu's talk on "How books can open your mind.” Lisa grew up in China with a dream that was taken from her before she could chase it. Books were what she turned to, and they handed her perspectives she'd never have reached on her own. A beautiful example of what a book can do when you let it in.

Watch it here:

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🐦 Researchers Asked People to Rate Birdsong, and One Bird Came Out on Top - The common blackbird came out on top with an average of 4.52 out of 5, and the researchers behind the survey are now working out why certain birds land so easily on the human ear while others simply pass us by. Read more → (CTV News)

🌿 Medieval Doctors Prescribed Gardens, Music and Good Company for a Heavy Mind - Historian Katherine Harvey opens the medical cabinet of the Middle Ages and finds saffron and ostrich liver sitting alongside advice that sounds startlingly current — walk, garden, keep animals, listen to music, and stay among people who care for you. Read more → (Aeon)

🏙️ After Decades at the Top, Tokyo Is No Longer the Biggest City on Earth - The UN’s latest count puts Jakarta first with nearly 42 million people and Dhaka second, and this run through all 50 of the world’s largest cities gives each one a photograph and a single detail worth knowing — Dhaka’s hundreds of thousands of hand-painted rickshaws among them. Read more → (Moss and Fog)

🎨 A Dutch Museum Has Hung All 88 of Its Van Goghs at Once, for the First Time in Over Twenty Years - The Kröller-Müller normally has wall space for about half of them, so it has brought the rest out of storage and hung the lot not by date but around faith, hope and love, including a landscape too fragile to have been shown for more than twenty years. Van Gogh, All Our Paintings runs until 3 January 2027. Read more → (The Art Newspaper)

Mention the Whitsundays and most will envision a picture-perfect-postcard.

The pure white sand, gorgeous blue waters and boats departing Airlie Beach for the reef.

Turn inland though, and the landscape changes fast.

This is sugar cane country.

Paddocks running flat to the ranges, roads cut dead straight between two green walls of cane.

Out at Kelsey Creek, fourteen kilometres southwest of Proserpine, there’s a farm that’s been in the same family since 1918.

Twice a week an old ute (an Aussie term for a pickup) leaves the gates of that same farm carrying a tonne of pumpkins.

The man driving it is eighty years old and fully committed to giving every single one of them away.

He doesn't have a clue how many he's distributed over the years.

"Couldn't even guess. A couple of thousand?”

Darcy Emmerson spent his entire working life growing sugar cane.

Now, with the help of an eighty-six-year-old mate, he grows bugle, butternut and kent pumpkins in the mill mud that the crops leave behind.

The waste that’s left behind from one season nourishing the next.

Beautiful.

The drop-off route he takes will tell you more of the story than Darcy himself ever will.

He visits Meals on Wheels.

Then the Proserpine Community Centre.

The library.

The Endeavour Foundation at Cannonvale.

Respite centres, churches, daycare centres, doctors' surgeries and businesses throughout both Proserpine and Airlie Beach.

At Meals on Wheels he actively picks out the biggest pumpkins on purpose.

"I try and get them big ones, so they can cut the whole thing up. That way it goes a bit further."

Picture an old man standing in his own paddock, pondering the size of somebody else's saucepan.

Nobody would know if he didn’t, but he still does.

Nobody organised the events that happened next.

A local sign-writer saw Darcy's handwritten pumpkin sign and decided to make him a proper one.

Then, someone left a cargo net on his ute so the pumpkins would stop bouncing onto the road.

Interestingly, he still doesn't know who.

A nearby restaurant put Darcy's Pumpkin Soup on their menu.

At the community centre, other people started leaving their own produce on the way out.

Ashley Gunn, who works there, says it now runs as a give-and-take with zero judgement.

You come in for a pumpkin, you come back next week with the tomatoes you couldn't use.

And the cherry on top?

A local mother, Leah Warren, is now writing a children's book about Darcy.

None of this was planned, just a shining example of the way kindness can ripple through a community.

Inspiring others to contribute in their own unique ways.

I spent many of my summers as a kid visiting my dad in Queensland.

Some afternoons we'd arrive home after he'd spent the day spraying crops from the skies and we'd know before we reached the door.

A thick and tropical scent cutting through the humid summer air.

Mangoes.

A whole box of them, sitting on the front step.

They came from his farmer mates, squaring up a favour he'd done them at some point.

That was the unspoken system.

You did something for someone, and now and then a box of joy turned up on your step.

As a young teenager at the time, I didn't give it a second thought.

Immediately slicing one and gorging on its deliciousness.

That you-look-after-me-and-I'll-look-after-you way of doing things runs deep in great communities and it deserves so much more than being filed away as quaint.

People like Darcy are everywhere, you just have to pay attention.

There are undeniably kind and generous people all around us.

Left to themselves, people are decent to each other in ways that will never make the news.

Well, until Darcy, that is.

This is where the ripple effect of kindness surfaces even further.

Darcy has lived in the same region his entire life, yet there was one place he had never visited.

"When I stuck my head into that respite centre one day, I couldn't believe it. It was chock-a-block."

"I didn't realise … there's so many disabled people around. I didn't realise how many."

"I'm gonna get a tear in my eye every time I go there."

Chock-a-block (Australian term): the point past "full" where you stop pretending anything else will fit.

He's still finding out what's in his own town.

Something he discovered because he showed up with a pumpkin and decided to walk in the door.

I keep coming back to that aspect, that it was kindness that got him through the door.

You can live ten minutes from a lesson like that your whole life and never truly see it.

Darcy would hate being called a hero, so I won't.

He'd tell you it's a gift for people, that he's got enough to live on, and that he feels like he should help where he can.

So should anyone who has what many don’t.

Enough.

That's his reasoning, offered like it's the plainest thing going.

What gets me is how cheap it was to make happen.

It’s defintely not free, as he clearly does both the growing and the driving himself.

But there was no initial plan or strategy other than his desire to help others.

He had a surplus of pumpkins and he chose to hand them out.

Most of us are waiting until we can afford to be generous.

Waiting for spare money, or the right cause.

Darcy had pumpkins.

And he's already worked out what happens when he can no longer complete the run.

"That's OK. Craig will do it."

Craig's his son.

Eighty years old, a tonne of pumpkins twice a week, and a son who learned about kindness in the most powerful way.

Through watching Darcy lead by example.

Some books take their time finding you, this one took me more than twenty years.

When I was 22 or 23, I worked concierge desk at a boutique hotel in London, UK.

Around 2002, from memory, Jonathan Franzen stayed at our hotel.

The Corrections had been successfully released in the US the previous fall and even won the National Book Award.

He’d come to London on the press tour for the book.

I remember meeting him, chatting briefly upon his arrival, and then a few more interactions throughout his stay, lovely fellow.

Since then, his name and the title of the book have stuck with me.

A few months back I came across it again, vividly remembered his stay in London, and picked it up.

I’m glad I did, because t's outstanding.

The Corrections follows the Lamberts, a family from the fictional Midwestern town of St. Jude.

Alfred, the father, is a retired railway engineer whose mind and body are starting to fail him.

Enid, his wife, wants the whole family home for one last Christmas.

Their three adult children, though, they’d rather be pretty much anywhere else.

Gary, a successful banker in Philadelphia, won't admit he's depressed.

Chip has lost his university job and ends up in Lithuania, mixed up in a dodgy internet scheme.

Denise, the youngest, can run a busy restaurant kitchen in style, but not her own private life.

For me, it was a look behind the curtain at the type of American family, I've only ever seen from the outside.

Everyone at the Lambert table is carrying something they'd never say out loud.

Franzen spends over five hundred pages letting you find out what.

It’s eye-opening to say the least.

I love the way Franzen tells the story, with the novel bouncing back and forth in time.

Each section follows one member of the family, and just when you think you've got the measure of them, he takes you back decades to add a little context.

One flashback has a young Chip at the dinner table with a plate of liver and rutabaga going cold in front of him.

Alfred won't back down, so Chip sits there on his own long after everyone else has gone.

Those pages tell us more about a father and son than any shouting match could.

Franzen builds each character that way, until you as an outside observer know the Lamberts better than they know each other.

Which doesn't mean you'll actually like them.

Most of the time, I couldn't stand them.

They made choice after choice that I'd never make myself.

I couldn't put it down, though.

It's a human story, almost too human.

In saying that, having a window into how people so unlike me see the world turned out to be the best part.

Providing a perspective I’d never reach on my own.

What surprised me most, though, reading it twenty years later, is how well this novel has aged.

Franzen wrote it as the late-'90s boom was peaking.

Gary desperate to get in early on a hot biotech stock.

Alfred spent his whole working life on the railways, the kind of solid, old-school industry that was already on its way out.

Reading it now, long after 2008.

It feels like a warning.

The people closest to us have chapters we've never read: Parents especially. Get curious and ask them about their lives before you came along. Assumptions will only allow you to create your own story.

Have the hard conversation sooner: Effective communication is the heartbeat of a family, and the Lamberts could’ve spared themselves years of grief with a few honest words at the dinner table.

At 22, standing behind that hotel desk, I could have asked Jonathan Franzen anything I wanted to about this book.

At the time I didn't know enough to ask.

Reading it now, as a husband and a dad, I found myself spending as much time with Alfred and Enid as with their kids.

The younger me would have read a completely different version of events.

It's well worth a read, especially if you like a story that takes its time and trusts you to keep up.

There are some novels you should read the week they come out.

This one was better for waiting until I had a family of my own.

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

None of us want to be the weakest, or the least informed, or the most vulnerable person in any situation.

Some take it even further and structure their lives specifically to steer clear of these moments.

You know, taking the class you’re already good at or sticking with the job you could do in your sleep.

No shame in that, being out of our depth can feel uncomfortable.

But, think back to the last time you were actually the slowest (or the least experienced) person present, a time when it genuinely mattered that you try your best.

You tend to find a gear you didn't know you had.

You weren't the one who put it there.

The company you were keeping dug it out of you.

In 1926, a German industrial psychologist called Otto Köhler turned up at a rowing club in Berlin with an odd little test.

He had the oarsmen stand and curl a heavy bar, around 44 kilograms, until their arms gave out.

First on their own.

Then in pairs, then threes, sharing a single bar loaded to twice or three times the weight.

Now, the setup is the clever part.

In the group version, the moment one man stopped, everybody stopped.

Each man's arms became the floor the others stood on.

Rowers know this feeling already.

A boat moves at the speed the crew can hold, and everybody involved is aware who's fading.

The groups lasted longer than their weakest member had lasted alone.

The gain was biggest though, when the gap between the men was small, but real.

Close enough that a weaker one might believe he was a chance and could hang on.

Psychologists now call this the Köhler effect.

Usually, as a group enlarges, each person pulls a little less hard.

Köhler spotted what flips the script.

When you make the weakest link decide the outcome?

The weakest link will often find something extra.

The reasons this happens are likely the ones you'd guess.

Because nobody wants to be the first one to give up.

It’s the arms holding up others that are the last ones to give out.

Be the worst at something this week: Put yourself out there and remember that every masterpiece starts as a draft. Join a run group that's a little too quick for you, it’s that flicker of discomfort as you arrive that does real work.

Give someone a job nobody else can cover: "Have a look at this when you get a chance” may invite a shrug but “We can’t move forward until your part is done" doesn't.

When you're the strongest one, stay in the boat: The person behind you has to see the pace and believe it's reachable. Pull too far ahead and all you are is distant scenery.

I know this feeling well from the other side.

When I'm competing in anything and the gap becomes wide in either direction, I tend to drift.

When it's tight, when someone’s right beside me matching my stride, I reach for something I'd never reach for alone.

I've come to love that.

A great competitor sets a pace that unveils a part of you you'd never meet on your own.

We're all capable of more than we think, I'm certain of that.

The trouble is, you can't always prove it to yourself.

Sit in the middle of a group that doesn't need much from you, and they’ll rarely ever ask you for more.

So, choose to stand somewhere that you're not the strongest.

Somewhere that the pace is a bit quick for you, or the topic is completely fresh, and suddenly, others are relying on you to hold your end up.

Is it hard? Yes.

Is it worth it? Yes.

Go and meet the rest of yourself.

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