The Motorcycle That Never Came

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! ☀️

This is the 100th edition 🥳

One hundred Sundays of greeting you here, in your inbox, and I don't take a single one of them for granted.

When I hit send on the very first edition, I was climbing out of some of the most challenging years of my life.

Then, just a few months later, I lost my Mum, well before her time was up.

I still find it challenging to find the right words for any of it.

What I do know is that I’ve come through it all still standing, and honestly, I’m not sure that would have been true a few years earlier.

If I hadn’t made some changes, that is.

My fascination with behavioural and neuroscience gave me a way to make sense of what was happening to me.

A dedication to grounded optimism kept me looking forward without pretending the pain wasn't real.

And the people around me, the ones I value more than I could ever put into words, carried me on the days I couldn't carry myself.

That's the whole reason this newsletter exists.

The storms of life will arrive whether we're ready for them or not, and everything I share here is what helped me through mine, in the hope it helps you through yours.

So thank you.

For opening these emails, for replying, for forwarding one to a friend who needed it.

You've turned a simple idea into something incredibly rewarding and I appreciate every one of you more than you know.

The world will always have it’s challenges, but it’s those who keep moving forward, seek solutions and lift others that stand tall through it all.

This week, we're rethinking the label of the midlife crisis and asking whether it really deserves the dread we hand it.

We start with the motorcycle I half-expected to own by 47, and the calm and purpose that arrived instead. We then meet Stephen Wiltshire, an artist who can draw entire cities from a single viewing and I recommend a new album that's settled into my days like an old friend.

Thanks once again for reading along, and here's to the next 100!☀

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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Growing up, my sister and I visted our dad in North Queenland for a few weeks every year.

One time, when he was in his mid-to-late forties, a new motorcycle had appeared at the hangar.

I don’t recall any mention of liking or wanting one, it was just there one day, parked off to the side of the planes, as if it always belonged.

My dad was a pilot, so the hangar was already full of fast machines that demanded respect.

The bike fit right in.

At the time I didn’t think much of it, other than thinking it was cool, but I was old enough to notice that something underneath had shifted.

For years I’ve half-expected my own version of that motorcycle to appear.

The thing that arrives uninvited somewhere in your forties to announce that a part of you has come loose.

I'm 47 now.

It hasn't come.

And the interesting part is why.

I've spent a good chunk of this year noticing that I've never felt better.

Clearer mind, healthier body, and far more focused and creative than I can remember being.

Also, most importantly, closer to my wife and my kids than I’ve ever been.

The drive is still there.

My work ethic hasn't gone anywhere.

What's missing is the restlessness that's supposed to arrive at some point this decade.

There's no itch to buy something loud to feel young again, and no panic that the good parts of life are behind me.

If anything, it feels like the good part finally has its footing.

The phrase midlife crisis is barely sixty years old.

It was coined in 1965 by a Canadian-born psychoanalyst named Elliott Jaques, in a paper called "Death and the Mid-Life Crisis."

He’d been studying the lives of great painters, writers and composers, and noticed a turn in their work around middle age as they began to reckon with their own mortality.

An interesting concept, but then human culture got hold of it.

Somewhere along it’s journey it shrank into a punchline.

Represented by the new red convertible or the sudden affair or the job you quit out of nowhere.

Be fed an image often enough and it starts to feel like a law of nature.

Then researchers went looking for the truth, and the picture actually changed.

Margie Lachman and her colleagues, working with the long-running Midlife in the United States study, reported that only around 10 to 20 percent of people experience anything resembling a classic midlife crisis.

When they narrowed it to the version pop culture sells us?

The number dropped to roughly 10 percent.

1 in 10 people.

Big difference to the story we’re fed.

Most middle-aged people, it turns out, describe their health as good, their relationships as steady and their lives as broadly satisfying.

We tend to brace for the crisis mainly because we were told to expect one.

When the truth is, if you remain honest with yourself, and take care of the one relationship that shapes all others?

This stretch of life has every chance of being the best of it.

There's a wrinkle here that I want to share because it nearly undid my own theory.

The economist David Blanchflower spent years tracking well-being across more than 140 countries, and he kept finding the same thing.

Happiness follows a gentle U curve through life.

High in youth, sloping down through the middle years, then climbing again into later life.

The lowest point of that curve in wealthy countries, on average, lands at 47.2 years of age.

I read that and laughed.

By the math, I am standing at the bottom of the well right now.

So why don't I feel like I am?

Part of the answer is in how the question gets asked.

A lot of the gloomier numbers come from comparing different people at different ages all at once.

Follow the same people across the years instead, and a more hopeful picture often appears.

The dip is real for plenty of people, I’m not questioning that, but it isn't a sentence we’re all issued.

Another thing to consider, is that there’s one thing that genuinely improves with the years.

The majority of us become steadier at handling our own ups and downs.

We stop treating every setback as a verdict on who we are.

By the time you've lived through a few real storms, you carry the knowledge that most of them pass.

That alone can remove the panic from a lot of bad days.

If I had to point to one thing behind how this decade feels, it wouldn't be money or status or anything I've achieved.

It's that I fully understand what makes me tick.

What energises me and what drains me.

Whose company leaves me lighter, and whose leaves me flat.

Which activities bring out my best, and I've learned to notice the ones that I need to step around before they cost me.

None of this came gift wrapped on a birthday but from paying attention across a looooong stretch of time.

The most powerful relationship any of us will ever have is the one we have with ourselves.

It's the only one running in the background of every other relationship we've got.

When that relationship is honest and steady, it tends to make everything downstream of it that much kinder and more harmonious.

When it's neglected though, that bill never goes unpaid.

It just gets forwarded to the people closest to you, often in ways none of you can trace back to the source.

A short temper that isn't really about your kids or jealousy that isn't really about your partner.

A dissatisfaction that buys a motorcycle because it can't find the words to explain what it actually wants.

This is also where the research on aging is surprisingly hopeful.

The psychologist Laura Carstensen has spent decades studying what she calls socioemotional selectivity.

As we sense our time growing more finite, our priorities shift.

We stop collecting people and start choosing them.

We invest in what carries meaning and let the rest fall away.

Her work also describes a positivity effect, a gentle tilt with age toward holding on to what's good rather than rehearsing what's wrong.

From the outside, it can look like your world is getting smaller.

From the inside, though, it feels like it's coming into focus.

Now, you might be reading this thinking, this is well and good Chris, for someone who's had years to figure this out but you don't feel anywhere near it.

This next part matters more than anything else above it.

You are not too late.

Not at 47, not at 57, not at 67.

For most of the last century, scientists believed that the adult brain was more or less set once you’ve finished growing up.

We now know that was wrong.

Researchers like Michael Merzenich have shown that the brain keeps rewiring itself well into adulthood.

Reshaping its own maps in response to what we repeatedly ask of it.

The catch lies in that word: repeatedly.

A mature brain can absolutely change, but it will need more reps than a young one.

It changes by doing the same small thing again and again, until that thing wears a new groove.

Which, as a concept, is oddly freeing.

It means the relationship with yourself isn't fixed by your history or your age.

It's trainable.

You just have to want it enough so you can be consistent, and also keep at it, long after the novelty wears off.

Living this way is a steady habit of noticing.

Noticing what lifted you today.

What flattened you.

Who you wanted to call afterward, and who you didn't.

Do that honestly for an extended period and you start to meet yourself properly.

Maybe even for the first time.

I think I finally understand the motorcycle.

The bike was never really the point.

Neither, I suspect, was being young.

It stood in for a conversation that probably never got to happen, a need that couldn't find a better way out.

I don't say that as a knock on my dad.

I say it because I think a lot of us are carrying an unspoken version of that bike around with us, waiting for the day we'll finally buy whatever it is and feel whole.

What I've found at 47 is that there was nothing to buy.

What I was bracing to chase turned out to be something I'd been building all along, just by being honest about what I value, who I want beside me, and how I want to spend the hours I've got.

We were promised a slow leak.

For a lot of people, middle age is when the noise finally lowers enough to hear yourself think, and to like what you hear.

I lost both my parents too young, and the cruellest part has turned out to be the accumulation of conversations I'll never get to have.

Back then as a kid, the motorcycle was just a thrill, and the rides with my dad were enough on their own.

The questions I'd ask him today about that bike would be completely different.

So would the conversation.

I'm doing just fine, Dad.

I just wish you could see it for yourself, and crack a joke or two with me while we talked it over.

If you've already done some of this inner work and noticing more about who you are?

You know the calm I'm describing.

But hey, if you haven't, know you're not behind.

There's no clock for this.

The best relationship of your life is still waiting to be built, and the person on the other side of it has been there the whole time.

Patiently hoping you'd finally turn around and say hello.

If this resonated, Bruce Feiler's TED talk is a natural next stop.

His idea of "lifequakes" puts language to much of what we’ve discussed above, but from any age, not just 47:

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A helicopter lifts off and climbs above the Manhattan skyline.

Inside it sits a man with a sketchpad and for twenty minutes he gazes down over the city.

He takes no photos and he makes no notes.

Then he lands, sits down, and gets to work.

Then, over the next five days, he draws the entire skyline from memory.

Every building.

The right number of windows.

The Hudson, Ellis Island, the bridges, the financial district.

Eighteen feet of paper, all drawn from a mind that saw it all once.

Once.

His name is Stephen Wiltshire and he is one of the most remarkable artists alive.

For the first years of his life, he couldn’t speak a single word.

Stephen was born in London in 1974 to Caribbean parents.

When he was three, two life altering things happened, in the same year.

He was diagnosed with autism, and his father, Colvin, was killed in a motorbike accident.

Stephen grew up in near silence.

He didn't speak.

He didn't connect with other children the way they expected him to.

The world came at him too fast and too loud, and he had no words for it.

What he did have though, was paper.

After being sent to a school for children with autism, Stephen discovered that his pencil could do what his voice couldn't.

He drew animals, then cars, before focusing on the red London buses which he loved.

Soon after, buildings became his obsession, and he would draw one after the other.

Then his teachers noticed something.

When they wanted him to speak, they removed his pencils, so that he’d have to ask for them.

His first word, as the story goes, was "paper".

Remarkably drawing was so much more than a hobby he’d picked up.

It was actually his first language.

By the time Stephen was a teenager, the art world had begun to take notice.

Hugh Casson, a former president of the Royal Academy, became a champion of his.

A book of Stephen's drawings was published when he was thirteen, and his books went on to climb the bestseller lists.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks sought him out and later wrote the foreword to one of them, captivated by a boy who could glance at a cathedral and reproduce it down to the stonework.

Then came the cities.

Stephen began taking short flights over many of the great skylines of the world.

Rome. Hong Kong. Dubai. Jerusalem.

Incredibly, he would draw each one afterwards, vast and exact.

Entirely from memory.

His Tokyo panorama, which he again sketched from a single helicopter ride, stretched across a canvas more than thirty feet long.

He never took measurements or used tools to help him simplify the process.

He simply remembers every aspect, the way the rest of us remember our favourite song.

It is tempting to tell this story as a fairy tale.

The silent boy with the miracle talent with a tidy happy ending.

But the reality is both gentler and harder than that.

Stephen's autism isn’t a costume he removes once his drawing is complete.

For him, conversation still requires effort and the world is still loud.

For years, people used harsh words to describe him, as if having a different way of thinking meant something was wrong with him.

Early television even called children like him the foolish wise ones.

Despite his success those hard parts remained, every single day.

Even his art divides opinion.

Some critics refer to it as astonishing but cold, and more copying than creating.

Maybe.

But there's another way to see it.

A boy who couldn't speak found the one way he could show us exactly what he sees.

To me? That looks and sounds a lot like art.

All of this didn't occur by chance.

It took a mother who refused to give up on her son, and teachers who looked past the diagnosis to the boy behind it.

Every step of the journey was marked by compassion and unwavering support.

Today, Stephen works from his own gallery off Pall Mall, where his sister helps him run the business his talent built.

There’s an added marvel on top of his talent.

How those around him paid close attention, supported him and helped bring it to light.

Difference is not the same as deficit: The wiring that made Stephen's childhood so hard is the same wiring that lets him picture an entire city in his head. We’re quick to file what we see as unusual under lesser. Often it is simply unmapped.

Everyone is fluent in something: Stephen couldn't speak, but he could draw before most kids can write their own name. The question is rarely whether a person has something to offer. It's whether we've found the language they can offer it in.

Purpose can hide in plain sight: His was sitting in a box of pencils the whole time. Most of ours is closer than we assume, waiting for someone, even ourselves, to take it seriously.

We spend so much energy trying to be the same as everyone around us.

Stephen's life points the other way.

Reading about Stephen pulled me back to my own school days in the south west of Western Australia.

There was a boy in my class who always kept to himself, quiet and always playing on his own.

He saw the world a little differently from the rest of us, and the other kids didn't always know what to make of him.

One day he and I were paired together on a class project.

Over a day or two we bonded, and the next lunchtime I wandered over to join him for a game of marbles (yeah that’s right, marbles was a thing in 1989 😆).

What he showed me that day stopped me in my tracks.

He’d built an entire marble course by himself.

Tunnels, winding paths, tracks running right across the play area and looping around the trees.

It was brilliant.

The kind of thing any of us would have been proud to make.

By the very next lunchtime, there was a line of kids waiting their turn to have a go.

The quiet boy nobody quite knew what to do with had built the best game in the schoolyard.

I keep coming back to a simple idea.

That it's our differences that make us special.

Everyone we meet has value, and everyone we meet has something to teach us, even when it's not what the world is measuring right now.

Sometimes you have to look a little harder to find it.

Sometimes you have to look a little further.

But it’s always there.

Judge less and celebrate more.

Honestly, it'll do wonders for your outlook.

A boy who couldn't tell anyone what he was thinking grew into a man who has shown millions of people how he sees the world.

What an incredible gift to share.

If you’d like to learn more about Stephen and his story, the following video provides a window into his incredible mind:

There’s a small ritual I look forward to every Friday.

Reviewing the list of new albums that have been released that week.

I take a bit of time to scroll through, click on whatever catches my eye, and see where it takes me.

Most weeks, but not all, I find something I enjoy.

A few months ago I found something I haven't stopped playing since.

The album popped up as a suggestion and I played the opening track, Infinito.

By the end of those first thirty seconds I knew Trio Asesino by Adrian Quesada, was for me.

New music releases something magic in my soul, and this one’s been in my rotation ever since.

Adrian Quesada is a name you may already know, even if you don't realise it.

He's the Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist and co-founder of Black Pumas, the psychedelic soul duo that's earned seven Grammy nominations since 2019.

Trio Asesino is his latest project, released in March 2026 on ATO Records.

It's a little different to anything he’s previously released with no vocals at all.

Eleven instrumental tracks across thirty-seven minutes.

Just Quesada on guitar with Joshy Soul on keys and Jay Mumford on drums, the live trio he's been touring with since 2025.

The result delivers a sound like the score to a great movie that has yet to be made.

It’s warm, cinematic and very assured.

It’s the atmosphere that I keep coming back to.

The album moves through you with soulful patience.

It’s calm without ever feeling flat.

Soulful without feeling heavy.

Quesada's analog production style makes it feel incredibly rich.

You almost feel like you’re in the room the music was being recorded in and you can feel the three players listening to and vibing with each other.

And, because there’s no vocals, nothing competes for your attention.

So you just glide along with it.

Just bring whatever mood you’re in and the music will meet you there.

The more I listen to this album, the more it gives back.

A few easy ways to get the most out of this one:

Listen front to back at least once: At thirty-seven minutes it doesn't ask much of you. The sequencing is intentional. Let it play!

Let it be a companion: I've had this on while writing, walking, working, and winding down in the evening. It fits in with whatever's happening just like a good friend. Some music demands your attention while this one sits happily beside you no matter what you're doing.

Let it grow on you: This isn't a hooks-and-choruses record. The first listen will set the mood. By the fifth, you uncover new details. It's an album that rewards patience and attention, becoming more rewarding with every play .

I've played this album at least once a day since I found it because it fits a lot of moments.

Writing days. Working through emails.

Quiet evenings reading a book on the couch.

It's both calming and soulful, and there's something about the playing that makes the room around you settle.

It's a great reminder that the best music doesn't always shout.

Sometimes it just settles in beside you and stays there.

This one is an absolute gem.

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

Picture this scenario: You've been away from home for a week.

You drop your bags by the door and step back into your home

The smell hits first.

The house has a scent that you stopped noticing a while back.

For half a minute it's there again, distinct, almost like you’re in somebody else's place.

Then your eyes catch up.

You notice the scuff on the wall you pass by every day.

The pile by the stairs that became invisible through sheer repetition.

The room that's somehow smaller, or warmer, or more cluttered than the version you've been carrying around in your head.

For a short while, you see your own life the way a visitor would.

Then familiarity closes back over it, and you stop noticing all over again.

Our brain is built to tune out whatever stays the same.

It's called habituation, and it's generally doing you a favour.

If you registered the hum of the fridge or the smell of your hallway every waking second, you'd have nothing left for what requires your attention.

So our brain files the constant stuff as "no longer worth sending a signal."

Smell shows this most clearly.

Olfactory adaptation means you genuinely can't smell your own home after a few minutes inside it, while a guest will as soon as they step through the door.

Leave for a few days and those receptors reset.

You walk back in and smell your life again.

I’m not saying it smells bad!

Just that you no longer notice it.

The cost of this is that the things we live closest to, become the things we see the least.

More than a century ago the critic Viktor Shklovsky argued that this was the primary responsibility of art: to defamiliarise the world, to make the familiar strange again so we actually perceive it instead of sliding past it on autopilot.

Distance does the same thing for free.

After a trip away or a few days off, even a different route to work, and you start noticing what you'd stopped seeing.

Do the doorway test: When you come home from your next trip, pause before familiarity resets. What do you smell, notice, want to change? Jot it down in the first ten minutes, while you still can.

Borrow a visitor's eyes on purpose: Look at your kitchen, your inbox, or your desk and ask what a guest would notice first. The answer is usually the thing you've trained yourself not to see.

Build in the reset. You don't need a holiday to see things clearly again. A weekend away, or a single day properly unplugged, is often enough to restore the sensitivity that habit tends to wear down.

I notice it most when coming home from Australia.

Twenty-four odd hours of travel, and the reward at the front door is my own house smelling like a place I've never been.

For a day or two afterwards I see things clearly: the jobs I'd been stepping over or the scratches on the wall.

It happens at work too.

Step away from something for a week, come back, and the problem you couldn't solve while you were buried in work is now obvious.

The same job and desk but viewed with different eyes.

The distance is doing all the work, but what it reveals fades fast, once you settle back in.

So I've started treating that narrow window as something to use rather than waste.

The first hour home, the first morning back at my desk, I pay attention to what I'm noticing before habit smooths it over again.

Next time you return to something familiar after any kind of break, catch what you see in those first few minutes.

Then do something about it before it slips back out of view.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

🌟 What's Inside:

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