A change of seasons

Thanks for all the birthday wishes everyone. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, and today is as good a day as any, hey it’s my (re)birth day. 

I finished up at FoxP2 at the end of last year and headed into the Karoo for a solo road trip for ten days. I found a little stone house halfway between Frasierberg and Loxton off the R356,  totally secluded with no signal.  

Each evening I climbed a koppie to watch  the sunset and it was here I befriended a sedimentary rock that has, I would estimate, seen a hundred and eighty million more sunsets than I ever have, or ever will. My newly befriended sedimentary rock bore an uncanny resemblance to the Marvel superhero Black Panther so I named him Chadwick after the actor who played him. (Wilson was already taken.) 

I spent time with Chadwick looking back on the amazing period of my life that has been FoxP2 . Being in a position to grow people and build a culture committed to creating great work has taught me so much - about creativity, about business, about people but even more about myself. This industry has always been so kind to me and I have such appreciation and  gratitude for all my industry peers, FoxP2 clients and fellow ForeverFoxes.  

Beyond creating the mental space to close my FoxP2 chapter, out in the Karoo I learned about the power of silence, away from the neverending  electronic pings that suffocate our days. 

At first, thoughts and thoughts skimming the surface, like stones across a river that end up going nowhere fast. Thoughts eat thoughts eat thoughts. But then in the silence, your monkey-mind starts to relax and you activate a different part of your brain, free from distraction, where the deep thought happens. You peel away the layers to get to the essence of things.

In that sparse Karoo silence, I started remembering how passionate I was about nature as a kid. Every month I would eagerly wait for my Wildlife TokTokkie magazine to arrive and I would draw and draw and draw - mainly dinosaurs, sharks and crocodiles, my Mom recently reminded me. 

But somewhere along the way, committed to a career that requires you to be more competitive than most, I lost that connection to nature. And I realise now just how important that connection is - for inspiration, deeper thought, creativity, mental health, teaching and learning, even exercise.

Which got me to thinking about our farm in Noordhoek and could Ang and I create a real-world space, connected to nature, away from the zooms and the teams and the google hangouts and the busyness,  to inspire people to deeper thought and creativity?

So we’ve spent the last few months building a barn on the farm, without any preconceptions of what it may be used for but we know whatever we embrace in the space will be aligned with our values and principles, and our wish for the Jardim Barn is it becomes a space for meaningful connection for whoever wants to hire it. Heaven knows we all need meaningful connection after what we’ve been through with the Pandemic. Ang and I can’t wait to see what manifests and I’ll post again when the Jardim Barn is completed, hopefully by September. 

I also felt inspired to write a book about what we’ve been through over the last two years of the Pandemic. It’s called “The Cloud That Helped People See” and is beautifully illustrated in water colour by the outrageously talented Arabella Leggat. (It’s her birthday today too!) It’ll be published in November and my wish for the book is it offers readers hope for a new way forward. There’s a saying “Stories that are not told, are wept” - we need stories to help us navigate times like these, to derive some kind of meaning and purpose from our experience or we become hostage to them. 

So that’s all my (re)birth day news, and if you’ve read this far, I can finally say, after thirty years of copywriting, you see, people do read body copy! 

Thank you for always supporting me, 
Justin