What’s behind your house?

On rediscovering curiosity and wonder in our own back gardens.

Yesterday, my friend took me on a walk behind my house. So far, so thrilling a start to a story.

But dear reader, you will be thrilled, because the view behind my house, just a few minutes’ walk, is this:

Here’s the real kicker: yesterday was the first time I had ever seen it. I have lived in this house for nearly eight months and not once had I walked the five minutes up the hill to see what was there.

Because I, like so many of us, have forgotten what it means to really connect with my local environment and to explore the world around me with curiosity and wonder.

For anyone who has been keeping up with my story, you’ll know that I spent a significant chunk of 2024 in a little bit of a freeze state, feeling caught between worlds, anxious about everything from the mundane to the existential, such as:

I can’t decide which coffee shop I should attempt to work in today and this decision has taken on unprecedented and completely disproportionate importance in my mind, help!

And:

I’m not sure what I should be doing with my career and how to do work in the world that feels aligned to what I now value but also allows me to exist and pay my bills in our existing system, oof…

And even sometimes:

I think that civilisation as we know it might completely collapse in my lifetime and pretty much everything about how we currently exist will change and we will have limited access to food and water and so I’ll either die of hunger, be subsumed by a wildfire or maybe WWIII will break out first and it’ll all end with a nuclear strike. Should I aim for the countryside or just accept my fate… oh crumbs!

You get the gist.

And, to be fair, it’s not surprising that I, like so many of us, feel the weight of anxiety in these deeply troubled times. It’s bloody frightening and actually I think it would be quite odd not to feel any anxiety in response to a cacophony of headlines describing devastating wildfires, continued genocide and endless stories confirming that we are now very openly living in an oligarchy.

And yet…

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New year, new me?

It may not surprise you to learn that I am very much a ‘new year, new energy’ kind of gal. There’s been lots of journaling, sitting and reflecting as well as a brand spanking new Notion page to track all my 2025 plans and habits (you can take the girl out of the startup…).

This year though, I’m not setting myself tangible goals, but rather intentions and principles that I want to be able to call on as I go through my life, making decisions big and small:

• Experiencing joy and strength in my body

• Building my mental and emotional resilience to be able to better respond to change

• Finding and contributing work in the world that aligns with what I value

Underpinning these is an intention to practice leaning into curiosity rather than fear.

Rather than consistently allowing my brain to invent and then focus on the worst possible outcome, I want to choose to be curious about all of the possibilities and to be accepting of whichever one ends up happening.

Let’s take yesterday’s walk as an example. Part of me was worried about heading up behind the house and wanted to say let’s go another time: I was feeling a little frazzled and tired, I’d been ill for most of 2025 and I hadn’t got as much work planning done as I’d wanted to. I was focusing on the bad: I’ll lose valuable time and I’ll be cold and tired. Boo.

But a little voice inside me said ‘go’. Go and stretch your legs and be with your friends. Go and do the thing that’s joyful and strengthening for your body and that will make you feel better than staying inside and staring unproductively at a screen. Go and see what’s there.

And what was there, beyond the massive car park that I have passed every day for months, was a short walk through an incredible forest full of twisted trees, and beyond that a stunning vista, with an even more stunning sunset and two beautiful friends to share it with.

Oh, and a sheep that had got stuck on its back that my pal very bravely approached and righted, sending it galloping off into the horizon. Who knows how long it had been there and would have stayed there if we hadn’t decided to come and explore.

One exceedingly upright sheep.

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Let’s get curious

So what’s the lesson here?

Something I have been thinking about and discussing a lot recently is that the antidote to anxiety is not certainty (which is all anxiety really wants) but rather curiosity. And curiosity can start at any moment, anywhere and about anything (or anyone).

Often, we can think that curiosity needs to be big and passionate - a flight to Taipei to learn about digital democracy in Taiwan for example. But what if it was as simple as following your nose, following that glimmer of something, and taking a couple of steps out of your door?

It’s understandable that in an age where we’re constantly bombarded by information, and feel like we just about have time to clothe, clean and feed ourselves, that we do not feel like we have time to follow little curiosities. The education system does the opposite of fostering our innate childish wonder and excitement about the world around us. And our screen addiction means that we don’t notice the vast majority of what’s actually happening in our immediate vicinity. So I ask you:

When was the last time you looked up and watched a bird pootling around?

When was the last time you stopped and watched an animal just doing its thing for a bit?

What if, by looking for big answers to big questions we’re missing the point: that it all starts with looking at the world around us and being curious about what we might find there?

And most importantly of all, when was the last time you turned a sheep the right way up?

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Uncommon Threads

So what am I getting curious about this year? There are three main threads that I am feeling particularly drawn to tugging on in 2025, unsure where they’ll lead but knowing that I’ll enjoy what I find along the way:

1. Rewilding

2. Citizening

3. Technology for this transition

Rewilding

Over the last few months, I've been down a rabbit hole (pun fully intended) of books about the healing power of reconnecting with nature. From Ben Goldsmith’s God is an Octopus, to The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn, to Chloe Dent’s Raising Hare.

Each one confirms something I feel beyond grateful to be learning at this (hopefully) early stage in my life: that a good life, a joyous life, is one where we see ourselves as part of nature’s great web. Not as controllers, or victims or even stewards, but as participants.

I’m still very early in my rewilding learning journey but I love the term for a number of reasons. In its most practical and literal sense, rewilding is about restoring ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself. It’s a future focused endeavour, acknowledging that we can and should learn from the past but that we’re entering a new and different ecological era.

The core underpinning of it is that, if humans get out of the way, nature will restore itself pretty darn quickly. There’s a tonne of energy in this area, from the famous example of the Knepp Estate, through to illicit species reintroduction (I just recently learned about the concept of ‘beaver bombing’) and I, for one, am currently pretty enamoured with the idea.

The second reason I love the term is that I think it is a beautiful metaphor for what we need to do to our minds and societies, as well as to our technologies. There is so much I could say on this topic that I might save it for another day.

As a teaser, one core idea is that we have created a global monoculture. And, unfortunately, monocultures are not very resilient. In order to build the resilience we need to face the oncoming crises, we need to literally and metaphorically create wild, varied, and complex ecosystems that allow for creatures, ideas and projects big and small.

Which leads me on to my next thread.

Citizening

If you’ve spent any time with me in the last 18 months or read my pieces before, you’ll know that I think the work of Jon Alexander and his book Citizens is incredibly important at this moment in time.

You can read all about it in Jon’s words here, but to recap for those of you who are less familiar, the core idea is this:

For many years we as humans have lived under the ‘subject story’, the idea that a few select members of society should rule and everyone else would defer to their wisdom and power (think kings, emperors, dictators). Over the last century or so we have transitioned quickly and horrifyingly deeply to the ‘consumer story’, the idea that if we all pursue our own self-interest as consumers (of products, services, content, even rest and relaxation) then market forces will do their thing and progress will happen.

What we are seeing now is the collapse of the consumer story as a viable narrative in the face of such turbulent times. In order to save ourselves from reverting to the subject story again, which is happening all around us with men like Trump, Putin and Jinping calling the shots, we need to step into a new story: the citizen story.

In the citizen story, “we see ourselves as the creative, capable, caring creatures we are. We realise that all of us are smarter than any of us. We get involved.”

Which is exactly what I’ve been trying to work out how to do and how to get more people to do for this past year or so.

And the point, I think, is that it starts at home. It starts with speaking to our neighbours and learning their names and lending them something they need, or asking to borrow something that we need. It starts with being brave enough to turn a sheep the right way round and send it on its way (honestly, I know I’m talking about it a lot but it was a really special moment).

It starts by getting involved in our communities and taking responsibility for our role in shaping what’s around us.

And then it spreads.

Technology

Again, anyone who knows me personally, knows that this past year has been a difficult one in terms of my changing relationship to technology.

As a bright-eyed bushy-tailed grad, I fell into the VC world and was SO excited about the potential of tech to change the world for the better. And I drank that kool aid, deeply.

I still believe this. I still believe that technology will be an important part of the transition to a more just, equitable and ecologically focused society. I am not someone who thinks we should eschew it all and go and live in the woods (most of the time, at least).

However, I have also come to believe very firmly that in order for tech to be used as a tool, an enabler for the human and more than human world, we must fundamentally reimagine our relationship with it. We must reimagine its purpose and we must also democratise access to building, disseminating and using it.

We cannot let the tech bros of Silicon Valley and their copycats in Europe run the show.

So what I’m getting really excited by is the emergent technology that supports both our metaphorical rewilding and our citizening. From platforms like polis that can help us to deliberate much more effectively, to platforms like open collective allowing groups to build and manage their legals and finances as a community, the potential for tech to enable a new paradigm and a new system is immense.

Tech will not save us. We will save us. But if we’re smart and thoughtful about it, we can use technology to help us do it.

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Honestly it just kept getting better

So here we are, midway through January with wildfires burning in LA, a tentative ceasefire in Gaza and with a megalomaniac about to be sworn into the office of US president. Again. FFS.

It can feel absolutely terrifying and exhausting. And make us either want to batten down the hatches and stay inside or else jet off to the other side of the world for some hope at a holiday and some respite from the overwhelming awfulness of it all.

But I invite you into my alternative suggestion for how to handle this moment: let’s get curious.

Let’s rewild our hearts and our minds, step into our power as citizens and wrestle back some control of the technologies that threaten to consume us.

And I really don't want this to just be me, typing away at my laptop and sharing my thoughts into the void. I want to hear about you too. So let's try something:

Pick one of these areas and take one tiny step into your curiosity about it this week.

Then share it back here in the comments.

Rewilding: What animal or plant have you always wanted to know more about? Is there any patch of land available to you that you could experiment with rewilding on a tiny scale? What other rewilding projects should we all be checking out?

Citizening: What's one tiny way you could get more involved in your immediate community this week? It could be learning a neighbor's name or righting an upturned sheep (though please be careful with that one). How could you step outside your comfort zone?

Technology: What tools are you excited about that could help us build this new world? Or what problems do you see in your community that technology might help solve?

Leave a comment here or over on LinkedIn - let's start weaving these threads together. Because I think that's how the change is going to happen: not through perfect ideas for new societies but through thousands of us taking small steps, sharing what we learn, and being curious about what might emerge.

So go on, take that step.

And let us know what was waiting for you when you dared to look around.