Every year, around this time, Frankie reminds us that winter is approaching. Some cats grow a thicker coat. Frankie simply sheds his. Being a long‑haired, silver‑tipped chinchilla tabby, he produces enough white fur to suggest that he has exploded quietly in the night. I come downstairs to find several neat piles of five‑ to eight‑centimetre fibres arranged around the house like small snowdrifts. Frankie himself remains intact, which is always a relief.
Winter is also the season when rodents begin looking for warmer accommodation. Frankie considers this a personal challenge. He does not wait for them to find their own way inside. He escorts them through the cat door in his mouth, deposits them on the carpet, and initiates a game he calls toss the rodent. He plays this in the rooms with the most furniture, ideally the kind that neither he nor I can reach under. The mouse eventually finds refuge behind something immovable, and Frankie settles in to wait.
This year he has developed a new variation. He brings the mouse upstairs, releases it under my bed, and then lies on his back, running his paws along the underside of the mattress in an attempt to herd it in circles. This is not something one can sleep through. After a few minutes he begins issuing long, insistent meows, which gradually deepen into growls if I fail to participate. Experience has taught me that ignoring him is unwise. If I do not assist, he eventually loses interest and leaves the mouse to resolve its own fate. This has consequences.
The other day the laundry developed a noticeable odour. It was the sort of smell that made being in the room and breathing mutually exclusive activities. I removed the washing machine, emptied the cupboard under the tub, and cleared the hot water cupboard. The smell remained. Eventually, after moving a cabinet of cleaning supplies, I found the source. It was a rat of considerable size. Its nose extended beyond one side of the shovel I used to remove it, and its rear end extended beyond the other. The injuries were consistent with an extended session of toss the rodent.
Living with Frankie’s winter traditions has taught me that resistance is largely symbolic. For example, if I stand up from my computer, Frankie immediately claims the chair. I could move him, but it is simpler to fetch another chair. This approach reduces friction.
Winter is coming. Frankie has made sure we all know.
Part One explored the childhood experiences that shaped my unease with certainty. In adulthood, those early lessons resurfaced in unexpected ways — in how I understood my own mind, in the life my wife and I built together, and in the spiritual language I eventually found for what I had been living all along.
Neurodivergence and the Habit of Questioning Perception
As I grew older, I began to realise that my way of moving through the world was not quite the same as those around me. I didn’t have the language for neurodivergence then — that understanding came much later — but I knew that I noticed things others seemed to miss, and missed things others seemed to take for granted. What I experienced as careful observation or thoughtful hesitation was often misread as confusion, indecision, or naïveté. For much of my life, I carried the sense of being slightly out of step with the rhythm everyone else seemed to follow effortlessly.
My parents, perhaps sensing this difference long before I did, took extra care to explain the “why” behind things. They didn’t expect me to accept rules at face value; they helped me understand the reasoning beneath them. That emphasis on explanation over obedience became a kind of internal compass. It taught me that perception is not the same as reality, and that people can interpret the same moment in very different ways. It also taught me to pause before drawing conclusions — not out of uncertainty, but out of respect for the complexity of what lay beneath the surface.
Over time, I came to see that this habit of questioning my own perception was not a flaw but a form of clarity. It made me cautious about easy answers and wary of anyone who claimed to see the world without distortion. Where others seemed comfortable with certainty, I felt an instinctive pull toward nuance — not because I lacked conviction, but because I understood, almost viscerally, that every perspective is shaped by the lens through which it is seen.
Living six decades without a diagnosis meant that I learned to navigate the world by building my own frameworks, often quietly and intuitively. Those frameworks were shaped by reasoning, by observation, and by a deep awareness that my experience was only one among many. That awareness didn’t make me doubt myself; it made me attentive to the limits of my own vantage point. And it reinforced something I had been learning since childhood: that truth is rarely singular, and that certainty — especially when unexamined — can be a fragile foundation on which to build a worldview.
Two Lenses, One Life — Marriage Across Cultures
If childhood taught me that truth has more than one vantage point, adulthood confirmed it in the most intimate way. When I married my wife — a woman whose early life unfolded in rural Japan, shaped by customs, rhythms, and assumptions very different from my own — I didn’t yet realise how profoundly our shared life would deepen my understanding of perspective. At the time, I simply knew that we cared for one another and that we were willing to build a life together. Only later did I come to see that our marriage would become one of my clearest teachers.
Living side by side, we discovered again and again that we could look at the same moment and see something subtly, or sometimes strikingly, different. Not because either of us was wrong, but because we were each shaped by the cultural lenses we carried with us — lenses formed long before we met, and refined over decades of shared experience. Even after more than fifty years together, we still occasionally stumble across assumptions we didn’t know we held, shaped by the landscapes of our childhoods and the stories we absorbed without realising.
What has always struck me is how naturally we learned to navigate those differences. There was no need to resolve them into a single viewpoint, no pressure to decide whose interpretation was “correct.” Instead, we learned to hold both perspectives at once, recognising that each revealed something the other could not. Our marriage became a quiet practice in humility — a daily reminder that no one sees the world directly, and that every understanding is filtered through the lens of a particular life.
This shared life has taught me that plurality is not a threat to be managed but a richness to be embraced. It has shown me that two people can inhabit the same moment with different understandings and still move forward together with respect, curiosity, and affection. And it has reinforced something I first sensed as a child and have carried with me ever since: that certainty leaves no room for the complexity of human experience, while humility allows us to see the world through more than one pair of eyes.
Finding Language for What I Had Been Living — Lloyd Geering and Quakerism
Long before I encountered Quakerism, I had already been shaped by ideas that challenged rigid belief and invited a more spacious understanding of truth. I was seventeen when Lloyd Geering first came to national attention in 1966, and eighteen when the Presbyterian Church formally charged him with “doctrinal error” and “disturbing the peace of the Church” the following year. His sermons — questioning the literal resurrection and the immortality of the soul, and asking instead what meaning these stories might hold for a modern world — spilled far beyond church walls. People were discussing theology in pubs, at sewing bees, in workplaces, in places where religion was rarely mentioned at all.
What struck me at the time was not the controversy itself, but how closely Geering’s way of thinking paralleled instincts I already carried. His insistence that truth has many vantage points, that our understanding is always filtered through the lens of our culture and experience, felt immediately familiar. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I recognised something of myself in his approach — a refusal to treat any single narrative as complete, and a willingness to ask what deeper meaning might lie beneath the surface of inherited stories.
It would be another decade before I encountered the Quaker tradition, but when I did, it felt less like discovering something new and more like finding a home for the worldview I had been quietly forming since childhood. The Quaker emphasis on lived truth rather than doctrinal certainty, on listening rather than asserting, on humility rather than proclamation, gave shape to instincts that had long been part of me. In the Meeting, I found a community that trusted silence as a form of knowing and treated discernment as a shared practice rather than an individual claim to insight.
Together, Geering’s thought and Quaker practice offered me both language and structure for what I had been living all along. They affirmed that religion, at its best, is not a set of propositions to defend but a way of being in the world — a mode of living grounded in relationship, humility, and openness to complexity. They also clarified why absolutism, whether religious or secular, has always felt so foreign to me. Certainty leaves no room for the truths that lie outside our own line of sight. Humility, by contrast, allows us to recognise that our perspective is one among many, and that understanding is something we build together rather than possess alone.
Returning to the Present
Coming back to the comments that prompted this reflection, I can see now why they unsettled me in the way they did. It wasn’t the criticism of religion itself; I’ve lived long enough, and thought long enough, to know that religion can be both harmful and life‑giving, sometimes in the same breath. What jarred me was the certainty — the sense that a single conclusion could be applied universally, without regard for context, history, or the lived experience of others.
For someone else, those comments might have passed unnoticed. But for me, they touched a thread that runs back through my entire life: the understanding that truth is always shaped by the vantage point from which it is seen. From my parents’ relational ethics, to the Kaumātua’s stories, to the quiet courage of my mother at the races, to the way my wife and I have learned to navigate our different lenses, to the insights of Lloyd Geering and the practice of Quaker discernment — all of these have taught me that the world is too complex, too layered, too full of human variation to be captured by any single, absolute claim.
So when I encounter certainty expressed without hesitation, especially from people whose values I usually share, it feels like a dissonance — not because I disagree with their conclusions, but because the confidence itself seems out of step with the humility that genuine understanding requires. It reminds me how easily any of us can slip into thinking that our perspective is the perspective, and how quickly that can close the door to the truths that lie outside our own line of sight.
This essay, then, is not a rebuttal of those comments, nor a defence of religion, nor a critique of the people who wrote them. It is simply an attempt to understand why they struck me so forcefully, and to trace the path that has shaped my own resistance to absolutism. It is a way of returning to the question that stopped me mid‑scroll: Why does this unsettle me so deeply?
A Gentle Closing — Living With Complexity
As I sit with all of this, I realise that my discomfort with certainty is not a flaw to be corrected but a thread woven through the whole of my life. It comes from childhood lessons in dignity and relationship, from stories that revealed the limits of any single narrative, from the quiet differences my wife and I have navigated over decades, from the insights of thinkers who challenged inherited assumptions, and from a spiritual tradition that trusts silence more than proclamation. These experiences have taught me that understanding is something we grow into, not something we possess.
So when I encounter certainty expressed without hesitation, it touches something deep — not because I think people shouldn’t hold strong views, but because I know how easily certainty can close the door to the truths that lie beyond our own vantage point. The world is too complex, too layered, too full of human variation to be captured by any single frame. And yet, we keep trying. Perhaps that is simply part of being human.
What I hope, for myself as much as for anyone reading this, is that we can learn to hold our convictions lightly — not weakly, but with the humility that comes from knowing they are shaped by the lenses through which we see. That we can remain open to the possibility that someone else’s experience might reveal something our own cannot. That we can resist the temptation to collapse complexity into certainty, even when certainty feels comforting.
In the end, this essay is not about the comments that unsettled me. It is about the long path that led me to pause at them, and the values that have shaped that pause. It is about recognising that discomfort can be a teacher, pointing us back to the places where our deepest commitments were formed. And it is about remembering that the world is richer, and more generous, when we allow room for more than one way of seeing.
I don’t expect everyone to share my unease with absolutism. But I do hope that, in a world increasingly drawn to simple answers, we can make space for the kind of humility that keeps us listening. Because in the end, it is in listening — to one another, to our own histories, to the quiet truths that emerge when certainty falls away — that we find the possibility of understanding.
I found myself unsettled the other day while reading a series of comments on a blog I follow. The writers were people whose values I usually share — thoughtful, evidence‑minded, wary of dogma — yet their certainty about the harmfulness of all religion struck me with unexpected force. It wasn’t the conclusion that jarred me so much as the confidence with which it was expressed, a confidence that felt strangely out of step with the humility they normally champion. That moment made me stop, mid‑scroll, and ask myself a question I’ve returned to many times over the years: Why does certainty — especially when it comes from people I respect — unsettle me so deeply?
Naming the Real Issue — Certainty, Not Religion
As I sat with that question, it became clear that what unsettled me wasn’t the criticism of religion itself. I’ve lived long enough, and seen enough, to know that religion can cause harm as easily as it can nurture compassion. What jarred me was the certainty — the sense that a single conclusion could be applied to every form of religion, in every context, without remainder. It reminded me how easily any of us, no matter how committed we are to evidence and reason, can slip into treating our perceptions as universal truths.
The more I reflected, the more I realised that the tension I felt had little to do with religion and everything to do with absolutism. I’ve encountered certainty in many guises over the years — religious, political, ideological, even scientific — and it has always made me uneasy. Not because conviction is wrong, but because certainty leaves no room for the complexity of human experience. It flattens the world into a single vantage point and mistakes that vantage point for reality itself.
That, I realised, was the real issue. Not the content of the claims, but the confidence with which they were made. And as I turned that over in my mind, I found myself remembering an unfinished draft I wrote years ago, trying to understand why absolutism — in any form — has always felt like a warning bell to me.
Sitting with that unease, I found myself thinking back to an unfinished draft I wrote years ago, an attempt to trace the roots of my discomfort with absolutism. I never completed it at the time, but the questions it held have stayed with me, quietly shaping the way I move through the world. This seemed like the moment to return to that earlier reflection — not to continue it, but to understand what it was pointing toward. To see, more clearly, how I came to trust complexity over certainty, and why that trust feels so deeply woven into who I am.
When I look back to understand why certainty makes me uneasy, I always return first to my childhood. Long before I had words like “ethics” or “pluralism,” I was shaped by a way of living that treated people as relationships to be honoured rather than problems to be solved. I grew up in a whānau where difference wasn’t something to fear, and where unfamiliarity wasn’t treated as a threat. People were met as people — not as categories, not as abstractions, not as representatives of anything larger than themselves.
My parents didn’t divide the world into right and wrong, good and bad, saved and unsaved. They didn’t punish us when we caused harm. Instead, they explained why an action mattered, how it affected someone else, and what it meant to consider another person’s experience. Looking back, I realise how unusual that was for the 1950s and 60s, when obedience was often valued more than understanding. But in our home, ethics was never about rules. It was about relationships — the living, breathing connections between people, and the responsibility we carry for one another.
One of the quiet gifts of that upbringing was the freedom to sit with the Kaumātua (a Māori elder) who lived next door — an almost blind, almost deaf woman with a moko kauae and a lifetime of stories. Many parents of the time might have kept their children away from someone they didn’t understand. Mine didn’t. They saw a neighbour, not an oddity. Because of that, I heard stories of Waitara and Parihaka years before I encountered the official versions at school. I didn’t know it then, but those conversations planted the idea that truth has more than one vantage point, and that the stories we inherit are never the whole story.
Another layer settled the day my mother — a woman barely 150 centimetres tall — stood up to a group of racegoers who were mocking two men dressed in matching pleated miniskirts. At the time, I didn’t think about their sexual orientation; it simply didn’t occur to me. What I saw were two men dressed in a way that was unconventional for the era, and, to my young eyes, rather stylish. What my mother saw, I suspect, was something more immediate: a crowd beginning to feed on its own delight in taunting difference, a mood that could so easily tip from mockery into menace.
It took tremendous courage for her to step forward in that moment. The crowd was large, loud, and moving as crowds sometimes do — toward a kind of collective unkindness that no single person would have embraced on their own. My mother broke that feedback loop with a few firm words, reminding everyone present of what it means to be decent. The effect was instant. The jeering stopped. A kind of collective shame settled over the group, as if people suddenly recognised themselves and didn’t much like what they saw.
What stayed with me was not the incident itself, but the silence that followed. My mother never lectured me about what had happened. She didn’t turn it into a lesson about tolerance or bravery. She simply acted from a place of instinctive respect, and then carried on with her day. From that, I learned something that has shaped me ever since: dignity is something you extend to others, not something you wait to have validated.
These early experiences formed the bedrock of my ethics. They taught me that strength can be quiet, relational, and grounded in empathy rather than certainty. They taught me that truth is rarely singular. And they taught me that the world is far more complex — and far more beautiful — than any rigid framework can capture.
Learning That Truth Has More Than One Vantage Point
If my parents taught me that ethics is relational, the world around me taught me that truth itself has more than one vantage point. Some of the most formative lessons came not from school or church, but from the quiet hours I spent with the Kaumātua next door. I didn’t grasp the significance of those conversations at the time. I was simply a child listening to stories — stories of Waitara, of Parihaka, of people whose experiences were absent from the official narratives I would later encounter in the classroom.
But something in me recognised, even then, that these stories were not “alternatives” to the truth. They were truths in their own right, shaped by a different history, a different memory, a different relationship to land and power. They revealed that the world looks different depending on where you stand, and that no single account can ever capture the whole of it.
Those early encounters planted a seed that has stayed with me throughout my life: the understanding that perspective is not a flaw in human perception but an inherent part of it. We do not see the world as it is; we see it through the lenses of our culture, our history, our experiences, and our place in the story. That realisation didn’t make me distrust truth — it made me wary of anyone who claimed to possess all of it.
It was in those moments, long before I had the language for it, that I began to understand why certainty feels so brittle to me. Not because conviction is wrong, but because certainty leaves no room for the truths that lie outside our own line of sight. The Kaumātua’s stories taught me that truth is not a single beam of light but a landscape — one that can only be glimpsed from many angles, none of them complete on their own.
In Part Two, I turn from these childhood experiences to the ways they continued to shape my adult life — in how I understood myself, how I navigated relationships, and how I learned to make sense of the world’s complexity.
I’ve lived in Aotearoa long enough to know that the weather here isn’t so much a climate as a form of improvisational theatre. Some countries have four seasons; New Zealand prefers to cycle through them all before morning tea, just to keep the population alert. Visitors think this is an exaggeration. Locals know it’s a public‑health warning.
Now, I should confess something up front. As an autistic person, I have a well‑developed tendency to “info‑dump” — a trait I’ve come to embrace. Some people collect stamps; I collect trivia. Meteorology, geology, astronomy, obscure historical footnotes — if it can be categorised, I’ve probably memorised it. So before I get to the stories (and there are stories), I should probably explain why New Zealand weather behaves like a toddler who’s had too much sugar.
It’s because we live on two narrow islands, perched in the Roaring Forties, surrounded by ocean, and angled just so that every air mass in the southern hemisphere feels entitled to drop by unannounced. Warm subtropical breezes, icy Antarctic blasts, Tasman Sea tantrums — they all arrive with the enthusiasm of relatives who don’t believe in phoning ahead. The result is a climate that can’t commit to anything for more than twenty minutes.
This unpredictability is something I’ve always secretly loved. I inherited it from my mother. While the rest of the family sensibly stayed indoors during storms, she and I would dress in raincoats and gumboots and venture out into the tempest like two slightly deranged explorers. Walking the deserted streets in the middle of a downpour, with only the occasional car hissing past, was one of my greatest childhood delights. Thunder and lightning were a bonus — nature’s own percussion section.
My Wife’s First Summer (or What Passes for Summer Here)
This is the environment into which my wife arrived from Japan. She brought with her a suitcase of Japanese‑summer clothing and the reasonable expectation that “summer” meant “warm.” The rest of her wardrobe was following by sea freight — a journey of several months — which, in Japan, was perfectly sensible. In New Zealand, it was an act of meteorological optimism.
I, having grown up here, didn’t think to warn her. It never crossed my mind that someone might interpret the word “summer” literally. I had internalised the local understanding that “summer” is more of a mood than a temperature range — a vague aspiration the weather sometimes gestures toward before changing its mind entirely.
Her first week was a masterclass in cultural miscommunication, most of it conducted by the sky. She stepped off the plane into a brisk southerly that had clearly wandered up from Antarctica in search of mischief. The next day was warm enough for short sleeves. The day after that brought horizontal rain, the kind that arrives at speed and with intent. By the end of the week she had experienced more seasons than she had packed outfits.
I remember her standing in the doorway one morning, holding a light blouse in one hand and a cardigan in the other, looking from one to the other as if the garments might offer guidance. They didn’t. They were as confused as she was. In Japan, clothing choices follow a reliable seasonal script. In New Zealand, the script is improvised, and the weather is the only one who knows the plot.
She adapted quickly, of course — she’s far more practical than I am — but that first summer was a revelation for both of us. For her, it was the discovery that “summer” in New Zealand is a negotiable concept. For me, it was the realisation that what I had always taken for granted was, in fact, deeply strange.
It was also the beginning of a long‑running household tradition: before leaving the house, one must consult not just the forecast but also the sky, the wind, the cat’s behaviour, and one’s own intuition. Even then, it’s best to take a jacket.
My Fingers, the Reluctant Employees
My relationship with cold weather has always been complicated. While some people merely “feel the chill,” my fingers treat even a mild temperature drop as grounds for industrial action. They don’t negotiate, they don’t file grievances — they simply walk off the job. One moment they’re typing away quite happily; the next, they’ve turned white and unresponsive, like tiny civil servants staging a silent protest.
This is Raynaud’s: a condition in which the blood vessels in my fingers and toes overreact to cold by shutting down entirely. Most people’s extremities get cold gradually. Mine go straight from “perfectly functional” to “Arctic expedition casualty” with no intermediate steps. It’s as if my fingers have only two settings: summer holiday and Siberian exile.
The real trouble isn’t the freezing — it’s the thawing. When the blood finally returns, it does so with the enthusiasm of a crowd rushing into a department store on Boxing Day. The nerves, having been deprived of oxygen, wake up all at once and lodge their complaints directly with the pain centres of the brain. The sensation is difficult to describe, but imagine someone driving hot needles under your fingernails while simultaneously setting your hands on fire. That gets you in the general vicinity.
For years, I delayed warming my hands because the cure hurt more than the problem. It’s the only medical condition I know where “treatment” feels like a disciplinary measure. I would sit there, fingers white and stiff, knowing full well that I should warm them — and choosing not to, because I wasn’t quite ready for the punishment. It’s a strange form of procrastination, but one that made perfect sense at the time.
Complicating matters further is my autistic tendency to be somewhat oblivious to bodily sensations until they become impossible to ignore. While other people notice their hands getting cold, I usually become aware of the situation only when my fingers stop obeying instructions. I would be typing away, wondering why my words per minute had suddenly plummeted, only to glance down and discover that my hands had quietly transformed into marble sculptures.
For now, it’s enough to say that my fingers have always been enthusiastic participants in New Zealand’s meteorological drama. While my wife was learning that “summer” is a negotiable concept, I was relearning that my hands are fair‑weather employees, loyal only to temperatures above about 15 °C — roughly 60 °F for my American readers.
The Desert Road and the Unheated Vans
If my wife’s first summer taught her that New Zealand weather has commitment issues, the Desert Road taught me that it also has a vindictive streak. For reasons known only to the gods of transport logistics, my employer in those days issued us English‑built panel vans with unlined metal cabins and, in the North Island at least, no heaters. The logic was simple: the South Island is colder than the North Island, therefore only South Island vehicles needed heaters. This was technically true in the same way that saying “the ocean is damp” is technically true — accurate, but missing several important nuances.
My territory included the Desert Road, a stretch of State Highway One that climbs to over a thousand metres and behaves, meteorologically speaking, like a small, moody alpine plateau. In midwinter it could be bitterly cold, with several inches of snow on the ground and a wind that locals cheerfully described as “lazy” because it went straight through you instead of around you. I suspect the humidity played a role, but whatever the cause, it was a wind with opinions.
Driving an unheated metal van through that environment was an experience I would not recommend. The cabin acted as a kind of mobile refrigerator, efficiently conducting the outside temperature directly to the driver. My Raynaud’s, always eager to participate in any climatic drama, would seize the opportunity to stage a full‑scale shutdown. My fingers would turn white and stiff, locking onto the steering wheel like frozen claws. Changing gear became a negotiation between willpower and physiology. By the time I reached my destination, the thawing process — that delightful sensation of hot needles under the fingernails — awaited me like a punishment for having survived the journey.
One winter, I was tasked with transporting the company’s managing director of engineering from our Whanganui branch to Turangi, where he was to be collected by an engineer from the Hamilton branch. He was dressed in typical business attire, which is to say: entirely unsuited to the conditions. The Desert Road had recently been blanketed in snow, and the temperature inside the van hovered somewhere between “meat locker” and “cryogenic storage.”
He said nothing during the journey, but his silence grew increasingly frosty — in both senses of the word. By the time we reached Turangi, he looked as though he had been lightly refrigerated. He stepped out of the van with the quiet dignity of a man who has just experienced something he will never speak of again.
He never mentioned the cold. He didn’t need to. Over the following summer, all our North Island vans were retrofitted with heaters. No memo was issued, no explanation offered. The decision had been made somewhere far above my pay grade, presumably by someone who had recently endured a long, silent, sub‑zero journey through the central plateau and decided that perhaps, just perhaps, the North Island could get cold after all.
The Heat Pump: The Unexpected Hero
After decades of cold offices, unheated vans, and fingers that treated winter as a personal affront, the solution to my Raynaud’s arrived not in the form of medical advice or specialised gloves, but as a floor‑mounted heat pump installed halfway along our long central hallway. It wasn’t glamorous — a beige box about the size of a small suitcase — but it had two vents, one at the top and one near the floor, and together they did something miraculous: they warmed the house properly.
Before the heat pump, our home relied on two wood burners located at opposite ends of the house. They were excellent at producing intense, localised heat — the kind that makes you feel as though you’re being slow‑roasted — but they had very little interest in warming any room they couldn’t directly see. The rest of the house remained stubbornly cold, including my office, where I spent much of my time working from home. It was the perfect environment for Raynaud’s to flourish. My fingers would quietly stage their walkouts while I typed, and I would only notice when my words per minute dropped to a level normally associated with Victorian telegraph operators.
The heat pump changed all that. Positioned in the hallway, it sent warm air drifting evenly into every room, including the ones that had previously behaved like refrigerated storage. We set it to 22 °C during the day, and it maintained that temperature with a kind of quiet competence I had never before associated with household appliances. At night, we switched it to economy mode, which allowed the temperature to drift down to around 16–18 °C — cool enough for comfortable sleeping, but not cold enough to provoke any physiological rebellions.
The effect on my Raynaud’s was immediate and dramatic. The episodes that had once been a regular feature of my winters simply stopped happening. For the first time in my life, I could move from room to room without my fingers interpreting the change as a threat. I could type without interruption. I could even make a cup of coffee without worrying that the journey from kettle to desk might involve a minor circulatory crisis.
It was, in its own quiet way, a revelation. I had spent most of my life accepting Raynaud’s as an unavoidable fact — something to be endured rather than solved. It never occurred to me that the problem wasn’t my physiology so much as my environment. Once the house stopped behaving like a series of refrigerated compartments, my fingers stopped behaving like disgruntled employees.
Looking back, I realise that the heat pump didn’t just warm the house. It warmed the rhythm of daily life. It brought a kind of stability that New Zealand weather rarely offers, and in doing so, it gave me a sense of ease I hadn’t known I was missing.
Closing — Weather, Adaptation, and Other Small Miracles
Looking back over the years, I realise that weather has been one of the great characters in my life — unpredictable, occasionally cruel, often hilarious in hindsight, and always ready to teach me something, usually the hard way. It shaped my childhood adventures with my mother, wandering the streets in raincoats while the rest of the family sensibly stayed indoors. It shaped my wife’s first summer, when she discovered that New Zealand’s seasonal labels are more aspirational than descriptive. It shaped my working life, freezing my fingers to the steering wheel of an unheated van on the Desert Road while corporate policy insisted the North Island was “not that cold.”
And, of course, it shaped my Raynaud’s — or perhaps Raynaud’s shaped my relationship with the weather. My fingers have always been early adopters of winter, eager to stage walkouts at the slightest provocation. For decades I accepted this as simply part of who I was, a quirk of physiology to be endured rather than questioned. It never occurred to me that the real culprit wasn’t my circulation so much as the environments I kept finding myself in.
Then along came the heat pump — a modest beige box that quietly rewrote the script. It didn’t just warm the house; it warmed the rhythm of daily life. It brought a kind of stability that New Zealand weather rarely offers, and in doing so, it gave me something I hadn’t realised I was missing: ease. The kind of ease that comes from not having to brace yourself every time you move from one room to another. The kind of ease that lets your fingers stay on the job without staging a protest.
It’s funny, in a way. After a lifetime of storms, cold snaps, southerly changes, and meteorological surprises, the thing that finally made peace between me and the climate wasn’t a grand revelation or a heroic act of endurance. It was a quietly competent appliance humming away in the hallway.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson here. Weather will always do what weather does. It will surprise us, confound us, and occasionally freeze us to the steering wheel. But every now and then, we stumble upon something — or someone — that makes the world just a little warmer, a little steadier, and a little easier to live in.
And in a country where the forecast can change three times before breakfast, that feels like a small miracle.
It was meant to be a simple Tuesday lunch. A potluck for cousins on my mother’s side of the whānau — those still living in the region. These gatherings have become fewer over the years. Some cousins now live overseas, others have passed on, and age or infirmity makes it harder for some to attend.
I had every intention of being there. But one of my too‑frequent migraines intervened.
This one began with intense visual auras: jagged zig‑zag striations, details slipping away. Not blurred exactly, more like the loss of peripheral vision — fewer pixels in the scene, as if the world had downgraded its resolution. Then came the unsteadiness, the inability to judge distances. At times this has been mistaken for drunkenness.
Soon my speech faltered. I struggled to shape sounds with mouth and tongue, and the words I wanted to say would not come. I realised I was having trouble understanding what my wife was saying. I knew the words themselves, but their meaning in a sentence escaped me.
There was a vague headache, though not the intense pain many migraine sufferers describe. Unusually, I felt no nausea when I lay down. That small mercy meant I could sleep the migraine off. By early evening I woke washed out, but with my faculties restored.
My sister later sent me a photograph of those who had gathered. I recognised her immediately — her unique dress sense always makes her stand out from the crowd. I guessed another was probably one of my brothers, sunglasses perched on his almost bald blond head. The rest were unknown to me. Prosopagnosia at work.
A few years ago, I would not have dared ask who the others were. I carried a sense of shame, as if failing to recognise faces was a personal weakness. Now I see it differently. Not as failure, but as difference — and not so rare as many believe. So I felt no shame in asking my sister to identify the other attendees.
I missed the cousin catchup, but the story remains. Migraine altered the day, prosopagnosia altered the photograph, yet both are part of how I move through the world.
This reflection pairs with Migraine Diptych: The Man in the Mirror Leans Left, a companion piece exploring the surreal disorientation of migraine from inside the mirror. Read it alongside this story to see how private perception and public belonging intertwine.
I – The Call to Arms Attend, ye halls, to my noble quest, A knight in service, sworn and pressed. No dragon’s flame, no foe’s advance, But jars that yield not to her glance.
I ride to rescue, bold and true, From spiders vast and mice askew. Her cry resounds — I must obey, For chivalry rules the home each day.
II – The Trials of the Household The inbox swells, a fearsome tide, Where messages in shadows hide. I seek them out with patient hand, And bring them forth at her command.
The pantry groans with cornflour’s weight, Five packets guard the cupboard gate. I marshal stores with knightly care, So waste and chaos linger rare.
III – The Burden of Duty The fridge conceals its ancient hoard, Forgotten relics, spoils ignored. I purge the past, restore the space, A silent steward of the place.
The Kindle falters, Wi‑Fi slain, I breathe it back to life again. No quest too small, no task too slight, For I am bound to serve the fight.
IV – The Gentle Turn Yet mock I may, with weary sigh, At endless calls that summon I. But truth lies deeper, plain to see: She serves as much, and equals me.
V – The Mischievous Reveal For love is not in lofty airs, But shared in jars and pantry cares. So laugh at my labours, my knightly role — They’re tokens of partnership, heart and soul.
And so — after jars, spiders, passwords, after cornflour battalions and inbox tides, I laugh.
Because these small labours, these knightly quests in miniature, are not burdens at all.
They are the daily stitches in the long cloth of us. Fifty‑four years, and still I choose the work, because she is my equal, and love is the only service worth keeping.
Postscript
This ballad was written in jest and affection, to mark fifty‑four years of shared life. The “essential services” I describe — jars, spiders, inbox tides, cornflour patrols — are the small labours that fall to me, not because I resent them, but because they are part of the equal partnership we’ve built.
Love, after all, is not only found in grand gestures. It lives in the pantry, the inbox, and the daily rhythm of two people choosing each other still.
These are not memories in the usual sense. They do not arrive in order, nor do they belong to a single time or place. They are fragments — glimpses of migraine episodes scattered across decades, recalled through the lens of dyschronometria. Some are vivid. Some are surreal. Some are stitched with civic misunderstanding. Together, they form an archive: not of diagnosis, but of lived experience. This is not a timeline. It is a constellation.
The Cold Tile Floor
There is light, and then there is that light — the kind that doesn’t just illuminate but interrogates. Fluorescent, unrelenting, it drills through eyelids and memory alike. I am wheeled into it, horizontal, passive, a reluctant offering on a metal altar. The wheels clatter over thresholds. Voices rise and fall like gulls in a storm. Someone says something urgent. I am the subject, not the audience.
Then the bed. Then the floor.
Cold tile. Smooth, indifferent. I press my temples to it, the way a child might press a fevered forehead to a windowpane. It doesn’t cure, but it acknowledges. The floor does not ask questions. It does not doubt.
Hands lift me. Back to the bed. Then again — floor. Then again — hands.
By the third time, they strap me down. One across the chest, one across the hips. I am now a risk to myself, or perhaps to the order of things. The straps are not cruel, exactly. They are procedural. They are what happens when a body does not behave as expected.
I do not remember what came next. The light swallowed it.
Strapped down not by cruelty, but by protocol. The room was bright. The staff were tired.
The Growing People
The street is unfamiliar. Not just in layout, but in logic. People move quickly — too quickly — like sped-up film. They are small at first, child-sized, toy-like. But as they approach, they grow. Not gradually, but suddenly. One moment they are below my shoulder, the next they tower above me, demanding I move aside.
I do. I step back. I sidestep. I flinch.
Their faces blur. Their limbs stretch. Their voices are fast and high-pitched, then deep and slow. I am not sure if I am shrinking or they are expanding. The pavement tilts. The world is a funhouse mirror, but no one else seems to notice.
I try to anchor myself — a lamppost, a shop window — but everything shifts. The migraine is not just in my head. It is in the architecture of perception.
Size is relative. So is reality. But civic space rarely makes room for neurological distortion.
The Prime Minister Test
The room is quiet, clinical. A man in a white coat asks me who the Prime Minister is. I answer correctly. He nods, satisfied. Then he asks how I got here.
I don’t know.
I search my mind for the moment of arrival, the journey, the threshold — but there is nothing. Just the room, the question, the light.
He frowns. “Nonsense,” he says. “If you can recall who the Prime Minister is, you can surely remember how you got here.”
I want to explain that memory is not a filing cabinet. That knowing a name does not unlock a sequence. That migraine does not respect chronology.
But I say nothing. The words are somewhere else.
He writes something down. I become a note.
Linear logic is tidy. Migraine is not. Civic memory is not a multiple-choice test.
The Door That Recedes
The shop is ordinary. Glass door, metal handle, a bell that rings when opened. I reach for the handle.
It moves.
Not visibly, not mechanically — but perceptually. Each time I extend my arm, the handle is farther away. My fingers stretch, my shoulder leans, but the distance grows. I am not short. The door is not tall. But something is wrong.
Someone asks if I’m okay. I try to answer. Nothing comes out. Not even a whisper. My mouth opens, but the words are elsewhere — stuck in a hallway of the mind I cannot access.
I nod. Or think I do. The person walks away.
I try again. The door remains just out of reach. It is not locked. It is evasive.
Access is not just about architecture. Sometimes the handle moves. Sometimes the words don’t.
The Funeral
I had intended to go. I had laid out my formal clothes, slow and deliberate, as migraine demanded. The aura was present — not loud, but insistent. Time bent. Movement blurred. I went to change.
They thought I had gone to bed.
Perhaps they whispered. Perhaps they decided quietly, for my sake, for the mourners’ sake. Perhaps they told me. I do not know.
When I emerged, dressed and ready, the house was empty.
The funeral had begun without me.
I sat down. Not in protest, not in despair. Just in stillness. My father was being farewelled. I was not there. Both were true.
Migraine delayed me. Misunderstanding left me. Emptiness arrived instead.
Closing Reflection
Migraine does not always follow the textbook. Aura may last longer than fifteen minutes. Memory may fracture. Time may bend. Yet too often, the clinical gaze demands neatness — symptoms that fit, timelines that align, patients who behave. These vignettes resist that demand. They speak to the quiet endurance of being disbelieved, the civic cost of diagnostic rigidity, and the emotional labour of explaining what cannot be easily explained. They are not complaints. They are testimony. And they ask, gently but firmly: What if we believed people the first time?
There are poems that speak to the heart, and then there are poems that remember it — that trace its contours across generations, stitching memory and love into every line. Grammas Verse by PoeticJane is one such poem.
I share it here not simply because PoeticJane is family — though she is, and that connection deepens my appreciation — but because this poem honours something far greater than lineage. It honours a way of loving that shaped me and my siblings from childhood: a love that was warm, constant, and quietly profound. The kind of love that filled Gramma’s sewing room with blankets galore, that turned ice-cream into ritual, and that made space for difficult conversations with grace and loyalty.
Gramma, the poem’s subject, is my sister. And reading these verses, I see not only the bond between granddaughter and grandmother, but the echo of our mother’s care, and the values passed down through our whānau. It’s a portrait of love that is both personal and universal — tender in its details, generous in its reach.
PoeticJane’s words remind me that this love is not only remembered, but carried forward. And in her hands, I believe it is in good keeping.
Time runs backwards every day. I’ve tested this theory thoroughly — not with spreadsheets or scientific rigor, but with the only reliable metric I have: my body.
Each morning begins with a feline alarm clock. Frankie, the cat, has mastered the art of vocal mimicry — specifically, the human infant. I’ve read that domestic cats (not wild ones) evolved this skill to manipulate their human companions. Frankie has honed it to absolute purr-fection. His yowl is impossible to ignore — unless you’re my wife, who seems immune. Maternal instinct? Perhaps not. I was always the first responder when our children were babies, and it seems Frankie knows this.
So, at approximately 5:30 AM, Frankie stations himself at the top of the stairs and begins his operatic plea. I, a mere youngster of 76, feel every bit of 100 as I attempt to rise. My lower back — one collapsed disc, one compressed — reminds me that pain is a loyal companion of 58 years. With effort, I reach a sitting position. My knees, aged 95, protest. Eventually, I shuffle down the hallway to the stairs, and gripping the handrail like a mountaineer descending Everest, I descend, mindful of the affectionate feline weaving around my feet.
By the time I reach the kitchen, I’ve loosened up to about 90. I fill the electric jug (or “kettle,” for those outside New Zealand), press the Green Tea button — 80°C, never boiling, lest you want bitterness in both taste and spirit — and retrieve Frankie’s kibbles. He has two feeding stations: one in the dining room, one in the home office. I dispense his rations, return the kibbles to the pantry, and prepare a cup of green tea for my wife. My joints now feel about 80. I ascend the stairs, present her tea as I’ve done for nearly 54 years, and return to bed a sprightly 76-year-old, ready to catch up on WordPress blogs.
One advantage of living in a relatively obscure time zone — UTC+12 — is that the WordPress reader is already stocked with fresh posts. Or at least it was, until last Sunday, when daylight saving began and we leapt to UTC+13. That shift makes us even more temporally isolated. For trivia lovers: approximately 5.3 million New Zealanders live in this time zone, which still amounts to less than 0.07% of the world’s population. We are the early birds of the planet — or perhaps the time zone aristocracy.
Time runs backwards. Frankie approves. (Image generated by Microsoft Copilot, October 2025.)
But daylight saving has disrupted more than clocks. Frankie, it seems, is still on NZ Standard Time. While it’s refreshing not to be woken by his plaintive meowing, I miss his early morning company. Now he waits until I’m in the shower before demanding attention — a feline protest against human meddling with time. I shower under surveillance, his yowl echoing off the tiles like a furry timekeeper demanding tribute.
As the day progresses, my body becomes younger. After my shower — sometimes delayed by an hour or two if I’m feeling leisurely — I feel more like my 70-year-old self. By midday, I can do things I did in my forties and fifties — mow the lawn, for example, though it requires more effort than it did at the dawn of the millennium. By evening, as my wife retires between 7 and 8 PM, I feel like I’m just hitting my prime. Sometimes a brisk walk feels just right. If it’s dark, Frankie joins me, and we stage mock surprise attacks on each other. Goodness knows what the neighbours think of an elderly adult ducking behind trees and chasing a fluffy cat — but I really don’t care.
By the time I reluctantly make my way to bed sometime after midnight, I feel like a child again — perhaps not in body, but certainly in mind and spirit.
I first encountered Towards a Quaker View of Sex in the restricted section of our local library—reserved for reading on-site only, never to be borrowed. I was a high school student then, visiting the library three or more afternoons each week. It was my sanctuary: a quiet space to decompress from the academic and social pressures of school life. My whānau were seldom, if ever, dogmatic about anything, but the booklet offered something deeper—it revealed that others, too, were seeking a gentler, more principled way to think about sexuality. It was the first time I saw moral clarity paired with emotional generosity. That slim volume, quietly radical in its time, marked the beginning of my journey toward inclusiveness, equity, and the kind of civic hospitality that still shapes my writing today.
The Ethical Framework: Love Over Law
At the heart of Towards a Quaker View of Sex lies a quiet but radical proposition: that morality is not a matter of rules, but of relationships. The authors reject fixed codes and punitive doctrines, urging instead a discernment grounded in love, truth, and responsibility. They write not as enforcers of dogma, but as seekers—asking what it means to honour the dignity of others in our most intimate encounters.
Rather than defining sexuality by conformity to religious or social norms, the booklet invites readers to consider whether an act fosters mutual care, emotional honesty, and personal growth. Harm, not deviation, becomes the ethical litmus test. In this view, exploitation is not about breaking rules—it’s about breaking trust.
This framework resonated deeply with me. It affirmed what my whānau had modelled in quieter ways: that kindness and integrity matter more than compliance. And it offered something rare in the moral literature of the time—a spaciousness that allowed difference to be met with curiosity, not condemnation.
Views on Specific Forms of Sexuality: A Little Light Through the Lace Curtains
Reading Towards a Quaker View of Sex in the 1960s felt like discovering a secret passage in a house you’d always assumed had only one hallway. Where others offered moral fire alarms—ringing at the slightest whiff of desire—the Quaker authors lit a candle and asked, “Is anyone being harmed here?” If not, they suggested, perhaps we could all calm down.
Heterosexual Relationships
The booklet refused to play the “married good, unmarried bad” game. Instead, it asked whether the relationship was built on mutual care, honesty, and emotional growth. Premarital sex wasn’t condemned; adultery wasn’t demonised—it was simply recognised as a betrayal of trust. In short: it wasn’t about who you were doing it with, but how you were treating them.
Homosexual Relationships
Here, the authors were decades ahead of their time. They wrote, “An act which expresses love and affection between two people and gives pleasure to them both does not cease to be good because it is homosexual.” In an era when even whispering such a view could get you excommunicated—or at least uninvited to tea—they affirmed same-sex love as morally equal. No footnotes. No apologies.
Masturbation and Solitary Practices
Neither sinful nor celebrated, masturbation was treated with the kind of calm that made you wonder why anyone had ever panicked about it. The authors acknowledged its role in self-discovery, while cautioning against using it as a substitute for genuine relational intimacy. No hairy palms. No moral collapse. Just a gentle nudge toward balance.
Non-Normative Expressions
Fetishism, role-play, and consensual kink were not catalogued in detail (this was still 1963), but the principle was clear: if it’s consensual, respectful, and non-harmful, it’s not the business of moral busybodies. The booklet didn’t exactly wave a feather boa, but it did quietly suggest that prudishness might be more dangerous than pleasure.
Forms of Exploitation and Coercion: When Consent Is Not Enough
While Towards a Quaker View of Sex was generous in its acceptance of diverse sexual expressions, it drew a firm line where power was abused and trust betrayed. The authors were clear: any sexual act becomes unethical when one party lacks genuine freedom, is misled, or is harmed—physically, emotionally, or spiritually.
They identified several forms of exploitation that remain disturbingly relevant today:
Rape and Incest: These were condemned unequivocally as violations of bodily autonomy and relational trust. No theological gymnastics. No moral grey zones.
Prostitution: Framed as economic coercion, the booklet viewed sex work as inherently exploitative—an exchange that commodified the person and eroded dignity. This view, while principled, reflected the limited social data available at the time.
Seduction of the Inexperienced: The authors warned against adults taking advantage of younger or emotionally vulnerable individuals. Even if technically consensual, such encounters were seen as manipulative and ethically suspect.
Emotional Manipulation: What we now call grooming was recognised as a form of coercion—using dependency, guilt, or flattery to secure sexual compliance.
This section of the booklet was not about policing desire—it was about protecting dignity. It asked readers to look beyond surface consent and examine the deeper dynamics of power, vulnerability, and trust. In doing so, it laid the groundwork for what would later become central to modern sexual ethics: that exploitation is not just about what is done, but about how—and to whom—it is done.
Relevance to Today’s Sexual Ethics: Still Whispering Sense in a World of Shouting
Sixty years on, Towards a Quaker View of Sex still feels like the quiet guest at the party who doesn’t raise their voice but somehow changes the room. Its ethical compass—centred on love, consent, and responsibility—has aged far better than many of the louder moral manifestos of its time.
Consent-Centred Morality
Long before “affirmative consent” became a legal standard or a campus slogan, the booklet was asking: is this act freely chosen, mutually understood, and emotionally honest? It didn’t need a flowchart—it trusted people to know when something felt exploitative, and to name it as such. In today’s world of checkbox ethics and policy PDFs, that kind of moral intuition feels refreshingly human.
Sexual Diversity and Inclusion
The authors’ affirmation of same-sex love as morally equal was not just ahead of its time—it was a quiet revolution. In an era when homosexuality was criminalised and pathologised, they offered a simple truth: love is love, and dignity doesn’t come with a hetero stamp of approval. Today, that statement might earn a rainbow emoji—but in 1963, it was a theological mic drop.
Harm-Reduction Approach
The booklet’s treatment of masturbation and kink was neither scandalised nor sanctified. It simply asked: does this bring understanding, connection, or growth? If not, perhaps it’s worth a second look. If yes, then maybe the moral panic brigade could take a long walk off a short sermon.
Economic and Power Imbalances
The authors were rightly concerned about exploitation—especially where economic need or emotional vulnerability distorted consent. But here, the booklet shows its age. Its view of sex work as inherently degrading reflected the social conditions of the time, not the lived realities of those in the trade. Which brings us to…
Reframing Sex Work: From Moral Panic to Policy Maturity
When Towards a Quaker View of Sex was published in 1963, its authors viewed prostitution as inherently exploitative—a transactional distortion of intimacy, driven by economic coercion and emotional vulnerability. Their concern was sincere, and in many cases, accurate. In mid-century Britain, sex work was criminalised, stigmatised, and often entangled with poverty, addiction, and abuse. The Quaker lens, rooted in relational ethics, saw such conditions as incompatible with dignity.
But here in Aotearoa, we’ve since learned that exploitation is not a foregone conclusion—it’s a structural risk, not a moral inevitability.
Now: Evidence-Based Harm Reduction
The Prostitution Reform Act (2003) didn’t just decriminalise sex work—it reframed it. Research over the past two decades has shown that when sex workers are legally protected and socially supported, they gain agency, safety, and the right to say “no” without fear of arrest.
Workers report improved relationships with police and better access to health services.
Street-based workers, often the most vulnerable, have developed peer-led safety strategies.
The law has shifted the narrative from criminality to workplace dignity—though stigma still lingers like a bad perfume in some corridors of power.
Reframing Exploitation
The Quaker concern remains valid: exploitation must be named and resisted. But Aotearoa’s experience teaches us that it’s not the sex that exploits—it’s the absence of choice, protection, and respect. When those are present, sex work can be just that: work. Not sacred, not shameful—just another way to earn a living without having to pretend you enjoy small talk in a boardroom.
Civic Implications
This shift invites a broader civic question:
Can moral frameworks evolve without losing their soul?
Can we honour autonomy without ignoring vulnerability?
And can we please stop pretending that bureaucratic morality—crafted by people who’ve never met a sex worker—is somehow more ethical than lived reality?
In short, the Quaker view was principled but incomplete. Aotearoa’s model doesn’t erase the risks—it dignifies the people navigating them. And that, perhaps, is the deeper ethical evolution.
Epilogue: From Booklet to Belonging
It’s been sixty years since I first stumbled across Towards a Quaker View of Sex in the restricted section of the local library—a place where moral danger was apparently shelved between the encyclopaedias and the gardening guides. I didn’t know it then, but that slim booklet would quietly reroute my moral compass. Not with thunderous declarations, but with a gentle insistence that fairness, equity, and social justice weren’t fringe ideas—they were the heart of ethical life.
Of course, I didn’t become a paragon of woke virtue overnight. It took decades, a few awkward conversations, and more than one moment where my autistic intensity collided with someone else’s comfort zone. I’ve been told I care too much, talk too straight, and ask questions that make people squirm. I take that as a compliment.
It also took me twenty years to finally walk into a Quaker meeting. I suppose I needed time to realise that principled silence and civic mischief could coexist. That a community built on discernment might just welcome someone who sees the world through both statistical analysis and satirical bursts.
Today, I write with that same spirit—not to convince, but to invite. To say that difference is not a threat, but a gift. That discomfort, when held with care, can be a doorway to deeper understanding. And that a booklet written in 1963, by people who dared to speak plainly about love and harm, still has something to teach us—if we’re willing to listen.
Some truths arrive softly. Others wait decades to be heard. This one whispered its way into my life—and stayed. (Image generated by Microsoft Copilot, October 2025.)
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