Notes From the Road with Adam Holmes
Notes From the Road is a quieter kind of podcast from Scottish songwriter Adam Holmes.
Voice notes, stories, songs and reflections recorded from old churches, backstage rooms, trains, roads and late nights after the show.
Small observations about music, fatherhood, attention, place and what it means to stay human in a loud world.
Not self-help.
Not productivity.
Just fragments from the road.
https://enterthesanctuary.net
Notes From the Road with Adam Holmes
Happiness and the ache of being alive
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A few thoughts from a walk home after the gym about happiness, achievement and the strange ache that seems to come with being alive no matter how much we accomplish.
Fatherhood, ambition, childhood, music and the quiet moments that actually seem to matter.
If this resonated with you, I’ve been building a quieter corner of the internet called The Sanctuary.
Hi yeah, that's me coming back from the gym. It's Sunday. The plan is get Rosa. We are gonna do some boxing. She's going to a little party, and then I've actually just carved out time from like two until seven with Rosa where we're just hanging, we're not doing anything. We will do stuff, but there's just no plan. And I feel like it's really important as a parent to carve out that time like at least once a week. I just think it's a really, really good thing in this world of like demands and school, and it's so easy to just fill the calendar. And actually, often those wee moments I have with Rosa when she's kind of there's just space. She tells me things or things come out, or she, you know, stuff she wants to try, things she's struggling with. So it's been a really good boundary that I keep in place around the week. So that's the plan today. And I'm coming back from the gym, and I was listening to a really amazing podcast which got me very inspired and made me want to get on here and have a quick chat to you about happiness. When I was a kid, I think um although I had a lot of suffering from an early age, there was a lot of experiences I had as a little kid. I was always a very emotional kid, but I would say I think I remember a kind of happiness that came from the present moment, from just being in the moment and playing and having your little friends, and just the colour of a tree, just the kind of texture of the present moment without the demands of grown-up life, although my childhood there was other demands, but there's something about being a kid and the way that you can access the moment you're in that's profound. But what I can remember is looking in the mirror and I thought, what will my accent be like? What will it look like? Um what will I thought I might be an actor, I thought, what will my job be? What do I want to do, right? And uh now I'm not a child, I'm a 35-year-old man, and I've I've achieved I want to say it's an ever-evolving thing, but I want to say I've achieved more success in terms of achieving the goals I want to achieve in my life than I probably ever would have thought was possible. I've made more money than I ever thought would be possible. I have done more cool things in music than I ever thought would be possible. I've lived in the area I want to live, I've lived in the house I want to live in. I've had the most amazing relationship for a while. Now, and really um honestly, life is better than it's been. I've got an amazing funnily enough, here are some of my friends now. Hello friends. I'm just doing a thing, but nice to see you. Love you. Um that's some of my lovely friends there. So, what what's the point of all of this, right? The point is, I think many of us think when there's a certain amount of happiness, right? If you think about what capitalism is, the purpose of capitalism is it creates like a whole and it goes, you need this, do this, get this, and then you'll be okay, right? Think about makeup, think about gyms, think about clothes, think about fashion, you know, think about mortgages, think about whatever, any of the different facets of capitalism, really their purpose and their job is to sell you on the hole inside of yourself, right? And then sell you the kind of solution, sell you the thing that's gonna then fill that hole. And uh in a purer sense, I've achieved a success in life which is not even very capitalistic. I mean I've I've done very well in terms of money, but also I've done very well in terms of achieving much of the uh the goals and dreams I had in terms of art, in terms of creativity, and uh what I want to talk about more than anything is just that there's nowhere I've ever got to, there's no state of achievement I've ever experienced that's taken away the pain of the human condition. Because no matter how much I've achieved, no matter how much I've done, no matter how well it's gone, I just feel this sort of like this ache of being alive, and it's not a bad ache, you know, it's not it's not um a problem. But I was thinking, isn't it interesting when you think about happiness and you think what if we were taught that happiness is is not something to arrive at through achievement, it's more like a kind of butterfly, it just it flies in and it flies out. And how many of us um hit a kind of depression in life? This was me. I hit a really bad depression in my life because I'd set out to become a successful musician and I did that in my 20s, and I was touring the world and making money and everyone telling me I was great, and uh I felt very unhappy, but rather than going, that's okay, I just I'm just human, the sort of cultural narrative led me to a space where I thought I should be happy, and actually that resistance became the most painful thing about my experience, and you see it all the time in the news and on TV, it's like, well, this famous person is not happy. How can they not be happy with all their money and their success? And it's like, well, because happiness is its own room, you know. If I'm if I'm eating garbage and I'm not going to the gym and I'm connected to negative people, it doesn't matter how much achievement and how much success I have, and um it's not my achievement's job to make me happy, isn't that trippy? Isn't that trippy? That goes against the whole kind of cultural narrative on how to get happy. So uh many of us just move the goalposts, like you can go, okay. Well, if I make five grand a month, I'll be fine, ten grand, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred, right? It doesn't it'll just keep changing if I win this award, if I do this, if I do this many, this, or that many that, right? It just keeps changing, it just keeps on changing. And the Buddhists said uh life is suffering. What they meant was not like uh acute suffering, acute pain. What they meant was to live is to to be sort of hungry. You're hungry for things, you achieve them, and you move on, and happiness comes and happiness goes. And some of the happiest moments I've had in the last couple of years, one was like I was helping an older woman make an album, and it was one night, it was just she was round at mine, and I was uh recording her, and I looked out the window at the trees on my street. I just thought, man, I'm really happy right now, you know. It wasn't like the big moment in uh in a big sold-out gig or a financial moment. It was just like it's just a little subtle moment, just a collection of hopefully a bunch of good choices along the way. And uh in my opinion, what's a lot more powerful than seeking happiness is just seeking to make good choices, putting one foot in front of the other. Anyway, I'm off to have a chilled out Sunday. Thanks for listening.