The Reading Rabbit

06/05/2026

So many of us spend years waiting. Waiting for the perfect moment, the right conditions, the green light from the world around us.

The biggest adventure isn't climbing a mountain or crossing an ocean. It's the quiet, terrifying, beautiful act of "deciding that your life belongs to you." It's unlearning the idea that playing it safe is the same as being happy. It's choosing growth over comfort, purpose over routine, and your story over someone else's expectations.

Some days the adventure looks like a bold, life-changing decision.
Other days, it's just one small, courageous step in the right direction.

But every single time you choose your path — your real path — you are already living the dream.

You don't need permission. You don't need to have it all figured out.
You just need to begin.

Because a life half-lived out of fear will always wonder *what if* — but a life lived with heart? That becomes a story worth telling.

06/05/2026

When was the last time you had a truly original thought? Not a reaction. Not an opinion borrowed from someone else's framework. Not a conclusion you arrived at because it was the obvious one in the room. But a genuine, unexpected, stops-you-in-your-tracks shift in the way you understood something.

If you had to think hard to answer that question, this book is for you.

*Seeing What Others Don't* by Gary Klein.

Insight, Gary says, is not a gift. It is not genius. It is not something that strikes a chosen few like lightning from a clear sky. It is a process. One that can be understood, cultivated, and — most urgently — one that most people and most organisations are unknowingly suppressing every single day.

1. Breakthroughs don't strike out of nowhere. Klein found they arrive through three paths: noticing something that contradicts what you believe, making a connection between two unrelated things, or hitting a wall so completely that your mind finally reaches for something it never would have otherwise. Insight rewards the people paying close enough attention to notice what doesn't fit.

2. BEING WRONG IS SOMETIMES THE ONLY WAY TO GET IT RIGHT
Some of the most profound breakthroughs in history came from people who were deeply, committedly wrong — and honest enough to follow the contradiction all the way to a better truth. Leaders are trained to project certainty. Klein is asking us to get genuinely comfortable with not yet knowing.

3. YOUR ORGANISATION IS PROBABLY KILLING INSIGHT WITHOUT KNOWING IT
Approval processes, risk protocols, cultures of consensus — these are often perfectly designed to prevent exactly the thinking that would move things forward. When your team only tells you what you want to hear, it is not because they have nothing important to say. It is because you have built a room where seeing clearly isn't safe.

4. THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE ROOM ARE OFTEN THE LEAST LIKELY TO SEE
Deep expertise without humility becomes a cage. The most credentialed, experienced people in a field are often the most locked into its existing frameworks — filtering out the anomalies that don't fit instead of getting curious about them. Knowing a great deal quietly convinces you that you already understand.

5. INSIGHT CANNOT BE FORCED — BUT IT CAN BE INVITED
You cannot schedule a breakthrough. But you can create the conditions for one. Curiosity over certainty. Diverse voices over echo chambers. Rest and white space over relentless productivity. The insight never comes in the meeting. It comes on the walk afterward, in the quiet moment when your mind finally has room to hear itself think.

06/04/2026

I want to talk about falling down.

Not the kind that makes a good story later. Not the polished, gift-wrapped version of failure that people share on stages and in interviews, where the ending is already known and the hard part is safely in the past.

I mean the real kind. The kind where you're still in it. Where you don't yet know how it ends. Where you're face down in the dirt and you can't quite tell the difference between the ground and the weight on your chest.

That is where *Rising Strong* by Brené Brown begins.

And it begins there on purpose.

Brown opens with an image that has stayed with me since I first read it — Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech about the man in the arena. The one who is not the critic sitting in the stands, but the one whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood. The one who dares greatly. The one who, inevitably, falls.

We spend so much time talking about daring greatly — about courage and vulnerability and showing up — but almost no time talking about what happens after you show up and it goes wrong. After you try and you fall. After the arena floor meets your face.

That silence, is a problem. Because falling is not the exception to a brave life. It is the cost of entry.

So what do you actually do when you're down there?

Brown builds the whole book around three words that I want you to sit with, because they are deceptively simple and profoundly demanding.

The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

The Reckoning is the moment you stop pretending. You stop smiling through it, scrolling past it, numbing it with busyness or wine or whatever your particular brand of avoidance looks like. You stop and you notice — something is happening inside me. Something I have been refusing to feel. The reckoning is not dramatic. It is just honest. And for many of us, that honesty is the hardest part.

Because we are masters at skipping it. We are a culture that gold-plates grit. We celebrate the comeback without sitting in the collapse. We post the victory and quietly bury the weeks on the floor that came before it. And Brown is asking us — gently, firmly, without flinching — to stop doing that. To ourselves. To each other.

Then comes the Rumble. And this is where it gets uncomfortable in the most necessary way.

When something hard happens to us, our minds do not sit quietly in the uncertainty. They write stories. Fast, convincing, emotionally coherent stories about why it happened, who is to blame, what it means about us, what it means about them. *I'm not good enough. They never cared. I always do this. This always happens to me.*

Brown calls these "the stories we make up." And she is not dismissing them — she is asking us to examine them. To rumble with them. To hold them up to the light and ask the hardest question: *is this actually true, or is this fear wearing the costume of certainty?*

The rumble asks you to look.

And then, if you can stay in it long enough — if you can reckon honestly and rumble truthfully — something shifts. Not suddenly. Not neatly. But something in you changes. Something integrates. Something that was broken in you stops being a wound you manage and starts being a story you own.

That is the Revolution.

Not a single moment. Not a breakthrough. A way of living. A decision, made again and again, to write the ending to your story instead of letting your worst moment write it for you.

You are probably carrying a story right now. Something that happened — last year, last month, last week, maybe yesterday — that you have not fully reckoned with. That you are managing instead of feeling. That you have wrapped in a narrative that feels true but might be protecting you from something truer.

You don't have to unravel it all today.

But you do have to start.

Because the story of your falling does not have to be the story of where you stayed. And the only person who gets to write what comes next — the only person who has ever had that power — is you.

Get back up.

06/04/2026

We are raising a generation of children who don't know how to sit with discomfort. Who cannot tolerate waiting. Who expect every problem to dissolve as quickly as a Google search delivers an answer. And the hardest, most confronting part of Teaching Kids to Think by Dr. Darlene Sweetland is this:

We taught them that.

Not out of neglect. Not out of laziness. Out of love. Out of the deep, instinctive, ferocious love that makes a parent want to remove every obstacle, cushion every fall, and solve every problem before their child even has to feel the weight of it. We did it because we care. And somehow, in caring so loudly, so immediately, so completely — we quietly robbed them of the one thing they need most.

The chance to think.

Dr. Sweetland calls this the Instant Gratification Generation. Children who have never had to wait, never had to struggle, never had to sit in the discomfort of not knowing and find their own way through. And as a result, they are more dependent on adults than any generation before them — not because they are weak, but because we never gave them the space to discover that they are strong.

Here are 5 lessons that stopped me in my tracks:

1. RESCUING YOUR CHILD IS NOT THE SAME AS HELPING THEM
Every time you step in to solve a problem your child could have wrestled with themselves, you send them a message you never intended: *"I don't think you can handle this."* Over time, that message becomes their inner voice. Dr. Sweetland is clear — the parent who drives the forgotten homework to school, who calls the teacher to argue a grade, who untangles every friendship conflict — that parent is not raising a resilient child. They are raising a child who has learned to wait for rescue instead of developing the muscle to rescue themselves.

2. MISTAKES ARE NOT FAILURES. THEY ARE THE CURRICULUM.
We live in a culture that treats a child's mistake as a parent's failure. So we hover. We correct before the error is made. We smooth the path so completely that our children never learn what it feels like to stumble — and more importantly, to get back up. Making mistakes is not a detour from development. It *is* development. The child who is allowed to fail a test, lose the match, say the wrong thing and repair it — that child is building something irreplaceable. The ability to tolerate imperfection and keep going.

3. YOUR CHILD'S BRAIN NEEDS STRUGGLE TO GROW
This one is neurological, not philosophical, and it carries enormous weight. The brain's capacity for planning, problem-solving, and decision-making — what scientists call executive functioning — develops through practice. Not instruction. Practice. When a child faces a challenge, figures out a solution, makes a decision and lives with the outcome — their brain is literally wiring itself for independence. When we remove every challenge before they can feel it, we are not protecting their brain. We are depriving it of the very experiences it needs to develop.

4. TECHNOLOGY IS DOING THE THINKING FOR YOUR CHILD
A child who can Google every answer has never had to sit in the productive discomfort of *not knowing*. A teenager who texts mum when they forget something at home has never had to experience the natural consequence of being unprepared. Dr. Sweetland is not anti-technology — she is asking us to be intentional about it. Because every time a device solves a problem that a child's mind could have solved, it quietly erodes their confidence in their own thinking. And a child who doesn't trust their own mind will always look outward for answers that should come from within.

5. YOUR CHILD CANNOT LAUNCH IF YOU NEVER LET THEM PRACTICE LEAVING
This is the one that quietly breaks parents open. Dr. Sweetland asks us to consider — not with shame but with honesty — whether the child we are raising today could function as an adult tomorrow. Could they navigate disappointment without falling apart? Could they hold a job, manage a conflict, sit with failure and try again? Every small moment of independence you give your child right now is practice for the life they will eventually have to live entirely on their own. The goal of parenting was never to be needed forever. It was to raise a person who doesn't need you to survive — but chooses to have you in their life anyway.

06/04/2026

I need you to stay with me for this one. Because this book didn't just teach me something. It dismantled something. Something I didn't even know I was carrying.

*When the Body Says No* by Dr. Gabor Maté.

Before I tell you what this book is about, I need to tell you who wrote it. Because you cannot separate the work from the man. And you cannot understand what Gabor Maté is saying until you understand what his body has already lived.

He was born in Budapest, Hungary, in January 1944. Two months later, the N**i army marched into the city. He was an infant — two months old, completely unaware of stormtroopers or genocide or what the word 'war' meant.

But his body knew.

The day after the German army occupied Budapest, his mother called their pediatrician in a panic. Baby Gabor would not stop crying. He was inconsolable, screaming without rest, and she didn't know what was wrong.

The doctor's response stopped me cold when I read it.

"Of course I will come. But I should tell you — all my Jewish babies are crying."

All of them. Every single infant in every Jewish home in that city, crying at the same time. Not because they understood what was happening. But because they felt their mothers' terror in their nervous systems before they had words for anything at all. Gabor had absorbed his mother's fear the way a sponge absorbs water — completely, automatically, with no ability to filter or refuse it.

And then it got worse.

His grandparents were taken to Auschwitz and killed. His father was sent to forced labour. His mother, grief-stricken, terrorised, barely surviving each day, tried her best to hold him — but she was drowning. The smiles, the playfulness, the calm and steady gaze that an infant needs to feel safe in the world — she didn't have them to give. Not because she didn't love him. But because she was fighting to stay alive.

And then one day, on a street in Budapest, she handed him to a total stranger.

Not out of cruelty. Out of desperation. Out of the unbearable mathematics of survival. Where they were living, he would not have made it. Giving him away was the only act of love she had left.

That is the wound Gabor Maté carried into the world. That is the body that grew up, studied medicine, became a physician, and eventually sat across from patients whose bodies were failing them in ways that no one could fully explain — and began to notice a pattern that medicine had long refused to take seriously.

The body keeps score. Every time.

In *When the Body Says No*, Gabor Maté makes an argument that is at once radical and achingly obvious once you hear it: that the stress we spend our lives suppressing, the emotions we swallow to keep the peace, the boundaries we never learned to set, the "no" we were never allowed to say — all of it goes somewhere. It doesn't dissolve. It doesn't disappear. It goes into the body. Into the immune system. Into the nervous system. Into the cells themselves.

And eventually, the body says what the mouth could not.

He traces this across disease after disease — cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, ALS. And again and again, he finds the same quiet thread running through the lives of his patients: people who had spent decades prioritising everyone else's comfort over their own truth. People who smiled when they were in pain. People who said yes when everything inside them was screaming no. People who had learned — early, often in childhood, sometimes in circumstances as extreme as a war-torn city — that their own needs were a burden. That love had to be earned through self-erasure.

And I want to ask you something.

How many of those people are you?

How many times today have you said you were fine when you weren't? How many things are you holding in your body right now that you have never given yourself permission to say out loud? How many years have you been swallowing a "no" that deserved to be spoken?

Because here is what Gabor Maté — a man who began his life being rocked by a mother shaking with terror, who was handed to a stranger on a street corner before he could even speak — is telling us from the other side of all that survival:

Your body is not betraying you. It is telling the truth you were never allowed to tell.

And the most radical, life-saving thing you can do is learn to listen to it.

Before it has no choice but to scream.

06/04/2026

I want to ask you something before I tell you about this book.

Think of your person. Your one person. The friend who has known you longer than most. The one who remembers who you were before life reshaped you. The one you call when something happens — good or terrible — before you've even had time to process it yourself. The one whose laugh you would recognise in a crowded room.

Now ask yourself — have you ever truly sat with the fact that one of you will have to watch the other one go?

That's the question *We All Want Impossible Things* by Catherine Newman made me sit with. And I haven't been the same since.

The story follows two women — Ash and Edi — best friends for over forty-two years. Forty-two years of shared history, of knowing each other in the deep, unhurried way that only time and survival can build. And now Edi is in a hospice, dying from ovarian cancer, and Ash is right there beside her. Showing up every day. Sitting at the bedside. Plucking the stray hairs from Edi's chin — because that, Catherine Newman quietly tells us, is what real love looks like. Not grand gestures. The small, tender, unglamorous acts of staying.

What broke me about this book is what it says about grief — not the grief that comes after, but the grief that lives inside the waiting. The grief of watching someone you love still be here but already beginning to leave. Of laughing together in a hospice room because what else do you do? Of holding someone's hand and feeling, at the exact same moment, both the fullness of forty-two years and the devastating weight of all the years that won't come.

Catherine Newman wrote this book from a real place. Her own best friend, Ali, died of ovarian cancer in 2015. And when the first copies of this novel arrived at her door, she said she half-expected Ali to appear. Because that is how grief works. It doesn't follow a timeline. It doesn't resolve. It lives inside ordinary moments — a box being opened, a familiar song, a Tuesday afternoon — and it surfaces, again and again, to remind you of what you loved.

And here is what I keep returning to. Here is the thing that I think we do not say enough.

We are so afraid of grief that we keep our most important relationships at a slight distance. We don't say the things we mean. We let months pass without calling. We assume there is time. We act as though love is a thing we can defer, as though the people we need most will simply always be there, waiting patiently in the background of our busy lives.

This book is a quiet, devastating, sometimes hilarious reminder that they won't.

Not because something terrible is about to happen. But because nothing — not a single ordinary Tuesday with your person — is guaranteed. And the people who make your life feel like yours deserve to know that. While they are here. While you can still say it out loud.

I am not telling you to spiral into fear. I am telling you what this book told me — that love is not a feeling you keep privately. It is a practice. It is showing up. It is the phone call you keep meaning to make. It is plucking the chin hairs. It is sitting in the hard, uncomfortable, holy space of being present with someone who needs you, without flinching and without looking away.

We all want impossible things. We want more time. We want the people we love to stay. We want the ending to be different.

But while we're here — while they're here — we have something better than impossible.

We have now.

Please don't waste it.

06/04/2026

06/03/2026

The first time I read this book, a wave of emotions I couldn't quite name washed over me. I struggled to get to the final page, and when I did, I sat staring into space, wondering what kind of inhumanity a father could subject his children to and still call it the will and purpose of God.

I grew up in a home I looked forward to returning to every day—a home where laughter echoed around the dining table each evening, and warm hugs and kisses were shared over breakfast. To imagine a life that was the complete opposite made my head spin. Even more heartbreaking was the thought that somewhere in the world, children experienced hunger as part of their daily reality.

So I dived into the pages of this book once again, but this time through the audiobook. As Anna narrated all that she and her siblings endured, the lump in my throat refused to go away. Her story gripped me from beginning to end, and long after it was over, it stayed with me.

Her father had thirteen wives and more than fifty children.

And Anna LeBaron was one of them. And for most of her childhood, that number — fifty — was the loneliest thing about her life.

You would think that growing up surrounded by that many brothers and sisters would mean you are never alone. That there would always be someone to hold your hand. Someone to notice when you were hungry. Someone to ask if you were okay.

There wasn't.

Her father, Ervil LeBaron, was a self-proclaimed prophet. The leader of a Mormon fundamentalist cult. A man who used God's name like a weapon — to take more wives, to demand absolute obedience, to order the murders of anyone who dared to leave or question him. More than twenty-five people were killed on his orders. He justified every single one.

Anna did not grow up with a father. She grew up with a name. A dangerous, hunted, blood-soaked name that followed her everywhere she went.

Because of him, they were always running. In the dead of night, bundled into cars with whatever they could carry, moving to the next town, the next state, the next hiding place before the FBI could close in. Anna grew up not knowing what it meant to stay somewhere long enough to call it home. Not knowing what it felt like to sleep without fear sitting on her chest.

They were often hungry. Not the kind of hungry you feel when dinner is a little late. The kind of hungry that becomes a permanent condition. That becomes background noise. That you learn, eventually, not to talk about — because talking about it changes nothing.

And in all of that chaos, in all of that noise and movement and fear, she felt completely invisible.

She was not beaten every day. She was not locked in a room. But neglect has its own violence. Being unseen by the people who are supposed to love you most leaves a wound that doesn't bleed on the outside. Nobody can point to it. Nobody can treat it. You just carry it, quietly, and spend years wondering what is wrong with you that you cannot seem to be enough for anyone to truly notice.

She used to watch children outside her world and wonder what their lives felt like. Whether their mothers tucked them in at night. Whether their fathers knew their names the way fathers are supposed to know their children's names. Whether they went to bed feeling like they belonged somewhere.

Anna did not know what that felt like for a very long time.

She escaped when she was thirteen.

Thirteen. A child. Running not just from a place but from an entire world — the only world she had ever known, distorted and dangerous as it was. She had no map for what came next. No language for what she had survived. No framework for who she was allowed to become once she was no longer just the polygamist's daughter.

And that question followed her for years. Who am I, if not this? What do I do with a story this heavy? Is there a version of my life that isn't defined by what he did, by what was done to me, by the name I was born into?

The answer, she learned, was yes. But it did not come quickly. And it did not come easily. It came through years of unlearning, of grief, of slowly learning to trust people in a world where the people she was supposed to trust had broken that word beyond recognition.

It came, eventually, through forgiveness. Not the kind that excuses. Not the kind that pretends the wounds were not real. But the kind that refuses to let someone else's violence have the final word over your life.

I finished this book and I sat with it for a long time.

Because I kept thinking — how many people are walking around right now carrying a version of Anna's story? Who grew up in homes that looked one way on the outside and were something else entirely on the inside. Who were handed a story at birth they never chose and have spent years trying to figure out how to set it down.

06/03/2026

Temple Grandin didn't learn to speak until she was almost four years old.

The doctors told her mother she might never speak at all. That she might need to be put away somewhere. That the kindest thing she could do was adjust her expectations and grieve the child she thought she was going to have.

"My mother didn't listen. And I am here".

But what growing meant for her was not the same as that of any other child. Because it wasn't the kind of growing we celebrate easily.

Temple doesn't think in words. She thinks in pictures. Literally. Every single word she hears becomes a vivid, moving image in her mind. When someone says "dog", she doesn't register a concept — she sees every dog she has ever encountered in her life, all at once, in full colour, in motion. Her mind is a film reel that never stops. Never quiets. Never stills.

For a long time, she assumed everyone's mind worked this way.

They don't.

And when she realised that — when she began to understand that the world had been built around a kind of thinking that was never quite hers — everything started to make a different kind of painful sense.

The fluorescent lights that didn't just flicker for her, they pulsed like a strobe inside her skull. The fabric against her skin that felt, to her nervous system, like sandpaper dragged slowly across an open wound. The sudden loud sound in a crowded room that didn't just startle her — it crashed through her entire body like a wave she could never brace for in time.

She wasn't being dramatic. She wasn't being difficult. She was a person whose nervous system received the world at a volume and a frequency that nobody around her could hear. And she was expected to smile through it. To keep up. To seem fine.

I keep thinking about how many rooms she sat in, holding herself together on the outside, while everything on the inside was overwhelming and sharp and too much. Surrounded by people who had no idea. Who maybe thought she was strange, or cold, or hard to reach.

She wanted to connect. Deeply. She watched how people moved around each other — the unspoken rules, the instinctive social rhythms — and she studied them the way you study a language you were never born into. She took notes. She practised. She built a bridge between her world and ours, plank by painstaking plank.

Can you imagine how exhausting that must have been? To work that hard simply to exist in ordinary spaces?

And yet.

She channelled that extraordinary visual mind into animal science. And something almost poetic happened — the same mind that made classrooms unbearable, that made small talk feel like solving a complex equation in real time, could walk into a livestock facility and immediately feel what the animals were feeling. The shadows that panicked them. The angles that disorientated them. The sounds that sent fear through their bodies.

She felt it because her nervous system had always been closer to theirs than to most humans around her. And she used that to redesign those facilities — to give animals dignity and calm in their most vulnerable moments.

She changed an entire industry. With the exact mind the world had once called broken.

Temple's story has a triumphant arc, yes. But she shouldn't have had to fight that hard just to be seen. And the truth is — most people like her don't get a book deal and a TED Talk. Most of them are just quietly struggling, in classrooms and offices and family homes, in a world that was calibrated for someone else's nervous system.

There is someone in your life right now — maybe a child, maybe a friend, maybe someone you've quietly written off as difficult or distant or odd — who is doing exactly what Temple did. Holding it together on the outside. Feeling everything too loudly on the inside. Wanting so badly to be understood but not quite having the words to ask for it.

This book changed the question I ask. Not — "what is wrong with this person?"

But — "what does their world feel like? And am I making any room for it?"

If you've never read Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, please do. Not to learn about autism as a condition. But to learn about a human being — fully, honestly, without looking away.

We owe each other that much.

06/03/2026

You don't have to do everything at once.

Progress isn't always loud. Sometimes it's choosing water over soda, taking the stairs, sending that one email you've been putting off, or simply going to bed an hour earlier. None of it feels like much in the moment — but those quiet, unglamorous little choices? They're quietly reshaping your life.

The big transformations we admire from the outside are almost always just a long string of small decisions made consistently over time. You don't need a perfect plan. You don't need to overhaul everything overnight. You just need to take the next small step — and then the one after that.

So be gentle with yourself. You're not behind. You're building. And every small choice you make today matters far more than you think.