SOMETHING BLUE

Whether you are standing beneath a wedding arch or centre stage at a prestigious club, the old rhyme carries a certain kind of power.

Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

I usually associate this with a walk down the aisle. Last week, those four pillars supported a very different moment in my journey as a speaker.

Stepping on the Carindale Probus Club stage to address a room of mostly septuagenarians and octogenarians, was a brand new experience for me. These were men and women who had lived storied lives and seen it all, which naturally raises the stakes for anyone holding a microphone.

To meet the moment, I leaned on four grounding elements.

Something Old
The audience themselves. A lifetime of history sat in those chairs along with high expectations, so I made the session deeply interactive and entertaining, rather than purely motivational.

Something New
The Probus Club setting placed me in front of my oldest audience to date. It stretched me in the best possible way.

Something Borrowed
For 50 minutes, I shared wisdom borrowed from the masters and mentors that I have been fortunate enough to meet across my life.

Something Blue
My blue attire for the day became a steadying visual anchor as I navigated this new territory.

Collectively, there was more lived wisdom in that room than any library could hold or any algorithm could scrape.

Artificial intelligence represents accumulated digital knowledge.
That room represented accumulated human knowing.

And there is a difference.

AI can process information.
Only lived experience can distil wisdom.

But what made the morning memorable was not my stories.

It was theirs.

At multiple points, I invited the audience to turn to one another and share the masters who had shaped them; teachers, parents, mentors, partners and even strangers who crossed their path briefly yet permanently.

The conversations were electric.

You could feel lifetimes being exchanged in minutes, wisdom moving from chair to chair.

It reinforced something I have come to believe deeply.

We do not only meet masters in monasteries, boardrooms or on stages.

We meet them in classrooms, airports, hospital corridors and family kitchens.

We meet them in moments we almost miss.

My meetings with masters began in 1963.

My first master was my mother.

She taught me many things, but one of the earliest lessons was about connection.

Before I was conceived, Mum suffered a miscarriage at 14 weeks. Understandably, she carried fear into her pregnancy with me. She later shared that she struggled to fully connect with me emotionally until I arrived safely.

That insight shaped me profoundly.

It showed me our stories do not begin at birth, they begin in the womb. Personality, attachment and emotional patterning start forming earlier than we imagine.

Connection is not just something we learn. It is something we feel or miss before we have language for it.

At the end of my talk, I also shared my latest master.

My granddaughter Sophie.

Her name means wisdom, which is ironic because she eats sand.

She negotiates fiercely.

She lives entirely in the present.

She has no interest in legacy, strategy or quarterly results.

And yet she teaches presence better than any Zen retreat ever could.

Humility, I have learned, often arrives in very small packages.

After decades of seeking teachers, mentors and guides, I realised something simple.

Life itself steps forward as the master.

You have to be present.

Every season instructs.
Every challenge refines.

You do not choose the season.

You learn how to live within it.

And in the end, the greatest master I will ever meet…  is the life…  I am living...  right now!