I had a big mushroom journey at the weekend. Big for me anyway — 4 grams to start, with a small booster later — and what has stayed with me, for now, is how little I can actually write about it. So much is still processing, which feels both right and fine.

Usually, something lands clearly. Insights, messages, learnings, ideas. There are myriad threads I can follow during the process, notes I can write up afterwards, and a sense of having understood something important. This time it felt quite different. There were many moments when a brilliant notion came into my awareness and, just as I began to follow it, it dissolved or evaporated before I could catch it. Again and again. Things arose and disappeared, without settling into anything I could hold.

This lasted for what felt like quite a while, and I found myself wondering whether this is what dementia might feel like — that sense of something coming into focus and then blurring again before it can be fully seen. Like when a word is on the tip of your tongue, or an idea is beginning to form, but it dissipates before taking shape. It wasn’t frightening, even while I wondered whether I had utterly lost my mind. More disorienting. I kept sensing there had been something important there for me, but I couldn’t retrieve it or stabilise it in any way.

What did stay, or perhaps what didn’t require holding on to, was a simple, undeniable sense that I know nothing. People, relationships, what matters, these times, the past, the future, even the present — I know nothing. That life is far too complex and multifaceted for me to possibly understand in any complete way. Knowledge feels like a thin veneer. Superficial. Skin deep.

Rather than panicking, I found it freeing. Without the need to know, without my usual reliance on knowledge and competence, then who am I? What can I bring? What do I offer life? There was a sense that if there is nothing to know, nothing I can fully grasp or control, then all I have to give is myself — my presence in this moment, this brief moment of being alive on this planet.

Alongside that came a strong sense of everything as compost. Relationships, grief, my brothers James and Edward, Mike, Julia, my parents, my siblings, friends, wider family, Neil, his family, my children, myself — all the people who have died in my life, all the people who are alive — all of it part of the same process. Alive for now, or already gone, all of it moving through the same cycle. And that compost stretches both backwards and forwards in time.

Everything is one great big ongoing experiment. I am having my life experiment, moment by moment. Others are having theirs. Gaia is having hers, spanning billions of years.

(In French, the nouns “experiment” and “experience” translate as the same word – “expérience”. I can find the paucity of French words irritating and confusing  at times. Why would “experiment” and “experience” be the same word? But here, it was exactly right. Experiment… experience… It’s all the same).

This is the now, and now is the this.

Which brings me to the question: how to live from here? Because I still have to live a life. A precious life that I love.

Because things still matter. There is still a sense of right and wrong, of right action, right words. I want to have a voice, speak up, challenge behaviour that feels off, and fight unacceptable violence in the world, rather than simply be in full acceptance of everything. So where is the line? Where do acceptance and action sit in relation to each other? At what point do they begin to cancel each other out?

We were touching on some of this in a psychedelics integration circle I was part of last night. When do you call something out, when do you hold back, and how do you know which part of you is speaking when you do? The part that feels hurt, the part that feels clear, the part that wants to belong, the part that won’t compromise? What are parts anyway if all is compost and life is one great big experiment?

I can feel my usual pull to turn all of this into a clear narrative, to extract something useful, something that can be shared coherently. That feels off. It would be a move back towards certainty.

More honest is to leave it as it is.

Nothing really landed.

And somehow, much became clear, even if I cannot express it.