Love, Work, and Sport

and the desire for deeper connection

Surely, there is more to life than love, work, and sport. Yet these are the things we keep coming back to.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently, and I found myself flicking through the filing cabinet in my brain for previous conversations that we’d had with each other. Searching for anything to keep the conversation going and deepen our connection.

Concurrently, I was also considering my next question, which was going to be about work or love, as we had started with sport. For context, we met whilst running.

I wasn’t doing a very good job at being an active listener. I also think that it is often a preamble talking about work when it is not someone’s passion. I vividly remember my friend telling me that my work wasn’t in the top 5 most interesting things about me. I want to find out what these 5 things are about you!

It’s so easy to reduce life down to these three pillars, yet I’m not saying that these are the only things I care about. I want to know about your hobbies, what you’re currently working on, what your living situation is like, what you’ve seen, read, or watched recently, or what you’ve been writing or thinking about frequently. I want to understand you better.

Once upon a time, I was with someone who had been encouraged by their mother to always arrive at any social gathering with at least five different things to talk about. Which I often find rather humorous, trying to think about topics of conversation before you even know who you will be talking to, and where the conversation will take you.

I liked thinking about this and unashamedly would use it on certain occasions. I shared the method with some friends who turned out to be big fans. One of these that sticks out was when I was going on a date a few years ago. Ahead of the date, I reached out to a friend and asked for her advice. Here is a transcript of our conversation:

“SOS need conversation topics”

“Paddy you’ve messaged the right person

Is it right to not make it illegal to smack kids?

Will Smith…*

Porridge

Fav train line

Are you a good judge of character?

What do you think about aging?

Are cinemas a thing of the past?

Did Oscar Pistorious do it?

Is Prince Andrew just misunderstood?

Then if shit hits the fan, their fav colour and what it says about them.”

“Thank you for the above, date appreciated the conversation starters - showed her the list last night.”

*NB. This was just after he had smacked Chris Rock.

I hadn’t thought about this conversation for quite some time before I started writing this piece. Which was probably better timed two years ago, when I moved back to Australia.

I arrived back into a country where I had struggled to keep friends. Through no fault of anybody else’s. I was gone for over five years and did a bad job of keeping in contact with them.

Five years is a damn long time, half a decade. There was intermittent contact immediately after I left. Perhaps, some more messaging if I posted an Instagram story about a place they had visited. But it ran dry pretty quickly.

I came back to visit Australia in 2022 after 4 years away and realised I’d lost most of these relationships. So, when I left London I made a point of trying to catch up with my friends at much more frequent intervals - which has paid dividends.

If you’re thinking about messaging someone, just do it. You will almost always make their day!

When I arrived back in Australia I had a realisation that it is easier to speak to people who you have never met than it is to speak to people who you have known at a surface level for much longer. I had several 30th birthday parties and weddings to attend in quick succession in the spring/summer of 2023.

I was excited to see some of my closest friends from the past decade get married, but at the same time, I found it so much easier speaking to the group’s new partners. Here I was, returning after five years in a completely different environment and I could speak to people who didn’t have memories of who I was at university trapped in their mind.

I bumped into one friend at a wedding and the first two questions he asked me (after checking how I was of course) were:

“Do you still get naked all the time?”

“Do you still like to party?”

Immediately, placing me back in a previous era in my life. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s nice to get nostalgic over shared memories. I have some relationships where this is the bond that still ties us together. The issue I had with this conversation was that it left me feeling invisible, or perhaps behind the mask of my future (current) self.

I’d cut all my hair off and done a lot of work to become the person that I am, but I will always be judged by my past actions. Which is why I found it so much easier to speak to new people, who can’t judge me, because they’ve never met me.

It became apparent that there were a lot of surface level relationships within this group. I’ve known them for over 10 years now and I can’t remember what most of them do for work. Marketing is a pretty safe bet because that is what we all studied. But to save face, I often avoided the question. I wasn’t interested in their love life, per se - the times where I knew who everyone was dating are long gone and quite frankly I wanted to know what they had actually been up to in the past five years - the same amount of time that I had known them for before I left. We made loads of memories in the first five years of friendship.

The other side of this is the inevitable fact that some people don’t keep space for you. I caught up with a group of guys I went to uni with and someone who I’d lived with and considered one of my best friends before I left, didn’t have a single question to ask me about the five years that I’d spent living and travelling in Europe. For him, it was just another meal at the pub.

So, there I was. Back in my ‘home’ town, feeling isolated from the rest of the world and my life back in Europe. I accepted the invitation from my friend and joined the Tanaka Running Club. Thus, beginning another phase of making friends. I feel most connected to the friends I made in London, because I was there for the longest time as an adult and they were also the first friends that I made as an adult (when my brain was fully formed).

Arriving in London wasn’t easy, I’ll always be grateful for having Conor there. Then, arriving back in Melbourne wasn’t much easier, as I had outgrown my old friends and was trying to navigate a life where I’d given up drinking.

Which is where Tanaka came in, I had a group of people who I could meet each week that I had at least one thing in common with. It was through this experience that I knew that I could also set myself up in Berlin without problem.

There were problems, but this had nothing to do with my ability to make friends…

Berlin is a playground. I often feel like the only person that I know who works a 9-5 job. It is a hotbed for creativity, and if you have any hobbies, ideas, or passions, this is the place for you. Provided you don’t get lost to the call of the clubs.

This has made it so much easier to expand beyond the safety net of Love, Work, and Sport. Which I think is true of anyone if you ask the right question. And of course, I have other friendships where we breeze past these topics to get to the heart of the matter - I simply needed to take this thought that I had in my brain and write about it a little bit.

So with that, maybe just think about your five before you next go on a date or out to meet your friends 😈