Introducing Pushing the Wave 2024

Each year, when I gather together the pieces that have made up Pushing the Wave over the previous twelve months, I’m struck by how little the process feels like simple compilation. These essays, reflections, travel pieces, photographs, and drawings may have been written and created week by week, often in response to whatever was occupying my thoughts at the time, but when seen together they begin to reveal patterns: recurring questions, persistent concerns, and unexpected connections. What felt provisional or incomplete when written can, in retrospect, take on a different weight, shaped by what came before and after it.

Pushing the Wave 2024 brings together that year’s work in a form that allows it to be read slowly and as a whole. While many of the pieces first appeared on the site, they have been edited and reshaped for the book, with repetition pared back and emphasis adjusted so that the collection works as a sustained conversation rather than a sequence of standalone posts. The result, I hope, is something closer to a long-form meditation on a year lived attentively. The writing is accompanied by a substantial body of photographic and drawn work that reflects the same impulse: to look carefully, to pause, and to make sense of experience through attention.

The year opens with “Finding the Flow”, a piece prompted by the familiar ritual of New Year self-assessment. Rather than embracing the language of resolutions and optimisation, it questions why ideas that were once taken for granted—losing oneself in a task, finding pleasure in repetition, making things with one’s hands—now need to be rediscovered and explained. What begins as a lightly sceptical response to lifestyle journalism becomes a broader meditation on attention, distraction, and the quiet satisfactions that give shape to our days. It sets the tone for much of what follows: curiosity tempered by doubt, and a resistance to easy answers.

That inward-looking thread continues in “Love or Limerence?”, which takes a contemporary psychological term and places it under a cooler, more questioning light. The piece explores the point at which attraction tips into obsession, and what that tells us about longing, projection, and emotional vulnerability. While rooted in personal reflection, it is also concerned with how language shapes our understanding of inner life, and how readily we borrow clinical or quasi-scientific frameworks to explain experiences that are, at heart, profoundly human. In doing so, it asks how much clarity such labels genuinely offer, and what they may obscure.

Other essays in the book turn more explicitly to the public sphere. “This Is How We Get Heard” revisits questions of voice, power, and participation, arguing that many of the freedoms we have come to assume are neither fixed nor guaranteed. Drawing on history as well as recent experience, it reflects on how systems of representation can be hollowed out quietly, without dramatic rupture, and what that means for those who find themselves increasingly unheard. It is one of the more overtly political pieces in the volume, but it remains grounded in observation rather than rhetoric, and in a belief that attention and memory still matter.

Alongside these more outward-facing pieces, the book also returns repeatedly to questions of control, chance, and the shape that lives take despite our best intentions.

Two pieces that sit quietly at the heart of the book, “The Unplanned Road” and “The Way It Always Ends,” reflect on the tension between intention and outcome. Both are concerned, in different ways, with the limits of control: how lives, journeys, and even creative projects rarely follow the routes we imagine for them. One approaches this through movement and chance encounters, the other through endings and repetition, but together they circle the same idea: that meaning often emerges not from careful design, but from attentiveness to what happens despite it. They are among the more understated essays in the volume, but they help give shape to the whole, reminding us that uncertainty is not simply something to be endured, but a condition in which insight becomes possible.

Travel has always been an important strand of Pushing the Wave, not as an exercise in cataloguing destinations, but as a way of thinking about place, memory, and continuity. Movement—whether across borders or simply away from the familiar—has a way of loosening habits of thought, allowing different questions to surface. In Pushing the Wave 2024, this is particularly evident in pieces and images from the north coast of Northern Ireland. Here, landscape, music, and history intersect, and the writing moves between the physical presence of the coast and the cultural currents that have shaped it.

A similar sensibility underpins the essays and images drawn from Cuba, where contradiction is unavoidable. The pieces written there resist both nostalgia and easy critique, instead sitting with the tensions of a place shaped by history, ideology, resilience, and improvisation. These are not travel pieces in search of revelation or transformation, but attempts to understand what it means to encounter another society without collapsing its complexity into a single narrative, or using difference as a form of reassurance.

Running alongside these outward journeys, and the recurring recognition of how little unfolds as planned, is a sustained engagement with contemporary culture and technology. “The Dark Underbelly of AI” revisits a subject that has become almost impossible to ignore, cutting through both hype and alarmism to consider how new tools are framed, sold, and absorbed. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as an abstract future threat or salvation, the piece asks more immediate questions: who benefits, who is displaced, and what is quietly lost when convenience is prioritised over craft, judgment, and responsibility. It is less a warning than an invitation to think more carefully about the systems we accept by default.

Throughout the book, visual material plays a more prominent role than in previous volumes. Drawings and photographic essays from places including Paris, Barcelona, the Amalfi Coast, and England sit alongside the writing. They are not intended as illustrations in the conventional sense, but as parallel forms of attention; ways of holding onto texture, light, and atmosphere when words alone feel insufficient. I remain reluctant to describe myself as a visual artist, but I’ve come to recognise that making images is part of the same impulse that drives the essays: a desire to slow down, to notice, and to preserve something of the moment before it slips away. In that sense, the images belong to the same conversation as the text.

Taken together, Pushing the Wave 2024 is less a record of a year than a conversation with it. Some pieces are quiet and personal, others more outward-facing and critical, but all are shaped by the same underlying questions: what matters, what endures, and how we might live more attentively in a world that constantly pulls us in the opposite direction. If there is a common thread, it lies in a belief that attention—sustained, patient attention—remains a form of resistance.

For those who have followed Pushing the Wave over time, this volume continues a familiar journey. For new readers, it offers an entry point into a body of work that values reflection over reaction, and observation over noise. I hope it invites you to linger.

📚 Explore Pushing the Wave 2024 here↗︎