I'm Gemma, a geographer by training. Waymark & Wonder is, in part, my attempt to live inside a question: if attention is one of the most powerful human capacities we possess, what does it mean to cultivate it well?

Why I'm doing this

I have become increasingly interested in the role attention plays in shaping my life. My struggles with my mental health have forced me to confront the idea that if I'm not my thoughts, who am I?

What I notice influences what I come to understand. What I understand affects the choices I am able to make. Those choices shape how I act, and my actions gradually create both the warp and weft of my life and the world in which other people must live.

I have often moved through life responding to whatever was most urgent, visible or expected of me, in a desperate attempt to be both good enough and fix every hurt I see in the world (not sure if this is just an eldest daughter phenomenon?). I have absorbed other people’s ideas about what success should look like, which ambitions are worthwhile, how quickly I should move and what kinds of experiences matter. Some of those ideas have enriched me, pushed me in a good way, or softened into ease and delight. Others have taken time to recognise, question and unlearn. Setting them down is often a harder practice than internalising them in the first place.

I am always seeking connection: to myself, to my loved ones and the world around me. I have used different tools or lenses to find this connection over the course of my life: through travel, walking, geography, yoga, making, reading, conversation, scent, landscape and voice notes to friends that could have been podcasts. Not all these experiences look significant from the outside. Often, their importance came from the quality of attention I brought to them, or that others inspired me to bring.

What I want Waymark & Wonder to become

I am not creating Waymark & Wonder because I believe I have discovered the correct way to live. I am creating it because I have found a set of questions that I want to pursue seriously.

I see my role less as an expert with answers and more as a researcher, guide, curator and fellow explorer. We're shipmates on The Beagle. I want to notice interesting paths, bring ideas into conversation, gather useful practices and say, "ooh come and look at this!"

A meaningful life cannot be reduced to a universal checklist. Fulfilment will look different across people, places, cultures, relationships and stages of life. What I can offer are waymarks based on my own reflections and lived experience. A waymark might be an essay, a walk, a question, a conversation, a book, a place, a creative experiment or an encounter with somebody else's way of seeing.

For now, Waymark & Wonder is a home for my own inquiry. I hope that making the inquiry public will create accountability, invite conversation and allow other people's experiences and perspectives to shape what it becomes.

Over time, it may grow into something more collective, a set of our own experiences with intentional attention. But I think it needs to begin honestly, with the questions I am asking and the practices through which I am trying to answer them.