Week 11.5 Ten Things I Learned
In January 2025, I realised I had been writing this blog for ten years. It started as something for my kids and grandkids in Australia — inspired by letters my great-grandmother Lizzie Peelman wrote to her husband from Linton, near Ballarat, in 1895. She wrote about the chooks and the kids and the neighbours. I thought I could do the same. I wasn't sure anyone would care. Ten years and 526 Sunday mornings later, here are ten things I seem to have learned along the way.
Walking fixes almost everything
I started tracking 10,000 steps a day back in 2016 and I never really stopped. First with Zoey at 0700hrs, then with Boeke — through the heath, around the pingo pools, into the forest behind our place. I once walked 6km in a single day just getting around our own building site.
Years ago I saw a Heart Foundation billboard in South Melbourne that said: "Old Age Catching Up? Walk Faster." I've never forgotten it. Walking is how I think, how I process the week, how I notice the seasons changing. The forest looks different every single time. I have never once tired of it.
Plantar fasciitis, a dicky knee, cold mornings, rain — none of it has stopped me for long. Short walks I can do in my clogs. At 75, I'm still going, and I think walking is a big part of why.
Purpose is more energising than passion
I read something once from a writer named John P. Weiss that I copied into Google Keep and have returned to many times. He said that purpose — something that can impact the lives of others for the better — is even more energy-giving than passion.
That is exactly what running a care farm has taught me. We've had audits, mountains of paperwork, government cutbacks, a client management system that would make your head spin, COVID protocols, and a gas bill of €24,000 in one year. And yet Janny and I have never once seriously considered stopping. The clients — Lucas now in his 17th year, others passing the 10-year mark — give the work a weight that no job I ever had in Australia quite matched.
The purpose of it all is baked into every Monday morning when the cars pull up and the day begins.
Mum's sayings turn out to be right
My mother Adele had a saying for every situation. "Bide your time." "As one door closes, another opens." "Keep your wits about you." "Smile when you say hello." I have quoted her, without embarrassment, in dozens of these posts over ten years.
When the roofing contractor was months late and we were losing patience, I forced myself to remember "bide your time" — and eventually the roof got done. When one of our longest-serving clients finally moved on, I found comfort in "as one door closes". And every time Ben heads off to somewhere new and unpredictable — Shanghai, Seoul, Namibia — I still say "keep your wits about you — remember what Grandma said." He rolls his eyes. But I say it anyway.
Mum also told me from an early age not to talk politics or religion. I have tried — not always successfully — to honour that one too.
The mundane things add up to a full life
I found this on the BBC somewhere and it struck such a nerve that I saved it immediately:
That is exactly why I write this. Not the highlights — the pumpkins drowning again, the bookkeeping I keep putting off, the outside taps that need turning off before winter, the same spot photographed every morning at 0815hrs as the light slowly comes back after the solstice. That is what a life looks like from the inside.
And one day, hopefully, the grandkids — or their grandkids — will read it the same way I read Lizzie's letters from 1895.
A good helper is worth their weight in gold
I once wrote, somewhat nervously, that I had taken on a new helper and was worried I'd have to do more work in order to keep him busy. That was Tjeerd. I could not have been more wrong.
Over the years, Tjeerd has become indispensable. He "sees" things that need doing. He tidies up my messes. He planted butterfly gardens (vlindertuin) all around the property. He helped with the glasshouse, the fencing, the insulation, the heat pump installation — often doing the harder half of any job without being asked. The 2024 house renovation would have been a very different, grimmer story without him.
Knowing when to ask for help, and then genuinely appreciating the person who gives it — that is something I have learned more slowly than I should have.
"Pottering" is underrated
I first read about pottering on the BBC — an employee off work for some reason, discovering the quiet value of not quite doing anything in particular. I remember exclaiming "that's me!" I have returned to that article and that idea many times since.
Pottering means moving slowly from one small thing to another — splitting some rhubarb, stacking a bit of firewood, repairing a gate hinge, mowing a patch of grass. It looks like not much. It feels like everything. The list never really ends and that, I have come to understand, is rather the point.
In a world that seems increasingly convinced that productivity is the measure of a good day, pottering is a quiet act of resistance — and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
The water shapes everything here
I came from the driest continent on earth. Here, the water is everywhere — in the canals, under the soil, threatening the foundations of 800,000 Dutch houses, filling the pingos behind our place, drying out in record droughts, overflowing in record floods, and at the heart of a history that stretches back to before the first mention of Wijnjewoude itself.
Living alongside it — and on it, in our boat — has changed the way I think about almost everything. The Dutch relationship with water is one of permanent, practical negotiation. Dykes and pumping stations are not just engineering; they are philosophy. The idea that a society can collectively manage an existential threat, if it chooses to, has stayed with me as the news from the wider world has grown steadily more concerning.
Kenneth Grahame said that, not me — but I have quoted it more than once, and I believe it more each year.
Goodbyes are part of the work — and they still hurt
In this line of work, you get attached. The Twins — Hendrik and William — came to us in October 2010 and had their last day in September 2018. Eight years. I had been with them so long that I could finally tell them apart. Over those years they had become simply "the Twins" — part of us.
"Our kids always seem to grow up and move on," I wrote when two long-serving clients left in the same week. "We hope that we have played some small part in the system which tries to find a meaningful place for all its people."
And then in August 2018, we lost one of our boys in a house fire. I did not write much that week. There was not much to say, other than: he was one of our boys.
Acceptance is not the same as not caring. It just means you keep going.
Being far from home never quite stops hurting — and that's OK
Christmas has always been a strangely difficult time. I have written about it more than once — the distance from family and friends, the feeling of being in the wrong hemisphere for something that is supposed to be warm. In the early years, I wrote about it quietly; in later years, more openly.
What I have also written about, many times over, is what has replaced it: Janny's enormous family, and the village that has wrapped itself around our lives. The brothers and sisters, the nieces and nephews, the boating friends, the clients who are now measured in years with us rather than weeks.
And when Cheryl Paul or Glen visit, or when I speak to the grandkids on a birthday, or when Ben comes home and we sit around the table — those moments are sharper and sweeter for the distance. You notice them differently when they don't happen every week.
Write it down — even the boring bits
When I started this in October 2015, I wasn't sure if there was enough happening in Wijnjewoude for a weekly update. I wasn't sure anyone would care. I almost didn't start.
Reading back through ten years of it now — with the help of my son Ben and a remarkable piece of technology — I can see that it was all worth writing down. The marten in the roof. The pumpkins drowning for the third year in a row. The morning I walked into a wall of birdsong at 0600hrs and stood there for a while, not sure why it mattered so much. The week I didn't write much because one of our boys had died.
A retired police chief whose writing I follow had a father who was a judge — worked until he was 79, but never found time to write in the journal his son had given him. I think about that often.
Lizzie wrote from Linton in 1895. Her great-grandson is writing from Wijnjewoude in 2025. The chooks are different. The essentials are the same.
Write it down. Even the boring bits. Especially the boring bits.
This article was written with the help of Claude AI, which read all 526 posts of This Week in Wijnjewoude — from October 2015 to early 2026 — and helped identify the themes and moments that kept reappearing over ten years. The words, as always, are my own. The idea was Ben's.
Ken Copeland writes This Week in Wijnjewoude from De Twa Buken (The Two Beeches), a care farm in Wijnjewoude, Friesland, in the Netherlands.
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