Somehow, I Think My Life Is Trying To Tell Me Something

I’ve never been one for signs. I don’t think the universe writes you letters, and I’m generally suspicious of anyone who reckons every bit of bad luck is a lesson wearing a disguise.

But I do know that there’s a difference between a sign and a pattern. A sign is something you can shrug off. A pattern is something that keeps turning up until you deal with it.

The last few years have definitely been a pattern for me.

The People

At the end of June 2025 I lost Philip Hayward-Surry.

I met Phil when I was sixteen, back when I was a kid with a guitar, a handful of finished songs and no good reason for anyone to take me seriously. Phil took me seriously anyway.

He was the first person outside my own head to hear something in what I was doing, and he made it one of his missions to put his time and his belief behind it. He never stopped either. He was still quietly nudging me to dig deeper and write more honestly right up to his final days.

In the middle of August this year I lost Lindsay Boyd.

Lindsay first walked into the third Open Mic @ The Dan on the 22nd of November 2006 and never really left. Best dressed man in the room, always in a tie, a gravelly blues voice that could make Tom Waits sound like Pavarotti, and one of the nicest, most genuine human beings I have ever met.

Twelve days later, on the 25th, I lost Kenneth Doyle.

Ken had been in my life since 2003, my mentor in IT, web development and online marketing, and the reason ZenWeb Systems exists at all. Just about everything I know about building things online, I know because Ken took the time to show me.

Three men, three separate corners of my life. Phil taught me music, Ken taught me the trade that pays for the music, and Lindsay taught me what a room full of musicians is supposed to feel like.

Which means both of the men who had mentored me are gone, and all three of them inside fourteen months. Whatever those three handed over, I’m the one left holding it.

The Year

Then there’s everyone else. 2026 has certainly been rough for anyone who grew up with a radio or TV on.

• Dolly Parton
• Tim Curry
• Chuck Norris
• Neil Sedaka.
• Bonnie Tyler
• Glenn A. Baker
• Sam Neill

Voices and deeds that had been part of the furniture since I was a kid, going one after the other like someone was quietly clearing a room.

You can’t watch that many of them go without working out what it all means. I suppose at 55, I am getting to the age where your heroes start to disappear in front of your very eyes.

The Blood Tests

And then, with no drama at all, came the thing that actually got me moving.

Every three months I have a set of blood tests done to see where I am tracking with my health focusing especially on my cholesterol and blood sugar levels.

The last set came back slightly up. Not alarming. Just up. Nobody rang me at nine o’clock at night but the numbers were heading in the wrong direction at a walking pace.

That’s the bit that sat with me. Ken and Lindsay and Phil were things that happened to me but the blood test results were a thing happening because of me. No bad luck involved, no one to blame, just the accumulated arithmetic of how I’ve been living for a very long time.

It was a warning shot. Something that I needed to take seriously.

What The Pattern Actually Says

Three ideas. None of them new. Each one can be found in a book, probably many books. But there’s a big gap between reading something and truly understanding it.

Everything is impermanent. Not just people. Bands, venues, businesses, health, careers, and the particular version of yourself you’ve been coasting along on.

Buddhism has been saying this for two and a half thousand years and I’ve been nodding along politely for about ten of them without ever properly believing it.

My life is shorter today than it was yesterday. Mathematically obvious. Actually feeling it, not obvious at all. The sum never runs the other way, and “one day” has never once appeared on a calendar.

My health is not a project for later. It’s the thing every other project sits on top of. Every plan I have for the music, the studio, the blogs and the businesses quietly assumes a body that still works.

That assumption is the only one I hadn’t been checking.

What I’ve Done About It

Not a life overhaul but so far I have done three specific things.

1. I’ve retired myself as a covers musician

For years I made a living playing other people’s songs. I was good at it. It paid, the rooms were friendly, and it was about as safe as music gets.

I’ve also written more than a thousand songs since I was thirteen, and most of them have never been heard by anyone but me.

Playing covers was never a betrayal of that. It was just a very comfortable way of never quite getting round to it.

There’s always another Saturday night, always another set list, and the years go by in a way that feels productive right up until you count them.

So, on June 21st, 2026 I played my last covers gig, and that was that.

Everything now goes into writing, recording, performing and finding homes for my own songs. My next release (the PastPresentFuture album), the live-streaming out of SongMachine that I am working on getting up and running by the end of the year, where I work the songs out in front of people instead of behind a closed door.

If I have fewer days left than I had yesterday, I’d rather spend them on the songs that nobody else can write except me.

2. The Drive To 99

99 is a number of kilograms. That’s the target. I started at 165 which was my weight at my last medical checkup.

Naming it was my deliberate homage to Robert Fripp and his “Drive To 1981” which spawned the King Crimson 1980’s trilogy of albums… Discipline, Beat and Three Of A Perfect Pair.

I’ve spent my working life running projects, and I know exactly what happens to a goal that doesn’t have a name, a number and a finish line attached.

Nothing happens to it. It sits there being a good intention. “I should get healthier” has been my good intention for the better part of two decades and to date it has achieved precisely nothing.

“The Drive To 99” has a name, a number and a finish line. It also has a scoreboard I can’t argue with, because those quarterly blood test results keep coming in whether I like the result or not.

Weight is just the metric that’s easiest to count. The blood tests are the actual point.

Now, I’m certainly not turning this blog into a weight loss diary. But I’m not hiding it either, because the whole reason it exists is that I stopped hiding from it.

3. Getting 4S onto paper

Slow. Steady. Simple. Silent. I’ve carried those four words as a theoretical way of living around in my head for years.

They’re behind how I want to work, how I want to write, how I want to run the businesses, and how I’d like to be around other people. They’re also the reason why I sold up in Adelaide and moved down to Yankalilla.

Here’s the problem though. A philosophy that only lives in your head isn’t a philosophy. It’s a wish, a vibe, a mood. It bends to fit whatever you were going to do anyway, and it never once tells you that you’re wrong.

So, for the first time I’m going to define what these four words really mean to me.

I’m writing it down properly. What each word means on a personal level first, then what it means for the music, for the businesses, and for my life practice.

Four words, four domains, sixteen answers.

Underneath all of it sits one idea: owning my own attention. Deciding what gets my time, my emotional register, my mental space and my ears, instead of letting the world decide by default.

Once it’s a document, it can hold me to it. Including on the days I’d rather it didn’t.

About Yankalilla

I sold up in the city and came down to Yankalilla for a reason. It’s quieter, slower, smaller and further from the noise.

The trouble with that kind of plan is you can move your house a long way without moving a single one of your habits. For a while there I was living a city life in a country town, same pace, same noise, same reflexive yes to everything, just with a nicer view out the window.

The last two years however have made that gap impossible to keep ignoring. Closing it is the whole job now.

This Isn’t a Sad Post

I want to be careful here, because at the moment this post is reading like one and it isn’t.

Losing Ken and Lindsay and Phil was awful, and I’m not going to insult any of them by suggesting a bit of personal clarity makes it worth it. It doesn’t. I’d hand back every realisation on this page to have the three of them still here.

But grief doesn’t arrive with an instruction manual and it doesn’t arrive empty-handed either. It arrives carrying information and what one does with that information is the only part of it you ever get to control.

What I’ve taken from mine is this: less time than I thought, and more choice than I assumed. Those two facts sound counter-intuitive but they point in exactly the same direction.

One More Date…

There’s one date I’ve left until last, because it’s the one everything else has been sitting on top of.

On the 22nd of November this year it will be six years since I lost Mara.

Now, I’m not going to write about that here. She has her own place in my work and it isn’t on this page but it would be dishonest of me to lay out the last fourteen months as though grief walked into my life in June of 2025.

It didn’t.

It arrived in 2020 and it has never once left the house. Phil and Lindsay and Ken didn’t start anything. They landed on ground that was already broken, which is the only reason three deaths and a set of ordinary blood test results could move me this far.

Six years is long enough to notice what grief does if you let it just sit there. It doesn’t announce itself. It settles in, gets comfortable, and quietly takes the shape of the life you’re living, until one day you’re a bloke who doesn’t get up, doesn’t write his own songs, and doesn’t much like the numbers on the page.

That’s the part I’m finished with.

Where All This Is Going?

This blog will be documenting the upcoming album, and what it actually takes to make one at this stage of a life rather than the start of one.

The live-streaming project, the Drive To 99, numbers and all.

The 4S philosophy definition as it gets pinned down word by word plus, whatever the studio and the businesses throw up along the way.

For me, I’m not looking at all of this as a total fresh start. I’ve had a few of those in my time and they never take. This is a narrowing of focus… Fewer things, done properly, at a pace I choose.

Phil taught me what it does to a person when somebody believes in them before there’s any evidence to go on.

Ken taught me how to build things with conviction and confidence.

Lindsay taught me how to be decent to people while you’re doing it.

And Mara gave me the gift of being loved and re-taught me how to feel again.

None of these people can be paid back now. The only currency left is passing it on, and you can’t pass on much of anything from a chair you’ve stopped getting out of.

So with all that being said, I’m going to stop wasting the time that I’ve still got ahead of me and make them all (and in turn, myself) proud.

Peace,

Corey 🙂