January seemed to blitz past pretty quickly this year, and I’m hoping that we can shift into the longer hours of daylight and warmer days sooner rather than later, and similarly quickly. The winter has (so far) been a relatively mild one (particularly here in South Wales in which we were the only part of the country that the blanket of snow failed to reach). I’ve had a little look around the garden and have been seeking to tidy things up a little from where the windblown pots had been scattered and with the clearer line of sight to where the ivy has spread across the flowerbeds.

A couple of years ago I finally got a hollyhock plant or two to take from seed harvested from my parents’ garden in Norfolk. The plants grew massive (10, nearly 11 feet tall) and I had neighbours speak admiringly about how the sight of these spikes of flowers poking over the tops of the fences made them smile.

Hollyhocks live on a two year life cycle. Each spike of flowers produces thousands of seeds, those seeds can spread in a radius of land nearby, they grow into smaller, non flowering plants the following year, retrench over that Winter, and then grow fully and flower the second year. On that basis 2026 is set to be a flowering year. We’ve had a whole bundle of plants come up and grow over the course of 2025, quite a few of them got smushed by rust last autumn, and then more got chomped by slugs and by frost over the last few months. But it does look like there’s some hardy ones that have made it through, and I’m hoping that with some sun and some feed I’ll be cheering up the neighbours with their blooms again.

I picked up a small rotary composter from the middle of Lidl last year with the idea of using it to get some leaf mould going speedily (there being lots of articles online praising its magical properties). Having spent a month or two stuffing it with leaves in the Autumn and giving it a tombola spin every week or two, the leaf matter does seem to have all mulched down (shrinking down to roughly a quarter of the volume) and I’ve been bemused to find the occasional earthworm has found its way into it for a fairground ride. From the size of them I wouldn’t have thought they were born in there, but it would seem that earthworms are cannier climbers than I would have guessed.

Which all brought to mind an interesting philosophical idea that I’ve occasionally contemplated adjacent to the coaching work. Back in the 4th Century BCE, Eubulides, a Greek philosopher who had a rep for, and a love of, paradoxes, put forward his ideas about when a heap stopped being a heap (or, to use the local lingo, the Sorites paradox). 

The idea was that if you were to remove a grain of sand from a heap (of sand), you still have a heap of sand. The paradox asks, if you were to repeat this over and over again, at what point does it shift from being a heap to being a non-heap? When you’re left with one or two grains of sand, it’s not really a heap any more, but removing a single grain of sand doesn’t/can’t make it not a heap…

The main thing that I find, pondering this paradox, is the limitation of language as a way of moving back and forth from general terminology to specifics. It also presents an interesting vantage point for the coach in terms of showing how incremental work can not seem to make any difference to the broadest view on short timescales and as a step by step basis, but that over time, and with repetition, you can remove (or make) a heap.

Many of the aspirations that people bring into a coaching relationship are couched in terminology that is rarely precise or defined enough to be able to really take significant steps towards achieving them, or understanding how close you are to doing so. “This year I’ll be better.” is so nebulous in conception that it’d be really hard to get a handle on how well any moves towards that are going. Or, that it would be vague enough to convince yourself that you’re trying your best, but being left with the nagging sense that it’s not really happening. 

And so the heap concept works quite nicely as a way of framing that the focus should be on the action that you’re taking (the moving of the grain of sand) and building that into a habit. Then once that’s in place, looking at the rate of progress and whether it would need to be ramped up in order to achieve the class change in this lifetime. But it, at core, also provides an antidote to inertia, a tiny, but manageable and repeatable shift, can provide the change of course that will shunt a person towards their destination, at the very least it provides a contrast from doing nothing against which it is possible to look at feasibility. 

In a true sense of trying to practice what I preach, there’s been a bundle of things that I’ve been deferring doing or never quite getting around to over the past 12 months. Through January I had a bit of a run at a handful of them, and while it’s true things got derailed again on a couple of occasions (gah, for January illnesses and grots) , I’ve made some progress and had a couple of successes, and those hurdles were much less monolithic and unmanageable than I’d feared.

So, as I sit here typing this on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I’m already planning on where I’ll be able to apply the magic leaf mold and dreaming of gangling hollyhocks all over the garden, and the happy bees of Spring. 

Just need the sun to burn through these clouds.