Who was richer?

I wasn't sitting in his field wishing I had it. I was sitting in his field living it.

Hello fellow traveller,

After the breathwork retreat in the New Forest recently, I drove my camper van to a field.

Not my field. Someone else's. A man I'd never met, who rents out a corner of his land through an app for people like me to pitch up for a night. I found it, booked it, drove there.

The field was beautiful. The kind of beautiful that takes a moment to register. Long driveway. Many immaculate paddocks. Many racehorses. The kind of property that communicates, without saying a word, that the person who owns it has done very well indeed.

He had. When I arrived and we got talking, he mentioned he works in investment banking, helping people sell businesses. He'd been connected, through his world, to the management of extraordinary sums. The kind of numbers most people never encounter. I’d had previous experience of that world having taken the Conran Shop to sale and I’ve now left that behind. In fact, he thought he recognised me.

He also mentioned, almost in passing, that the money he makes from renting out his field probably covers a day's wages for a stable hand. He does it anyway.

The next day I saw him come home from working in London and was feeding the horses.

And I sat in my chair, under my awning, in his field, and I thought: who's richer?

The question wasn't rhetorical

I want to be clear about what I felt in that moment. There was no envy. No judgement. No sense of lack. Not even wistfulness.

What I felt was presence. And through presence, something unexpected: I had it. Right then. The field, the evening light, the horses moving quietly in the paddock, the stillness. I wasn't sitting there wishing I owned it. I was sitting there experiencing it. Fully. In the present moment.

He owned the field. I was living it.

And I sat there thinking: I could probably have had something like this, if I'd stayed on the CEO track, kept accumulating, kept building. I chose something else. And sitting in that chair, I didn't feel the lack of it. I felt the fullness of what I had instead. I felt like the richest man in the world. I had choice, connection, presence, time, gratitude to name but a few…a total absence of lack in other words.

That's not a consolation prize. That's a completely different relationship with enough.

What presence actually gives you

The founders and CEOs I work with are often him (as I was). They own the field. They commute to it and back. They fund it and maintain it and worry about it. But they rarely get to sit in it.

Not because they don't want to. Because they haven't yet discovered that sitting in it (or an essential version of it) is available right now, without selling anything or achieving anything or waiting until some future version of their life arrives.

Presence gives you access to what you already have. That's not a small thing. That's everything.

Absence of lack isn't about having less. It's about being so fully in what you have that the question of more simply doesn't arise. And when you come from that position everything is possible.

I sat in a stranger's field on a Tuesday evening and felt like the richest person alive. Not because I'd accumulated anything. Because I was there, fully, without anywhere else to be.

What would it feel like to be fully in your life, right now, exactly as it is?

Best,
Hugh

You've lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.

If something in this resonates and you'd like to explore what it would feel like to be fully in your life, that's exactly the kind of conversation we'd have together. Let's talk.

P.S. That's me in the photograph. In the field. It was one of the best evenings I can remember.