Same Sun

I grew up with a Polish dad and an Irish mum in a multicultural town in England, surrounded by families from all over the world. Each of them had their own way of seeing things and their own answers to the same questions, and it fascinated me how the same life could look so different depending on who you asked. It still does.

Over the years I’ve travelled through Europe, Africa, the Americas and Australia, spent six months living in Jamaica, and these days I live in Asia.

The more places I’ve been, the more I’ve noticed that people everywhere deal with the same things, like love and loss, work and worry, belonging, and what it means to live well. What changes from place to place is how people think about them. Sometimes it’s a word for a feeling I’d never managed to put into words, and sometimes it’s a small daily habit that makes something hard a little easier.

A lot of these ideas are hundreds, even thousands, of years old, and every so often a researcher somewhere finds evidence for the same thing today. I love it when the same idea turns up in two places that had nothing to do with each other.

I find that comforting. Whatever’s on my mind, there’s a good chance someone, somewhere, has thought about it for a long time, and hearing how they see it often helps me look at it differently.

So that’s what Same Sun is about. Every day it shares one idea from somewhere in the world, alongside how another culture, or modern science, sees the same thing. Then every Sunday, an email takes one of those ideas further, looking at where it comes from, what it means, why it’s lasted, and who else around the world has lived it. There’s a lot more room in an email than in a caption.

I called it Same Sun because we all live under the same sun, and what we see depends on where we’re standing.

I hope you enjoy reading Same Sun as much as I’ve enjoyed discovering, learning and writing it.