love – Find Joy in the Middle

There is no final edit: what 70 Up reminded me about finding joy in the middle

September 23, 2026 jameshempsall

I watched the final episode of 70 Up last night and found it difficult to shake off. I found it poignant, sad, uplifting and, perhaps most of all, confusing. That last word matters because I don’t think this extraordinary series left me with a neat conclusion about life, and perhaps that is precisely its achievement. For more than six decades we have watched the same people grow from seven-year-old children into adults and now into their seventies.

We have seen ambitions expressed with the beautiful certainty of childhood encounter the much less predictable reality of actually living. Careers have happened, relationships have flourished and failed, families have grown, people have experienced loss, health has changed, expectations have been revised and life has repeatedly refused to follow the script. Watching the final instalment, I found myself thinking again and again about Find Joy in the Middle, because if there was ever a demonstration that the richness of life happens between beginnings and endings, surely this was it.

The original 7 Up was interested in a compelling question: how much of the adult can already be seen in the child? It looked particularly at the effects of class, background and opportunity. Yet, watching those lives from the vantage point of 70, I was struck by how inadequate any simple idea of prediction eventually becomes. Certainly, our beginnings matter. Where we come from, the opportunities available to us and the expectations placed upon us all shape what follows. But they do not tell the whole story. Life intervenes. People surprise us and we surprise ourselves. Things we desperately want do not happen, while other things we could never have imagined become enormously important. Doors close and unexpected ones open. We adapt, compromise, recover, change our minds and sometimes discover that something we once regarded as a disappointment looks very different when viewed from further down the road.

That is one of the things I have tried to explore through Find Joy in the Middle. We are very attracted to beginnings. New jobs, new relationships, new projects, new homes and new years all come beautifully uncluttered by what follows. At the beginning, possibility is everywhere and disappointment has not yet had time to interfere. We are equally fascinated by endings, because endings allow us to construct a story about what happened. Retirement speeches, obituaries, anniversaries and biographies take the untidiness of decades and arrange it into something that appears coherent. What we talk about much less is the enormous space between the two, where most of life actually happens. The middle is where plans meet reality, where certainty becomes doubt, where achievements coexist with disappointments and where we discover that life is much harder to classify as successful or unsuccessful than we once imagined.

There was something almost unnerving about seeing the participants confronted by their younger selves. Most of us are spared the experience of watching our seven, 14, 21 or 28-year-old selves describing confidently what we expect from the future. Yet those earlier versions of us still exist somewhere. I can certainly look backwards and remember times when I thought I knew where my own life was going. There were ambitions I thought would matter enormously, worries that occupied far too much space and assumptions about the future that turned out to be completely wrong. There are also people, experiences and opportunities that became hugely important to me which I could never have predicted. Perhaps one of the gifts of getting older is slowly becoming more forgiving of the person we used to be. They were making choices without knowing what we know now. What looks obvious in retrospect was rarely obvious at the time.

And that was where the sadness of 70 Up sat for me alongside something unexpectedly uplifting. Time is impossible to ignore in the programme. We see what six decades do. People who were once present are no longer there, possibilities have disappeared, relationships have changed and some chapters are definitively over. There is genuine loss in that. Yet the lives we are watching stubbornly refuse to become simple stories of triumph or failure. A life can contain achievement and regret, contentment and disappointment, love and loss without one cancelling out the other. Someone can arrive somewhere very different from where their seven-year-old self expected and still have lived a life of enormous value. There is something wonderfully liberating about that.

Perhaps we spend too much of our lives waiting for the moment when everything will finally make sense. We tell ourselves that things will settle down when this busy period is over, when the project is finished, when work becomes easier, when we have enough money, when the family is sorted, when we achieve the thing we have been working towards. Somewhere ahead of us exists an imaginary point at which the pieces will fall into place and we will finally understand what it has all been about. Then, presumably, we can relax and enjoy ourselves. Yet watching people at 70 reflecting upon lives we have witnessed in fragments since childhood made me wonder whether that moment ever really arrives. Perhaps life remains unfinished and contradictory for as long as we are living it.

That thought could sound bleak, but I find it strangely hopeful. What if we do not have to wait for resolution before we allow ourselves joy? What if something does not have to turn out as we hoped for it to have been worthwhile? What if we do not yet have to decide whether a particular period of our life was a success or failure? We might simply acknowledge that it happened, that it changed us, and that we carried on. Finding joy in the middle has never meant pretending that difficult things are wonderful or encouraging a relentless positivity that refuses to acknowledge disappointment. For me, it is almost the opposite. It is about recognising that joy can exist alongside uncertainty, sadness, frustration and regret. We do not have to eliminate one before we are entitled to experience the other.

That may be why 70 Up left me feeling so many apparently contradictory things at once. It was poignant because we knew we were saying goodbye. It was sad because time, ageing and loss were impossible to avoid. It was uplifting because people keep finding meaning, relationships, interests, humour and reasons to look forward. And it was confusing because there was no great answer waiting at the end. Nobody stepped forward to explain what makes a successful life or reveal the secret of happiness. There was simply the accumulated evidence of people having lived, with all the glorious mess that involves.

Perhaps that is the lesson I am taking from it. There is no final edit while we are living. We do not get to tidy the story before experiencing it. We are always somewhere between what has happened and what might happen next, carrying previous versions of ourselves while becoming somebody slightly different. That middle can sometimes feel frustrating because we want to know how the story turns out. Increasingly, though, I think there is a freedom in accepting that we don’t need to know.

Finding joy in the middle is not about reaching a point where everything has worked out. It is about looking around while the story is still unfinished and noticing what is already here. It is forgiving ourselves for choices made without the benefit of hindsight, accepting that some questions may remain unanswered, valuing the people who are travelling alongside us and staying curious about what might still happen. 70 Up reminded me that a life does not need to have followed the plan to have been a good one. Perhaps the real challenge, whatever our age, is to resist waiting for the final chapter before deciding that the story we are living now is worthy of our attention.

Because we are not waiting for life to happen. We are already in the middle of it.

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

When violence becomes the language of childhood.

August 18, 2026 jameshempsall

I was travelling on a train recently when I found myself sitting close to a young boy, perhaps five years old. For about 30 minutes he talked almost continuously, not about school, friends, football, dinosaurs, superheroes or adventuring in the woods, but about destroying things.

He described blowing things up, exploding buildings, wrecking vehicles, smashing and killing. There was no context, no story, no apparent game, just a stream of imagined destruction that seemed to fascinate him. His parents barely responded and other passengers hardly noticed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Today, the Children’s Commissioner has published a report examining children referred to the Prevent programme. One of its most striking findings is that around seven in 10 children referred do not fit traditional definitions of extremist ideology. Instead, many display a worrying fixation with violence, weapons, mass casualty attacks and harmful online content. The report argues that our systems struggle to respond to these children because they do not fit neatly into existing categories of radicalisation.

As I read the report, my mind returned to that little boy on the train, not because I believe he was a clear and present danger, he was five years old, but because I found myself wondering when it was that violence became such a normal language of childhood.

Of course, this is not entirely new. I grew up watching cowboys and Indians films. We played war games. Toy guns appeared every Christmas. Many of us pointed plastic revolvers at our friends before we were old enough to understand what a real gun could do.

It would be easy, and wrong, to pretend that previous generations were somehow innocent. Children have always explored power, risk and conflict through play. Stories have always contained villains. Boys in particular have often been encouraged to test boundaries through rough-and-tumble play, competition and confrontation.

Yet something feels different. The violence of my childhood was usually embedded within a story. However simplistic and problematic those narratives may have been, there was at least a framework.

Today’s children inhabit a digital world where violence is often detached from meaning. Online platforms can serve up an endless stream of fights, humiliation, cruelty, real-world killings, extreme pornography and videos designed purely to shock. The Children’s Commissioner describes children becoming “fixated on violence” after exposure to harmful online content. Violence is no longer a scene in a film; it is content, and content never ends. That should force us to ask difficult questions about the messages children receive.

Too often, boys are still encouraged to destroy while girls are encouraged to create. A boy knocking down a tower of bricks is laughed at; a girl building one is praised. Boys are given weapons while girls are given crafts. Boys are expected to conquer while girls are expected to nurture. These are caricatures, of course, and modern parenting and education is more nuanced than this. Yet the underlying messages remain surprisingly powerful. We continue to socialise boys towards domination, aggression and risk, even as we express concern about male violence later in life.

Then we seem surprised when some boys become fascinated by power expressed through destruction. The uncomfortable truth is that violence is not a fringe interest in our culture; it sits at the centre of much of our entertainment, media and public discourse. We celebrate military victories. We cheer cinematic revenge. We consume true-crime documentaries at extraordinary rates. We replay footage of attacks and atrocities across rolling news channels. We talk constantly about conflict, threat and enemies. The blame does not solely lie at the feet of social media.

Children are not separate from this culture; they absorb it. The Children’s Commissioner’s report should not simply prompt a discussion about Prevent. It should prompt a discussion about childhood itself.

What stories are children hearing? What images are they seeing? What behaviours are being rewarded? What alternatives are we offering? Because if we want children to create, collaborate, empathise and care, we have to build a culture that values those things as highly as it values competition, conquest and destruction.

The little boy on the train was not the problem. He may simply have been reflecting the world around him. That is what children do. They absorb our values, our anxieties, our obsessions and our dreams. They hold a mirror up to the culture we have created.

And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable question raised by today’s report: not simply what is happening to children, but what are children are learning from us?

It’s so funny, how we don’t call anymore.

August 12, 2026 jameshempsall

It was my birthday recently. There were cards on the window sill, thoughtful texts arriving throughout the day, WhatsApp messages from friends I haven’t seen for years, LinkedIn notifications from professional contacts and the familiar stream of digital kindness that reminds us we are remembered. I was genuinely grateful for every one of them.

Yet among all those messages, there was just one telephone call. Something that caused me to paraphrase Cliff Richard.

This isn’t a complaint. I didn’t feel unloved or overlooked. Quite the opposite. The messages were warm, generous and heartfelt. But the imbalance struck me as an observation worth pondering.

Once upon a time, birthdays involved sitting near the telephone, as it would ring continuously. The call itself was never simply about saying “Happy Birthday”. It was the opening line of a much longer conversation. The birthday greeting soon drifted into other territory. How are things really? Have you heard from so-and-so lately? What happened with that project you were worried about? How are the children? Before long, twenty or thirty minutes had passed. Sometimes longer. The conversation wandered and meandered, discovering things neither person had intended to discuss. There was no agenda and no objective other than human connection. The unexpected happened.

Today, the message arrives instead. A quick “Happy Birthday, James”, perhaps accompanied by an emoji or a thumbs-up, and the exchange is complete. The sentiment is still sincere and the affection is still real, but the experience feels different. Less expansive. More transactional. A thoughtful gesture, certainly, but often a completed task rather than the beginning of a conversation.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that we have never been more connected to our phones. We carry them everywhere, rarely letting them out of our sight. We sleep beside them, check them before getting out of bed and glance at them hundreds of times every day. Yet we seem increasingly reluctant to use them for the very purpose they were originally designed for: talking to another human being.

I notice this phenomenon everywhere. People frequently send a message asking whether they can call. I’ve often wondered what response they are expecting. Increasingly, asking permission to make a phone call has become a social ritual, almost an acknowledgement that an unsolicited conversation feels intrusive in a way it never used to.

I see it in the workplace too. Some younger colleagues visibly tense when the office phone rings. The ringing itself appears to create anxiety. Who could it be? What do they want? Why didn’t they send a message first? To many people, a ringing telephone is no longer an invitation but an interruption, a risk rather than an opportunity.

Then there are the callers who politely ask whether I can talk after I have answered the phone – another ritual I feel. I always find myself smiling at that moment. Well, yes, that’s why I chose to pick up, I have that sort of agency. Yet the question reveals something about the way our culture has changed. We have become accustomed to scheduling and managing communication so carefully that even a spontaneous conversation can feel unusual.

This is not intended as criticism. Every generation develops its own communication norms. Text messaging solves genuine problems. It is efficient, convenient, fast-paced, and respectful of people’s time. It allows us to respond when we are ready rather than forcing an immediate interaction. For busy lives, that flexibility matters.

But I do wonder what we lose when conversation becomes increasingly filtered, managed and controlled. A text message delivers information, but a phone call reveals mood. A WhatsApp message conveys words, while a conversation communicates hesitation, laughter, uncertainty, excitement and emotion. We hear the pause before somebody answers. We notice when their voice sounds tired. We recognise enthusiasm that would never fit inside an emoji. We discover things we didn’t know to ask.

Perhaps this is one reason why loneliness continues to feature so prominently in public conversations despite our endless digital connectedness. We have become remarkably effective at communication, but have we weakened conversation? The distinction matters. Communication is the exchange of information. Conversation is the exchange of humanity.

In Find Joy in the Middle, I explore the importance of living in the spaces between life’s milestones. The middle is where relationships deepen, where understanding grows and where meaning often emerges unexpectedly. It struck me on my birthday that phone conversations inhabit a similar kind of middle. A text message takes us directly to the destination, whereas a conversation allows us to wander through the landscape. Often it is in that wandering that joy is found.

I don’t know whether the decline of voice calls is a temporary cultural shift or a permanent change in how we relate to one another. Perhaps future generations will find our nostalgia for telephone conversations as quaint as handwritten letters. Maybe we can ask AI bots to talk to our friends whilst we are busy doing something (I don’t know what) that’s a better use of our time. But I do know this: the one person who called me on my birthday didn’t simply wish me a happy birthday. We talked, laughed and caught up. We discovered things neither of us knew when the call began. Long after many of the messages had disappeared beneath newer notifications, that conversation stayed with me.

Maybe that’s what all this means.

Not that messaging is wrong. Not that technology has failed us. Not that we should abandon convenience for nostalgia. Rather, that amidst all the pings, alerts, notifications and unread messages, there remains something uniquely powerful about hearing another human voice unexpectedly reach across the distance and ask, “How are you?”

And perhaps, every now and then, that question deserves more than a text.

What type of year has it been for you? One year of Find Joy in the Middle.

June 1, 2026 jameshempsall

It’s been a year since my first book, Find Joy in the Middle hit the bookshelves. When I look back, I see a year that sat squarely in the middle, not just chronologically, but emotionally, socially, and culturally. It was a year that invited us to pause, to take stock, and to recognise the quiet power of being in‑between. In many ways, it felt like the world was catching up with what I’ve been saying for years: that the middle isn’t a place of stagnation, but a place of movement, momentum, and meaning.

For those of us in middle age, it was a year of reframing. I sensed a shift away from the tired old clichés of crisis and decline. Instead, people were beginning to see midlife as a pivot point, a moment to re-evaluate what matters, to shed what no longer fits, and to step into a more honest version of themselves. The conversations I encountered were full of people renegotiating their work, their relationships, their ambitions, and their wellbeing. It was as if the world had collectively exhaled and said, “right, what now?”

The middle class, too, found itself under the spotlight. Not always comfortably. There was a growing awareness of how squeezed and stretched this group had become, not wealthy enough to feel secure, not struggling enough to be prioritised. Yet this discomfort brought clarity. It forced a reckoning with what fairness means, what opportunity should look like, and how society depends on the very people it so often overlooks. The middle, once again, proved itself essential.

Even middle children, my favourite metaphor for the overlooked middle, found new resonance. Families were talking more openly about identity, birth order, and the subtle dynamics that shape us. I heard from many who felt seen for the first time, who recognised that their adaptability, diplomacy, and resilience weren’t accidents, but strengths forged in the in‑between. The middle child became a symbol of what I’ve always believed: that being neither first nor last can be a superpower.

Workplaces, too, were redefined by their middles. Middle managers, often dismissed or misunderstood, were the glue holding hybrid and flexible work together. They were the translators, the stabilisers, the human connectors in a year when organisations were still figuring out what ‘normal’ meant. I saw so many step into their roles with renewed confidence, realising that leadership from the middle is leadership in its most human form.

And then there was the middle ground, that fragile, precious space between extremes. I sensed a growing fatigue with polarisation. People were tired of shouting matches and binary choices. Others have been grasping onto their pre-extinction burst, fearful of change, angry with it and all perceived injustices, and they took to the streets to protest, or to create harm. Those in the middle ground were craving nuance, balance, and the courage to say, “It’s more complicated than that.” The middle ground, long dismissed as indecisive or dull, began to look like the only place where real progress could happen.

So yes, it has been a middle year. Not in the sense of being average or forgettable, but in the sense of being transitional, reflective, and quietly transformative. It was a year that reminded us that the middle is where life actually happens, where we grow, where we adapt, where we find our footing. And if we’re willing to embrace it, the middle can be the most joyful place of all.

I invite you to wonder how ‘middle’ your next year may be, and to think how you will be the architect of it.

www.findjoyinthemiddle.com

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From lockdown to now: Five years of looking back and moving forward.

March 21, 2025 jameshempsall

Our worlds changed on 23 March 2020. We were united by a sense of uncertainty, feelings of anxiety, and of confusion around what was to come. We gathered eyes and mouths agape, in front of TV screens as we were told to stay at home. The outside world fell silent, roads and skies emptied, non-essential shops closed, workplaces ceased operations with some being asked to work at home or be ‘furloughed’ (a new word for most of us), and keyworkers kept our essential services going.

Home was a reassuring sanctuary, if you were lucky, surrounded by loving family members. A time to pause, reflect, look after our basic needs for safety and nourishment. For many it was a trap that intensified disadvantage, deepened dysfunctional relationships, and a exacerbated their lack of opportunity. For our youngest children, their worlds became so much smaller. Some benefitted, some did not. As lockdown(s) continued, we predicted families would feel the effects in terms of parent relationship pressures, domestic abuse, economic burdens, and children’s development would be compromised or delayed. It gives none of us any pleasure to say we were right.

In early years, we started to hear from keyworker parents who needed our support so they could go to work, we delivered for them. Parents not able to use our services started to appreciate in new ways the work we do, and the shared partnership we have in supporting their children’s development and learning. Providers, like all businesses, were juggling with the new realities, the economics, and the need for short- to long-term planning, and supporting their own workforce. Local authorities were contacting us for help in navigating the complexities of Government guidance, financial packages, and the processes needed for business change, so the best possible support could be offered to the whole sector. We were only too pleased to do what we could, it was something core to our mission.

Like many others, online meetings were something of a grey area for us. But we soon got to grips with the technology (after many clumsy attempts). We started to connect as a team to make sense of what was happening on a day-to-day basis. We began meeting with individual local authority early years leads, for mutual support, sense checking, and information sharing. This is a time we look back on with great fondness and friendship. We were in it together. These exchanges formed the basis of our national support programme ‘Finding Your Way Through’ a structured strategy framework, and a set of actions, approaches and resources we developed and freely gave to the sector. Then came the idea to offer a weekly/fortnightly online session for local authority leads for peer support, wellbeing, and information sharing. We called them Coffee Breaks, essentially because we were asking everyone to stop, put the kettle on, and come together with the community for an hour of mutual support, understanding, and collaboration. What a moment that was, a movement began, and Coffee Breaks became that national space for both unstructured and focused discussion, problem solving, resource sharing, and a safe space for emotional safety. Five years on, and they continue, for all the same objectives, and they are a pleasure for us to facilitate and provide for our colleagues.

The lessons learned, from lockdown to the present day are many. It has become clearer for many who have a stake in our sector that we play an essential role in supporting parents in caring for their children, building their development and joy for learning, and their economic opportunities. Early years is an essential cog in a large machine that delivers for families across multiple (not single or artificially allocated) outcomes. Without it, and the impacts are clear. We have been identifying the increases in children’s developmental delays, speech and language, and SEND and have been adapting approaches to best help their recovery. However, we know these will continue for many, and risk affecting their school-lives and beyond.

The past five years have also reminded us of the power of togetherness, our unswerving commitment to the sector, our empathy and affinity with parents and children, and not forgetting our resilience. That said, there are fragilities that continue despite the ambitions, recognition, and increased spend in the sector. The need for support, challenge, and community in the sector remains vital. This needs to include all types of setting or school, group-based or home based, and reaching all practitioners to fully deliver our impacts confidently, healthily, and joyfully for better futures.