SINEAD DIVER
Australian marathon runner
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve gained throughout my life is the ability to discern between genuine expertise and empty advice. Social media is saturated with influencers and self-proclaimed experts offering guidance on topics they know little about. I would encourage everyone to seek out and embrace those individuals who are truly knowledgeable and experienced. It takes patience and requires more effort, but it’s worth it in the long run. Over the years, I’ve learned that being curious, always asking questions and listening more acutely are the best skills you can hope to master.
HANNAH SUMMERS
Peppermint reader and marine biologist
What you decide to do now doesn’t dictate the course of your entire life!
ALANA
Peppermint reader
It’s ok to speak up and be heard. It’s ok to be vulnerable, emotional and truly authentic to you. The people who see you, hear you and get you are the ones you need in your life.
DR DINESH PALIPANA
Doctor, lawyer and disability advocate
There was a time when I thought happiness came from the things that I could accumulate in this world. But, we are infinite beings inside, with a universe within each of us. If we try to fill that cup, it’s a never-ending path of being unfulfilled.
I’ve learned that fulfilment, paradoxically, comes from what we can do for the world. It comes from what we can do for our fellow humans, community and the environment. Our purpose in this brief but beautiful life, through its ups and downs, is to leave our universe a better place than we found it.
DAMON GAMEAU
Filmmaker and Regenerators founder
Find joy amongst the despair. While there are humans doing horrible things, there are more humans doing wonderful things. I make sure I bask in their offerings, and use those offerings as fuel to imagine and build a better world.
SARAH WILSON
Author, podcaster, climate educator
As Peppermint hits 60 issues, I am turning 50. It’s a glorious age as a woman. For me, it’s about feeling – finally – that I’ve arrived. Truly, a whole lot of stuff that used to confound and upset me now makes sense. The random dots on the page connect and form a thread.
If I were to distil things down to “one wisdom” that has landed me here, it’s this: embrace living at your edge. The edge is where we go out of our comfort zone, and where we get uncomfortable. You can spend a life edging away from your edge – protecting, cocooning, being avoidant of pain or of extending into the unknown. But if you embrace it (and you do this by just going to it, over and over, and sitting with the discomfort), well, you really live. You’re jolted out of complacency and numbness. The American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron prescribes going to our edge as a way to reconnect back to life and to what matters. “Life is a whole journey of meeting your edge again and again,” she writes in . “That’s where, if you’re a person who wants to live, you start to ask yourself questions like, ‘Now, why am I so scared? What is it that I don’t want to see? Why can’t I go any further than this?’”
