How One Beautiful Road found its way

Everything we have is borrowed. Our time, our places, the people we love. None of it is ours to keep, only ours to look after for a while.

That simple belief underpins two ideas that started separately but have now become one – Beautifully Borrowed, a book about how we live and what we leave behind, and One Beautiful Road, an app for turning care into small, quiet actions. This is the story of how they found each other.

Where it started

Screenshot of an early prototype of the One Beautiful Road app, built mostly around givingOne Beautiful Road began as an answer to a feeling most of us know all too well – being frustrated with the state of the world but not knowing what to do about it. The app grew out of apathy to action, a project built around a simple belief that most people care but are too busy or too distracted, or don’t know what they could do that would genuinely make a difference. So their care rarely turns into anything useful.

The idea behind One Beautiful Road was to lift people from a state of apathy to one of empathy, action and change. The first version focused mostly on giving, allowing people to provide real, tangible things directly through trusted charities, with a way to follow the difference those gifts made, rather than just allowing them to make a regular donation. This screenshot of that earlier prototype shows how the concept was originally built mostly around giving.

What was missing

But giving is only part of the story, and it was never going to be enough on its own. A gift made in a hurry is easy to forget, and many people might want to help facilitate change where they live but aren’t in a position to give their money away. What seemed to be missing was the step before giving – pausing long enough to ask what matters, how we want to live and what we hope to leave behind. Action without a pause can feel hollow. Reflection without action remains nothing more than a nice idea.

This was the gap that Beautifully Borrowed had been describing all along. The book was the reflection. The app was the action. Each was incomplete without the other.

Reflect, then act

The two now work as one. The book is offline. It’s slow and quiet, something to read at your own pace away from a screen, and to sit with. The app is online and practical. It’s somewhere your thoughts can turn into something you actually do. The app offers four paths, each a different form of action.

The four paths in the One Beautiful Road app: Time, Talk, Learn and Give

There is also a companion edition of the book, written for people who arrive through the app, with a new introduction that connects the two. The text from the book’s twelve reflections are also now embedded within the app itself, allowing users to connect their actions with the wider philosophical message of change.

Kindness without performance

One choice shaped everything else. Actions don’t need to be seen to matter, and many traditions teach generosity without attachment to recognition or outcome. So there are no leaderboards, no streaks and nothing to share unless you want to. Every action is yours, and yours alone. This is also what ties it back to the book. You do these things because they are the right thing to do, not because they might make you look good.

A good ancestor

For much of my working life I was far from home, sometimes in distance and sometimes in spirit, mostly across Africa, the US and Europe. Along the way I learned that a simple act, carried out with the right intention, can travel further than anyone ever imagined. So my hope is a modest one. I’d like us to leave the world in slightly better shape than we found it. And this combination of book and app is designed to try and help us all live a little better. If we succeed, the world will be a little better for it, too.

One Beautiful Road is still taking shape and I’d love you to be part of it. You can check out the companion guide, or find out more about the book. You can try out the app in your browser at onebeautifulroad.org and let me know what you think, or you can help get it into more hands by making a donation through our GoFundMe campaign. Thank you.

Life is borrowed. What will you do with yours? 

What we leave behind

I watch a lot of documentaries, but few leave their mark on me like this one.

On 22 August 1962, a 20-year-old German called Heinz Stücke left home with a bicycle and a tent. He was leaving what he described as a ‘life without a future’ to follow what most people would have called an impossible dream – to see everything in the world. By 1996 he had set foot in every country on the planet. But he didn’t stop there. He kept riding until May 2014 when he finally returned home to Hövelhof after more than fifty years on the road.

The Man Who Wanted to See it All picks up the story of that homecoming. His village have decided to prepare a museum in his honour, and he has to sort through a lifetime of photographs, objects and memories. It’s a film about reunions and what it costs to be gone for so long.

One scene in particular has stayed with me. Heinz leaves his small, untidy, modest home to visit an old friend who lives in a large, fancy, ornate house. This friend took the conventional route through life – a career climbing ladders, marriage, children, a comfortable home. You don’t need to spell out the contrast. Just seeing the two houses and the two lives is powerful enough.

Personally, I found it a little uncomfortable to watch. While this isn’t a story about right and wrong, it is a story about the trade-off most of us make without admitting we’re making it.

Following your own path often costs you something, and those who step off the track rarely end up owning as much as those who stay on it. They often end up with fewer possessions, less security and, sometimes, no partner or children. Of course the conventional path costs something too, but it’s harder to see because the price is paid in things that never happened.

Heinz Stücke in a still from the documentary The Man Who Wanted to See It All

Still from the documentary ‘The Man Who Wanted to See It All’ (directed by Albert Albacete) featuring Heinz Stücke. Courtesy of Feel Sales/Netflix

This is what I came away with after watching the film. Everything in the big house stays behind when its owner goes, and so does everything in the small one. What goes with us, if anything, is what we noticed, felt and did with our time, and the people we befriended and whose lives we touched along the way. Heinz spent fifty years collecting that. The film suggests the people he met became a kind of global family. What a strange and wonderful thing to be able to say.

Of course, grown children are not a consolation prize, and a nice home full of memories raising a family is every bit as real as a mountain pass at dawn. Those of us who chose to wander might sometimes assume that the people who stayed did so out of fear. But that’s not fair. Sometimes they just chose differently. And they’re happy with their decision. I sold nearly everything I owned in 1996 at the tender age of thirty to go and study, and I’ve never regretted it. I’ve also come to love a family and a home I never expected to have at twenty-five. Deep down I’ve always felt like I’ve lived two lives. Maybe I’ve been lucky to have both, however different they’ve been.

At the end of the day I don’t have a tidy answer to any of this, or to the questions Heinz’s life throws up. His village is building a museum to hold the photographs and objects he collected during his incredible life. But the best of what he gathered? The people and the moments? He ended up taking those with him.

These are some of the questions I explore in ‘Beautifully Borrowed‘, my new book of twelve reflections on mortality, attention and what we leave behind.

Heinz Stücke, born 11th January 1940. Died 22nd July 2026.

The FrontlineSMS Story

During some much-needed SEO work on this website, something surprised me. Twenty years after I built the first version of FrontlineSMS, it turns out people are still reading about it, citing it and teaching it. Academics and the ICT4D community keep coming back to it as a case study in appropriate technology development.

Amazingly, in all that time my site never had a comprehensive, dedicated page about the platform. It was a major oversight – and it’s now fixed.

World map showing the many countries where FrontlineSMS is used, marked with the FrontlineSMS logo

The new FrontlineSMS Story page pulls the story together in one place – the papers, news coverage, talks, interviews and blog posts, along with early screenshots from the 2005 Beta and the story behind the logo. It also includes some little-known insider history, drawn from my own email archive. You’ll find the original ‘Project SMS’ budget, the very first emails and a few moments from the early days that I’d half forgotten myself.

The page isn’t exhaustive, but I hope it’s a useful starting point for anyone studying, teaching or just curious about how a simple text-messaging tool ended up used in more than 190 countries. \o/

Beautifully Borrowed: A book about living

Earlier this summer I turned sixty. I wrote about it here at the time, about how it didn’t feel like a milestone so much as a nudge, a tap on the shoulder from someone leaning over to say you know you don’t have forever, don’t you? I talked about sitting down and asking AI to write my own obituary as a strange kind of experiment, and how it turned out to be less about death than I expected and more like a mirror. You end up seeing the shape of a life you’ve been too busy living to properly notice.

That reflection didn’t stop when the post went up. If anything, it kept going.

Beautifully Borrowed Final CoverOver the months before and after the great event I found myself returning, again and again, to a handful of questions I hadn’t dealt with properly before. What does it mean to live well once you’ve admitted the time you have left is limited? What do we actually owe to the people, places and communities that briefly become part of our lives? And, more than anything else, what will remain after we’re gone?

I don’t have tidy answers to any of this. But over the last few months I have been writing a short book where I’ve tried to honestly and openly sit with the questions. That book is ready to share with you now, and it’s called Beautifully Borrowed: Twelve Reflections on Mortality, Attention and What We Leave Behind.

It grew out of a realisation that arrived, unannounced, earlier this summer while I was walking down my garden, that almost nothing in my life truly belonged to me. The places we love, the people we know, the knowledge we’ve gathered, even the years we’re given, all of it borrowed, held for a while and eventually passed on. Once I stopped fighting that idea and started paying attention to it instead, things started to sit far more comfortably with me.

The book itself is a companion to The Little Book of Mindful Social Change, though it stands on its own. That earlier book was written for anyone trying to do good in the world. This one is for anyone trying to make sense of the fact that their time to do so is limited. Which is probably most of us.

Twelve short reflections. Some drawn from a Ugandan forest, some from a box of old keepsakes I’d carried through a bunch of house moves without ever properly opening, one from a pair of socks I somehow still own from my first trip to Africa in 1993. Nothing dramatic. Just an attempt to notice what’s actually here, before it isn’t.

The book is available now as a free PDF, and also for Kindle and in paperback on Amazon. You can read more and get your copy here.