shem banbury

Every December, as the pōhutukawa burst into bloom and my birthday once again looms on the 31st, I find myself back at my favourite annual tradition: a deep, meaningful reflection… followed by a wildly unnecessary personal challenge.

For over 18 years I’ve set myself peculiar, sometimes preposterous missions. Each one a small experiment in endurance, curiosity, and—let’s be honest—questionable decision-making. Some have pushed my body, some have tested my willpower, and at least one has ended with me wondering whether Tauranga Hospital offers a frequent flyer programme.

These challenges have become a strange little timeline of my middle years: growth, humour, a few failures, and a consistent reminder that I am not built like a sensible man.

So, before I unveil the 2026 chaos, here’s the annual roll-call of what on earth I’ve done to myself so far:

• 2008: Launched my first blog, ventured into romance writing, and published my first book.
• 2009: One Gillette razor. Daily shaving. 365 days.
• 2010: Same pair of underwear – everyday.
• 2011: 3,000 Weet-Bix in a Year – First failure, derailed by suspected appendicitis and three days in hospital.
• 2012: 66,785 Press ups in a year – Another failure although I did get to 44,850 press ups until a bike crash and cracked ribs stop me.
• 2013: No pillow.
• 2014: Only water. No other beverages.
• 2015: Daily cold showers, Wim Hof-style.
• 2016: A year off social media — a blissful detox.
• 2017: Running at least 30 minutes every single day.
• 2018: One Brussels sprout a day for a year.
• 2019: Same knife, fork, and spoon all year.
• 2020: Out of bed at 5:11am every day.
• 2021: Listened to Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone each day.
• 2022: Read the entire First Edition of the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.
• 2023: “Sitzpinkling” — sitting down to pee, every day. Also published my second book Half Time.
• 2024: “Constant Wood” — a piece of Rimu on me at all times.
• 2025: A Roly Poly every single day. A forward roll. The move of children. The regret of adults.

Which brings us to 2026 and Six-Second-Shem.

This year’s mission is deceptively simple:

Once a day, I will attempt to measure exactly six seconds—without looking—pausing the stopwatch and seeing how close I land to 6.00.

That’s it. No gear beyond a simple stopwatch. No torn hamstrings, no crooked spine, no paramedics shaking their heads at another one and minimal chance of security escorting me out of airport check-in for rolling on the baggage carousel.

Now, this is the moment people groan. The moment they look at me like, “is that it? You had a year to come up with that!” They give the same vibe my grandad gave when my parents revealed I was going to be called Shem—that split-second pause where you can almost hear the disappointment settling in.

Yep… this is it. Just me… and time… and all of 2026.

I have a strong feeling this will be sneakily brutal. We live in a world that runs on time. We measure life in years, seasons, months, hours, minutes, and finally seconds. And they seem to whizz by.
But this year, I’m doing the opposite. I’m trying to notice the seconds as they pass and get a feel for every second and milli second.
Because six seconds is nothing… until you try to feel it.

Why six seconds?

Well six seconds is small enough to be doable, but precise enough to be infuriating. And because after a year of roly polys, I’ve realised something: the best part of these challenges isn’t the stunt itself — it’s what it makes you pay attention to, the places you go, and the value you put on the people you meet along the way.
Six seconds, I hope, will make me notice time in a unique way. Or… it’ll just prove that I have the internal clock accuracy of a toasted crumpet.
Either way, I will learn.

The rules

• One attempt per day. No warm-up, no second go, no “that one didn’t count because the sun was in my eyes.”
• Start the stopwatch, count internally, stop it when I believe six seconds has passed.
• Record the result on Instagram. Celebrate the wins. Laugh at the disasters.
• Include people. If I’m with friends, whānau (family), colleagues, or a brave stranger who looks mildly curious, they must be offered a turn. There might even be a little prize for those who hit the magical 6.00.

What I’m hoping for

I’m not expecting enlightenment. I’m not aiming to become a monk. I’m just trying to become a man who needs to respect the tiny moments that make up a day.

Because a day is made up of hours.
Hours are made or minutes.
And minutes —quietly, relentlessly—are made of seconds.

Let the timing begin.

POST SCRIPT
I couldn’t resist asking AI to run the numbers on the supposedly simple task. Using a simple probability model built from my first 10 stopwatch attempts, it worked out two key things: my average stop is 6.56 seconds (so I’m typically 0.56 seconds late) and my results wobble by about half a second from day to day.

From there, the maths treats each attempt like a little bell-curve of possibilities and asks: what are the odds of landing on the tiny 6.00 window (to the nearest hundredth)? With my current bias and variability, the chance of a perfect 6.00 comes out at roughly 0.42% per day — about 1 in 236. Over 365 attempts, that predicts ~1.5 perfect hits, which in normal-human terms means I’ll probably see about 2 glorious 6.00s in 2026 if nothing changes.

But AI is smart and it factored in that I’ll get feedback every day. Therefore, I should start correcting that “always a bit late” habit. If I can drag the average closer to 6.00, the prediction jumps to around 4 perfect hits (and somewhere in the 2–7 range wouldn’t be surprising).