Reflections Mid Way through My Life Thesis
Because if you don’t change your direction, you might end up where you are going ~ John C Maxwell
Today marks six months since I stopped working.
It sounds simple, but leaving a corporate job and “taking a year off” was a long time in the making. Eight years in the making, in fact. I’ve wanted to do this ever since I graduated from university but for one reason or another (job opportunities, buying an apartment, serious health problems and then the pandemic) I kept postponing it, until November 2021 when I made the decision that 2022 would be my year – I was going to take a chance on myself, see the world, meet new people, do different things, have an adventure, and string some words together.
And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Armed with a work permit and a one-way ticket, I landed in Vancouver on the 1st April 2022. I had planned to stay in Canada for the whole year, or most of it, but after visiting Vancouver, Québec City, Montréal, Halifax, Lunenburg, Toronto, Calgary and the Rocky Mountains – a highlight reel of the provinces – I realised Canada wasn’t for me (at least not yet). So I carried on, ducking to Paris, then Igls and Trento, where I spent three weeks hiking in the Dolomites, had a quick family visit in the Netherlands for a birthday and a platinum wedding anniversary (yes, that’s 70 years of marriage), and I’m currently savouring the last of summer in the northwest of France.
It’s always a funny thing, when you meet someone new and they ask you what you do, or what you’re doing. Are you studying? Working? No, I’m on a gap year. A career break. A mini retirement. Just travelling. Writing a book. Experimenting. I guess all of them are true, and yet not.
I recently had a conversation with an old friend, and the truth is that a gap year, a career break, a mini retirement – this all implies that I am filling a place between two parts, that it is almost two different people having different priorities and experiences during each period, and this year therefore doesn’t amount to a place of its own.
But it’s not true. Because the year I’ve taken (and year being arbitrary, a concept to indicate to others the expanse of time) is part of the same thread that is my life. It doesn’t begin somewhere and end somewhere else; it’s not a problem that is being solved, or a finite chapter that when I return to work, or my old life, or the real world, is just something that I did once, smiling fondly at photos of Montréal rooftop sunsets and remembering how I bought oven-fresh bagels from the shop around the corner (St-Viateur bagels, to be exact).
What I realised, talking to my friend, was that this year was about my life thesis. It’s about research, and investigation; testing, analysing, evaluating, experimenting; having a hypothesis, or five, and trying them out, trialling and figuring out what kind of life I want to have, and where and how everything else fits in.
Who is in it? Where am I? What am I doing? How do I feel? What gives me purpose? Why do I get up in the morning? What makes me feel alive? What’s the weather like? What are the values of the people around me? What are my values? What am I eating? What do I smell? What does a good day look like? What does a bad day look like? What are all the normal things I do every day (because life is, mostly, a series of ordinary events)?
What happens when I break everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I wanted, and started again?
You see, I knew I needed to leave my bubble because I recognised the symptoms of depression from the year before. I looked around at my colleagues, many of whom are incredible people, and not a single one was living a life that I aspired to, career-wise or personally. I had found a great group of friends, had a lot of fun outside of work, but still felt trapped, restless; I wanted to see what else was out there, and discover what else I could do. I wanted to break the cage that I was in and rebuild the pieces in a different order, finding new pieces and throwing out old ones so I could build something that felt more like something I chose, with a foundation that was mine, in sounds and colours that spoke to me, rather than what was given to me by chance and circumstance.
I knew I would never figure out what I wanted by being miserable at home, or at my sit-stand-desk, scrolling on Instagram saving vegan recipes that I never made and finding the top ten things to do in Quebéc without ever booking a flight. My life – your life – is the greatest project we will ever work on (or perhaps second greatest, after the world problem we each choose to solve – I’ll explore this another time!). Therefore, I believe it deserves the investment – time, energy, resources, attention – to get it right.
Most importantly, I knew that if I didn’t change, in March 2023 I’d be in exactly the same place, doing the same thing, as I had been in March 2022, and that scared me more than all of my fears of leaving my comfortable bubble. It’s also what gave me the courage to finally take a chance.
Through my travels and experiences so far in this life thesis, I’ve met incredibly warm, inspiring people from all over the world – I’ve been dabbling in languages I have exactly zero background in – I’ve remembered and rediscovered parts of who I am that I’d forgotten and buried, and regained confidence in my ability to improvise, work through problems, and have faith in others that everything will work out; I know that there will always be a solution even though sometimes it takes a while to find.
And more than that, I’ve been figuring out what my life will look like, and what I’d like to work towards, and that’s reassured me more than any awe-inspiring mountain sunsets that even though these six months have not gone as I expected, taking and investing 100% of my time to this purpose was the best possible decision for me.
I read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction, and love finding others who have approaches to solving the classic “what to do with your life” problem. Some of my most influential resources have been Bill Burnett and David Evans’ Design Your Life, and a blog post by Tim Urban which made me examine how many of my dreams and values were mine, and how many were my parents’, teachers’, and society’s. I also loved Oprah and Gary Zukav’s discussion around your soul having a north star, or mother ship, and I use it to test whether what I’m doing brings me closer or further away from that direction (for me, this is the good old gut instinct).
As a result of these influences, my thesis year has more focus than what might appear on the surface. I know the questions I am asking, and I’ve already figured out the types of places I want to be, the people and community I need to be around, and even what I’d like my week (my days, really) to look like, at least in five-ten years’ time. The path to get there is fluid – as life is – but the image, the colours of my life – they are starting to emerge because I gave them the space to colour and texture themselves.
There were many ways I could have spent my year. I could have taken a year and just based myself somewhere (say, Whistler, where you’ll find many other Australians when they go to Canada), or gone on a shopping spree and travelled to as many cities, countries and historical sites as I could in 365 days for the sake of adding them to my collection.
But I already knew, from my previous travels, that I prefer slow travel, and experiences over things (and of that, experiences in nature). I learnt this when I was 19, at the end of my semester abroad in the Netherlands, when after three weeks of gallivanting around Europe I decided to spend one week in Salzburg because I need to stay put for a while, and I felt so much better as a result.
I like living somewhere long enough to make a friend or two, to become a regular at a café, to get a taste of life there, and where I can explore the parks and nature in the region. I already knew that before I started, but what these last few months made me realise is that there are a lot of beautiful, worthwhile places to discover in the world, and I don’t need to see them all. More importantly, I don’t want to. I would far rather know that I’ve hiked hut-to-hut in a small part of the Dolomites, where I had the time to understand the changing weather patterns and discover which rifugios had the best pasta, rather than race around to all the best known peaks without having the time to sit on the edge of a mountain and breathe.
I started the year with a broad goal – travel to Canada, and write a book. These were my two dreams that had kept me sane over the last three years, and the justification for staying safe in my bubble. These goals became my hypothesis. Did I want to be a fulltime writer and live in Canada?
There was only one way to find out.
And I’m glad I went. It turns out that Canada is a really big country, and much older than Australia, which meant the different provinces each have their own flavour, something I hadn’t expected. Moreover, I wasn’t at home in any of them, save one – and I only know this because I went out and tried them. (Realistically, I could have also trusted my gut when I first landed in Vancouver, BC but I was on a quest, and I’m still glad I ventured east.)
I booked my flight to Europe while I was in a province that didn’t suit me, which is how I ended up on another continent, exploring a different mountain range, testing what life could be like here instead.
It also turns out that I’m not ready to be a fulltime writer, yet. It was long, and lonely, writing words and solving problems that no-one else would ever see, and without knowing if it was worth continuing or not. I missed the camaraderie of working in a team, towards a shared goal, and knowing quite quickly whether or not the work I did was worth it. I still love writing, and I’d still love to publish a book (five, actually), but if I’m blessed enough to live a long life, I can transition into being a writer, and work on other projects and in other businesses for the next decade or so.
Again, this isn’t something I could ever have learnt, or realised, unless I left my corporate life for an extended period and tried it, and it’s given me the perspective to invest in other projects in all my spare time (to be fair, this is mainly hiking at the moment).
I learnt other things too.
I realised the wonder of following your nose and seeing where that takes you, like picking up a book at random in second-hand bookstore in Vancouver and two months later, on my first afternoon in Montréal having just arrived at my sublet, sitting in a café in my new suburb with the book where the opening phrases stated that the story was set on my street, in my suburb (seriously, what are the chances?). I believe that every person you are destined to meet will come into your life, and every place you are destined to go to you will reach, but you also need to open doors and windows and step outside to create those possibilities, otherwise you’ll certainly never leave your house.
I realised that we’re all the same. Well not all of us, but society’s composition, and therefore our fears, hopes, insecurities and dreams – collectively, we’re all really similar, no matter where we are or how we were raised or the language we speak. The majority of people are kind, curious and open. We love sharing our home and what we know with others. We’ve all lived through horrific experiences and bear the scars, and we’re all figuring out what life is, and what we want to do with it.
And most importantly, I realised that you’re allowed to go somewhere, or do something, just because it’s beautiful, because it brings you joy, because you feel at peace, because it’s intriguing, because it feels good. It looks different to different people, in different seasons of life, for different reasons. Whatever its shape, its smell, its texture – you don’t need to justify it, or explain it, or quantify it. You can just feel it, and live it, cherish it, remember it, share it if, you like, and that’s all.
I’d gotten quite caught up in measuring how I used every hour of every day, and making sure I was being productive, and that others knew I was being productive, and in doing so, had forgotten how to live. In fact, it took me it took me a long time to even unlearn the productivity mindset. It wasn’t until I reached the Rockies, three months into my adventure, that I allowed myself to just be in the Rocky Mountains.
I still took a lot of photos and wrote a lot of memories, but I shared very few with friends and family because I realised, as I watched the morning light filtering through century-old trees when I used selfie-mode to put in my contact lenses or when I ran my hand along the soft baby pinecones growing in tufts along the trail, that this was for me. The experience was mine. The grandeur, humility, wonder and magic of being surrounded by snow-capped mountains and this icy blue water so sharp you’d think you could walk across it, it was all mine, and it didn’t need to be shared, or validated, by anyone else for me to know that it was worthy, and it was right, and it’s where I felt like I belonged. Now that’s a skill, and a memory, I’ll treasure all my life.
The life thesis is still in progress, but as I wrote earlier, I found some of what I was looking for in BC, and some hidden in the Alps, and some in small moments in small villages along the coast of France. I find it when I’m lost in the fantasy world I’ve built, and when I’m following my nose down alleyways, challenging myself to explore a new place without google maps and a camera in my pocket.
I’ve woken up happy and blessed every day, without the weight and dread of counting down minutes until I could do something I enjoyed. And I rarely know which day of the week it is, although I tend to know which date; time has taken on a different meaning, more a fluid line that is measured in seasons, and moon phases, and tides (when I’m by the sea) than the precise movement of two watch hands spinning endlessly around a circle.
I feel good, and I feel like I am here, making the most of what I have and who I am, in all my imperfections. I love following my instincts, and filling my days with curiosity and wonder, appreciation and gratitude; I am happy and I am free, which creates a superpower in and of itself. I have no idea what the next six months will bring, or where I’ll end up going, but I am excited to keep following my nose, writing pages, and opening doors to discover what else is possible and where I might be.
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