In February I will have been with the same company for fifteen years. It’s the longest I’ve stayed in one place, one company, one set of rules. Fifteen years of doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Predictable. Suffocating.
My work anniversary is also the day I met my husband for the first time. At work. Fifteen years ago. There has been nothing predictable about our relationship with its highs and lows, struggles and moments of peace and happiness. We continue to evolve and peel back layers of ourselves, together.
We are brought up and conditioned to want our lives to be concrete. Find a secure career and eventually retire. Get a mortgage and buy a property. Put down roots somewhere preferably a good, reliable place to raise children. Fall into a routine. School runs, soccer, dinner. Take prescribed vacations to the beach every year. Then at the end of twelve months, put a fresh calendar on the wall and start it all over again.
It’s unnatural. Change is everywhere. Nobody has a baby and doesn’t expect them begin to crawl, walk, talk and eventually become independent beings with their own thoughts and journeys. Why, then, do too many of us resist change after a certain age?
Emma Gannon sums it up brilliantly:
Change is in the first grey hair, the leaves falling off the trees, the baby picking up a spoon, the bread gathering mould, the steam coming off the kettle, the cake in the oven, the for-sale sign, the pop of a champagne cork, the moving cloud formations, the mulchy leaves, the changing moods we feel. Embracing change also makes for an easier life because life is change. The more we resist change, the more we suffer.
My greatest fear is waking up one day and realizing that life has passed by and I’m still in the same place doing the same thing.
This fear has been the catalyst for our plan to move to Europe. Stop talking. Stop dreaming. Start following our hearts.
For someone who has been confined to a clear structure and path her entire adult life, my instinct is to set my eyes on a destination and chart a specific route and timeline to get there. To do that will be my greatest failure. Who is to say where I would be today if I had loosened the reins a bit and was led by what excited me the most.
Life is about taking chances. Living fluidly. Figuring things out. It’s about walking in on the first day of work and meeting the man you will marry. These things can’t be planned.
Jamie Beck didn’t want to die without ever knowing what it was like to live in France. She set out to find herself in France for one year. That was in 2017. Her husband eventually joined her, they had a child and bought an apartment. France changed everything for her. Her photography evolved and she gained a huge international audience. When COVID hit and her regular income dried up during lockdown, she started offering posters, phone cases and paperweights with her photos instead of catering to the fine art crowd she had exclusively sold to previously. Nothing in her journey was planned out. She followed the path that unfolded for her.
Oddur Thorisson and his wife, Mimi, have followed wherever their dreams take them. He recently posted on Instagram:
I was going through old hard drives this week looking for a specific photo for a friend. When you tidy up your closets or your attic you will invariably be distracted by the ghosts of your previous lives, like a kid tidying up their room, playing with forgotten toys. It was a pleasure rummaging through these old photos, many from over 10 years ago when we lived in the countryside, foraging for mushrooms, cycling to the village to fetch groceries. When all we cared about was lunch and dinner … ehrrm, what can I say, not much has changed in that department.
We ended up in Médoc by pure chance. When our holidays, mostly in Italy, ended - we asked oursleves “why don’t we always live like this?” Then we did. We traveled very little, “mastered” how to take care of a vegetable garden, we lived in a bubble as it were. People looking in invariably said “you have such an idyllic life”, and they were right. A lot of bumps on the way, many struggles, but life needs those - in life like in art and cooking, the plot and the sauce need to sometimes thicken.
Mimi started writing a cooking blog, soon after I started taking the pictures, but nothing was planned…Before we knew it things took off, cookbooks, we bought a big house, so big that we planned to open a restaurant only to ask ourselves “wait, do we really want to do this” - so the idea evolved into workshops.
People ask us why we left, usually surprised. The answer is that we left as naturally as we arrived, bigger kids need a bigger picture, Italy was calling, it was combination of things. New dreams and projects to realise.
It was the right decision, our years in the French countryside will live with all of us, as the man said, like a moveable feast.
The moral of the story is, I suppose, when you look back on your life it’s better to say “look what we did” than “we should’ve done that”…
Indeed.
Life should be made up of a series of delicious moments strung together. The more of those I can accumulate, the better.
“Living fluidly. Figuring things out.”
Amen.
There’s so much difference between living within a prescribed plan and living with intention.