Going Away to Go All-in

?“Maybe our conversation at Heathrow meant something. I am taking a much needed break after 30 years,” text from a colleague, who worked at an Atlanta based conglomerate. Another text from a friend who has been at a start-up for a few years, “exiting the business soon to soul search and examine what I am good at and want to do.”?

These messages have been a frequent phenom over the last decade, even more so during and post pandemic. Over the course of time, when I have been approached for career advice, I have refrained from career advice: to leave or stay; to go to a large or a small company; or to change roles. My counsel universally, with no exception, has been to “Go Away to Go All-in.”?

You could do it in your current job or another, at home or travel—for prolonged periods of time or short. Go Away every day for an hour or for 10 days at a monastery, like I did in 2016. But Go-Away. To Go All-In.?

In solitude, with no familial interaction.?

Emily Dickinson did it. Her entire life. Never left home. Wrote soul-searching poems. Her contemporary Henry David Thoreau walked a few steps towards Walden Pond and became a hermit for 2 years and 2 months. Wrote Walden.

Too often, Going Away is twinned with the exotic: Elizabeth Gilbert took off to Italy, Indonesia, India and wrote Eat, Pray, Love. What Gilbert and Thoreau did is not practical for many of us, and that’s why perhaps we crave their writings.??

Prolonged getting away of the mind. The natural response is to travel afar to detach. I have had my own long Go Aways on the Ghats of Banaras, streets of Jerusalem, days long wanderings in Kew Gardens, stumbles through Bryce and Zion. There have been a dozen trips to Go Away to Go All-In, since 1989, that now I am writing about. Long get-aways by myself—when I was single, and since I have been married, well supported by my family.?

But, I have increasingly realized these exotic trips don’t last if I don’t Go Away, each day. Ideally morning and evening, just for a bit.??

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts, wrote Marcus Aurelius the Roman writer and Emperor. Aurelius wrote Meditations. In recent times, Shakeaspeare wrote “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Today, Pico Iyer, the travel writer writes about not checking the weather after waking up to avoid its influence on how it may shape his day. This peripatetic writer ironically says that “I am truly moving when I am sitting still.”?

It ain’t easy: The paranoia of Going Away, without a job for a period of time, away from one’s network and the fear of never finding a livelihood again. This fear always existed in my mind over the dozen get-aways over the three decades--and does today. The thought what my colleagues, supervisor, boards would think. However, the sustained joy of an empty mind abundantly eclipses the spasmic sense of insecurity.?Besides, the outcomes of Going Away to Go All-In have justified my Going Away.

So my friends: Do not wait 10, 20, 30 years for the day when you go away to Bali to find yourself. And to the friend who called me mid-week: I am now headed off on a long walk in the neighborhood, with no charted route, to truly observe; to not think. The Japanese call it Jikan, the silence between two thoughts. I know it already that it will be the hardest thing I will do all day.?