Swapping the busy train for actual trains

In October 2018, my husband and I decided to get divorced. Faced with an enormous life change, I?got busy. Busy looking for a new home, getting our old home ready to sell involving countless emotional trips to charity shops, finding a new job, buying a car, supporting our kids emotionally, sofa surfing every weekend, moving house, renovating and DIY-ing, getting a divorce finalised and trying to learn a new work role after fifteen years of self employment.

It was a lot.

The busy train never slowed down. It seemed that every time I got my head above water, another work project would arrive even bigger and busier than the last. It was easy to get lost in work and learning new skills to avoid facing life.

Then the pandemic happened and a period of enforced less-is-more started. Daily walks, kitchen discos and zoom parties replaced normal busy out of house activities. But home schooling and remote working and general anxiety about hand washing and getting click-and-collect grocery slots meant the sense of busy lingered.

Even when I took time out, walking miles and miles of coastal paths solo, my brain was busy processing all the emotional stuff I’d not taken time to work through. And besides the mental health healing, I was physically pushing myself, setting targets of walking anywhere between forty and a hundred miles over several days. Always with a destination in mind. Always a time schedule to keep.

Once the world opened up again, everything sped up, only with added complexity due to post Covid-related rules. My job got bigger. Travel recommenced. I met someone new and had to learn the art and dance of blended families. And still my workload grew.

For the last year I have been responsible for managing all content and PR for a global company in 65 countries, stood in as marketer on services that lacked a dedicated resource for a time, and was part of a small team that conducted an entire global corporate rebrand. It has in all seriousness, been the job of three people. Exhilarating but exhausting.

And so as I faced a new year, the start of a new decade for me, with the same enormous workload, I realised that I just had to stop. Get off the busy train. Take time to breathe.?So I resigned.

Of course in making that decision, I ramped up my workload. I had three months to wrap up any number of big work projects, find a replacement for my role, renovate and declutter my house once again, get it ready to become a holiday let and make arrangements for my almost adult teens, so that I can take a grown up gap year (well six months) backpacking.

And now at last I find myself looking at my clutter free home. Every cupboard and drawer, if opened, would reveal empty shelves. The last six weekends of just doing relentless chores has paid off. My bags with everything I might need until the end of August have just been driven away. I’m left alone in my house with a small overnight bag, enough food to make a couple of meals using the remnants of what's left in the freezer. I have pretty much wrapped up my work, just a few loose ends to square away. Every call with colleagues is another round of good byes. It’s a sad, empty feeling of no longer being part of something yet freeing at the same time.

Then a pause.?

A strange sensation of not having anything I have to do is creeping up on me. It’s not entirely comfortable. My brain isn’t used to stopping. The sense of responsibility has gone and the lightness of it is making me feel slightly unsteady. I have to learn to ease my foot off the adrenalin accelerator. I think I may feel a bit lost for a while. Bored even.??But boredom is good because it’s where fresh ideas are born and creativity flourishes.

And I won’t be bored for long. I have a very busy summer planned inter-railing through France, Italy, the Alps, and most of the Balkan countries, sailing in Croatia, white water rafting the Grand Canyon and doing a road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway.?

So the ‘busy-ness’ will still be there but it’s a liberated kind of busy. The kind where I don’t have to be anywhere or do anything by a given deadline. I can just go where I feel, doing as much or as little as I like, reconnect with what truly makes me happy and explore which direction that takes me. What a privilege!

Leaving a job and normal life behind is scary (particularly in the current economic environment). So much of our identity is wrapped up in what we do for work, a job title, our to do list. But for the next few months I’m swapping my ‘to do list’ for a ‘to be list’ to discover whatever possibilities may present themselves.

By September I may be looking to go back to work, find a new role (looks at my LinkedIn network....), start up something on my own, keep travelling - who knows. But taking this time to simply enjoy life, to board real trains rather than the busy train, is going to shape my future positively. Of that I am certain.

Feel free to armchair travel along with me by following @GoneRogue2023Tour on Instagram.