What if it were easy?

Photo courtesy of Andrea Preziotti

When you’ve lived in one city your entire life, how do you know when it’s time to go?

That’s the question that my client Andrea posed last spring. Actually, on the surface, her question was: where is home when I can live anywhere? She’s a business owner in the creative space and works primarily online. At first, that flexibility looked like freedom: she could literally choose any town or city in the world (logistics and visa issues notwithstanding). But in reality, flexibility can be so paralyzing. How do you begin to break that down? Where do you start?

Here’s the thing: when we have so much choice (and that is a common “challenge” amongst my clients), it’s actually not about the surface level things. In picking a new city, it’s not so much how many parks it has or how close to the airport it's situated. In identifying a career move, it’s not whether a company has stock options or good paid leave.

Rather, when choice is overflowing, it’s about identifying what’s most important to you. And then, it’s about taking small steps (I like to call them experiments) until you start to be pulled in the direction that’s for you.

It’s not so much that you know where you’re going, it’s that you start walking until you can feel your way there.

So, when Andrea came to me, I knew the first thing we needed to do was shift from a position of making lists to a state of making moves.

And, what I noticed pretty quickly was that as long as she was in her hometown, she couldn’t see clearly what she needed.

Much like going to a meditation retreat strips away a lot of the busyness of life, or a spoonful of sorbet releases the taste of the appetizer’s tanginess to prepare you for the main course’s savory flavors, Andrea needed a palate cleanser.

Our goal, simply put, was to get her out of her hometown, to anyplace, so that she could see past what she knew to uncover what she really needed.

So began a summer of exploration and experimentation. She visited multiple towns and cities, some for a handful of days, some for longer. None of them were meant to be “the one.” Just places that were different from her daily life and could help her experience different ways of living. In each city, I offered her one main directive: act like a local and go about your normal life. Work, grocery shop, go to places you might if you lived there and meet people you’d meet if you lived there.

As she went from city to city, we’d check in… sometimes mid-trip, sometimes after, sometimes live, sometimes by text.

Her last stop was her longest. She bought an open-ended ticket to spend time with extended family. She stayed until she felt like she’d had her fill. And then, thanks to a little volcanic eruption (!), she stayed a few days longer.

We spoke when she was back, sitting in her house in her hometown. And she described how things just started to flow. Her family kept asking her to stay longer, offering her space. Just as she contemplated this, the man house-sitting her home and cats in the US asked to extend his trip. And when she floated the idea of returning to the familial town for a longer stay in the spring, someone offered a spare apartment.

As she was telling me how these things were seemingly falling in her lap, I noted that the clearer she got on what she wanted, the easier things were becoming.

We’re so often fed this false narrative that everything good comes through struggling.

I beg to differ: the struggle comes when we can’t see what we want and we let that question get big without kicking the proverbial tire, without jostling it around, without bringing it out into the daylight.

Once we do that, a funny thing happens: one step leads to another and to another and suddenly there’s an apartment waiting for you in a town you didn’t know you could call home, on the other side of the world.

Will this be her place? I don’t know. And she doesn’t either. Not yet. But, did spending time there bring her greater clarity and peace of mind? Absolutely. As she wrote me after our call: “As I seek out those experiences (through experimentation) to fill my cup, I am beginning to recognize that every step forward (no matter how big or small) is a conscious decision, a signal to my inner self that I know what I'm doing, that I know what I want for myself, that I put more trust in myself than the blind faith I may sometimes put in others. Thank you for the collaboration and guidance that helped me to open the portal of transformative thought (sounds so heady, but it's not really a doorway as much as a conduit in between the way I was thinking and the way that I am thinking).”

So, how do you know when it’s time to go? Well, what if it’s not about when you leave at all, but rather about becoming open to what’s beckoning you to arrive? What if, in fact, it were easy?