What if it’s amazing fun..?

Well, just to let you know musings will be a bit sporadic as we move to Malaysia.

It’s been quite a journey... to get to the journey..! And we’re currently in what can only be described as chaos. And a lot of emotional goodbyes. A lot of mixed emotions. Mindfulness is absolutely getting me through.

One regular conversation we seem to have with people goes a bit like this:

We’re moving to Penang on 23rd July...

Wow! With work?

No... it’s just errr... an adventure.

Riiiight... but you’ve got somewhere to live?

Erm... no… we’ll find that when we get there.

Oh ok, well you’ve been to Penang before so I guess you know where you’re going?

Well, no, we haven’t actually been to Penang.

Oh right, but you’ve been to Malaysia, yes?

Err, no.

Ah. Well what about all your stuff? It’s going into storage, you've sorted shipping?

Well, um, we’re not doing storage or taking anything other than what can fit in our suitcases...

It does feel mad. The whole thing. We’re uprooting our children from school, all of us from our home and community. We are knackered with a baby who loves an all-night party. And we’re only keeping the possessions we’d save in a fire (for me it's photos, drawings by the children, my mum’s bottle of Elnette hairspray and her Black & Decker drill).

But the madness is one of the reasons we’re doing it, the UK housing market our sensible excuse. You see we spent so long and worked so hard trying to buy a house. And we tried and tried. But it didn’t “work out”. We’ve always wanted to try living in another culture for the kids (and us). But we’d also watched my mother breathe herself out of this world, some of her last words “I want amazing fun” have clung to us as grieving gospel.

So… we we bought flights.

If we’re honest it had been some time of feeling we were going against the grain – the signs were there… the London dishwasher didn’t want our dirty plates any more so broke for two months (after the freezer’s eight month switch-off and a carbon monoxide drama). When we finally had a deposit there was a house price boom. The car didn’t want us to buy a house so broke en route to a week of checking out where to buy. The landlord decided to sell our flat… How easy it was to press ‘click’ on five plane tickets one Friday night, to somewhere we’ve never been.

Something I’m fascinated by, and will at some point write about, is our approach as a society to discomfort. As a copywriter one of my mega remits is to play with people’s discomfort (“Yikes, wrinkles !Buy this cream now!” “Sleep better, buy this extortionate ergonomic mattress!” “Don’t use your feet to walk to a shop, get this delivered today!” “Sit back, consume, don’t ask too many questions... above all, stay in your comfort zone!”).

We humans don’t like discomfort, and yet – it’s imperative to our growth and health. Novelty builds neurons. But as we grow we get less tolerant to change. Elderly people are even being encouraged now to switch places on the sofa each evening to help fend off dementia. The benefits of submersing ourselves in freezing water and fasting are being touted not just by crazy Viking men who climb Everest in their pants (Wim Hof... if you know him, you know him) but by hard science.

In the end, there was something about doing this – upending our lives and everything we know, shedding all our stuff – that was just too tantalising to resist. It’s so tame in comparison to what other people do (my husband worked with someone who, after getting annoyed with his kids’ spoilt and entitled behaviour, took them all to live in a Mexican slum for a year with zero access to any screens. After a year the kids didn’t want to leave.). It’s uncomfortable, it’s tiring, it can be worrying (especially at 3am) – but all these things are, for us, reasons to do it.

Despite the regular exhaustion and concern that there are just too many mountains to climb to get ourselves on that flight in three weeks, when I practice mindfulness and step back from my thoughts, I notice the feeling of discomfort is literally just that – a feeling. And when I step into it without thought, I notice something else: a little fizz of childish excitement. A buzz that I don’t have a frikkin’ clue. A relief that we’ve thrown the deck of cards up in the air and we’re faithfully leaping into where they’ve landed. Something about it all feels “amazingly fun”.

So, if there’s something in your ‘maybe one day’ bucket, or even just something new you want to try this week but you’re too scared, I leave you with these questions…

What if it all worked out?

What if you stay in your comfort zone and don’t do it, but looking back with regret is worse?

There’s never a right time. There’s only ever now.

Selamat hari Isnin ("Happy Monday" in Malay 🙂)

Love, Jo x