Change is Constant
...because sometimes plans fail, sometimes they work, and always we learn from them
10 years ago Ruskin and I met and bonded about the belief in a gap decade - why would people only take a year to do the things they love before settling in for a lifetime of grey mundane work? We agreed (at the time) that rather than devoting just one gap year to adventures, life should be a set of gap decades. The principle was simple, we thought: get a job doing something you really enjoy.
A ski season seemed like the perfect gap decade activity - we loved skiing, we loved the mountains, and surely chalet hosting would be a breeze. This would turn out to be our first major life test that totally bombed.
Of course the season did have some upsides (skiing everyday, stunning mountain scenery, a simple life), but there were some bigger downside that didn’t bode well for our lifetime-of-doing-this plan (crazy long unregulated hours, nothing but skiing to do, no interesting problems to solve, life enjoyment strongly tied to recent snowfall volumes). And so we took stock of this experience, picked up some lessons from the failure, and came up with a new plan: optimise for location. Get a job in a place where you can ski at the weekends.
We had unknowingly embarked on what will be a life-long journey to constantly learn and evaluate what makes us happy, and to constantly plan and test what will make life even better. Sometimes the plan requires a big shift: maybe a more interesting job; or the most amazing location, and other times the plan is pretty light touch: like forming a new habit. Always embracing that Change is Constant.
And so we’re kicking off this blog, to share some of our trials and tribulations - because sometimes plans fail, sometimes they work, and always we learn from them - and hopefully to encourage new chats and friendships with a similar minded community.