When you make choices, you narrow future choices. When you get on a path, you seldom get an opportunity for broad re-evaluation. An opportunity to say, “right, I am going to start from scratch.”
When attempted a clean slate in 2014, I removed the stake in the ground of where I physically had to be. Normally that stake is your job. If you have kids, their schools. If you have a house, you can rent it... so maybe that is a medium rare stake. You can also change jobs and schools. The change is not a trivial one.
I packed up a single week’s worth of clothing, carrying my world on my back. Australia and New Zealand chose themselves as my first destination because of a wedding invitation.
Ironically, just before I left, I met my future wife. She was heading in the opposite direction. She is an Anthropologist and was transitioning from being an academic to engaging with the corporate world. She was shifting from living for the love of learning to a pragmatic and purposeful engagement with applying ideas.
When I came back, we had to figure out a balance of two visions of the future. A challenge in building autonomy is our decisions impact others, particularly if we want to share our journey.
How do we agree on the stakes? Our choices are path-dependent, and what happens affects what happens next. We are never in complete control. There is an element of randomness to it all. Within those constraints and shifting winds of change... we get to have an influence on the direction.
...and he's off
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