Leaving Melbourne

Location: Melbourne

Week: 0

Days Travelled: -1

There are certain conversations you anticipate when people discover you are going traveling for close to a year.

“Where are you going?”

“Where are you most excited for?”

Others, perhaps naively, took me by surprise. One of the most fascinating to observe, both in how others asked it and in the ways in which I would respond, was “What are you going to be doing for work?” Relatively often, this was someone’s first question when they found out my partner Liv and I were leaving for the rest of 2024. In doing this, it was like they were revealing part of themselves, our culture and myself to me.

It is not hard to argue we have a culture which is relatively obsessed with work. Generally speaking it will be one of the first questions we ask a stranger, many of us have perfectly cultivated LinkedIn pages and others, like me, even have it as their intro on social media. It is a big part, perhaps the biggest, of how we define ourselves.

There was certainly a trend in the people who asked me this straight off the bat; they were people I either knew or suspected as defining themselves by their work. It was almost as though they couldn’t imagine a world where they wouldn’t be working for that period of time.

What was more interesting was what it brought out of me. I feel quite confident in myself not being pulled into a conversation or direction based on the expectation of others, yet that is exactly what happened. I found myself justifying the trip by the fact I had another subject of uni to finish whilst being there, how I would still be working with my clients online or teaching a workshop here and there.

It was like I didn’t have the confidence to simply state I wanted to explore the world; that I had to justify my choices based on their life experience and ideals. In doing so, I immediately validated their way of thinking and missed the opportunity to subtly challenge it – something I was a little disappointed with on reflection.

A big reason, perhaps the biggest, Liv and I decided to do this trip was to shift the paradigm we exist in. To remember there is a whole world out there filled with cultures, peoples, ideas and perspectives and that our microcosmic Melbourne/Australian/Western modalities are just one way of doing things. We hope it will offer new insights and help shape us and our lives to feel consistently well-rounded, rich and free.

Based on these interactions I may need this trip even more than I initially expected.

I am so excited to learn more, to write again (via this blog), to create and to finish my degree. I can’t wait to have conversations without words, experiences without expectation and create memories I’ll never need to recall.

But most of all, I am excited to be in the world, to see what it brings out of me and where the tides of both time and circumstance lead us.

Thank you for being part of this journey from the beginning; I can’t wait to share more with you.

Until soon,

Zig xx