Embracing Change

To be fair, as you may have guessed, our daily life is fairly boring these days. Hence, the slowdown in blog posts of late. But, since a bit of time has passed, a few developments have finally come about that are worth writing about. 🙂

I’ll group this post’s contents according to three themes:

• Travel
• Worklife
• Spanish
• Fitness

Travel

When we moved to London, we thought we wouldn’t be here for more than 12 to 24 months. The rest of that plan was to then return back to the States (with my MBA in hand…and lots of rich experiences under our belt) in order to start our own (or my own) company. As such, we adopted a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle for Life in London. We traveled at every possible opportunity — mainly because we thought we’d be heading home at soon and wanted to cram as much as possible into our short time abroad.

Sometimes though, we surprise ourselves. We’ve now been in London for 3.5 years. Upon reviewing life last fall (after being here 3 years), G and I realised that our recent approach to life wasn’t suitable for the longer term. We decided it was time to ‘rescope’. Amongst our priorities, we decided that travel for travel’s sake should be deprioritised. During 2009, our best travels were those which incorporated some element of ‘doing’ rather than just ‘seeing’: Jordanese cooking class in Petra; kayaking birthday in Croatia; skiing with friends in Austria; snorkeling in Maldives. So, given this insight that an enriched life is a happy one, we decided that we should put a greater investment into our UK life and in having deeper, more enriching life experiences when traveling. Our first investment was a Japanese Cooking class in London with friends that I [K] had to miss because of a new business pitch. Which is a nice segue to….

Work Life

Simultaneously with the change in travel priorities, I had become quite miserable in my day to day work life. The people were wonderful, but working within a large global advertising firm for the last two and bit years has made me realise that climbing the layers of middle management in the business isn’t for me. There are lots of reasons for this change of heart (and I may well change my mind later…), but the main one is that I now feel that the job of advertising is to generate envy and guilt amongst consumer audiences in order to drive purchase behaviours. It’s a fun psychological puzzle that kept me entertained for years, but at the end of the day, I feel that envy and deception are the roots of most evil in the world and I don’t want my life’s work to be spent toward propelling it. [This combined with the fact that my recent promotion would make me sell squeezy cheese to children…]

At the ripe age of 80, I’d instead like to look back on my life and feel that I have spent my days doing something that ‘matters’. So, I handed in my resignation last Fall (3 months notice stinks!!!). And I worked my last day at the agency on 10 Feb. We had a very lively Spanish themed leaving party (I’ll come onto more about the theme later) and I have a job waiting for me there if I would like to go back. But, for now, I’m spending a month exploring possible routes for starting my own small business or initiative–or, alternatively, working for someone else’s which I believe in. Stay tuned for more on timing below.

Spanish

G and I often day dream about speaking a second language…fluently. So, upon reassessing life last fall, we decided to stop dreaming and make it happen. We promptly signed-up for conversational Spanish classes once a week in London and began as of late last September. All’s going well with our courses, but given my leaving date, we decided to take advantage of the timing in order to spend a bit of time IN Spain to study the language. We’ll leave for a one-month Spanish language course in Barcelona on 20 March and return 17 April. What’s really surprising is that we’ve always thought that moving someplace for a month for such a course would be crazy expensive. We were pleasantly surprised. By living in student housing and being cost-conscious with our choices, we’ve secured the 28 day experience for less than 3x the cost of our typical 3-day weekend trip abroad. Guess it just goes to show that we should spend less time ‘dreaming’ and more time ‘doing’ 🙂

Fortunately, G will be able to work part-time for his current company while we’re abroad. All the household responsibilities will fall to me while we’re there, but we’ve very excited to live in a place that will help to expedite our language skills’ development.

Fitness

Two years ago, not even the promise of jewels could make me hit the gym more than 2 times a week. How far I have now come 🙂

With my first half marathon quickly approaching (Bath, March 7), I quickly realised that I had to start putting some mileage under my belt come 1 Jan. With a training plan in hand, I set out to hit the road and have gradually worked my way up to 11 miles (though I’m meant to run 13 miles today after I finish this post :)). I now visit the gym AT LEAST 3 times a week. And it feels great! I will never be the fastest runner…but, at least I can do the distance.

The only remaining problem is that I HATE running in the rain. I just can’t do it. So, given our weather, I’ve taken to running on the treadmill. I realise that this is both bad for my knees and a potential problem come race day. T minus two weeks for the sun to shine and for me to get some mileage in outdoors.

Goodness help us if it rains on race day…the finishing reward of a spa day at Bath Spa with G may not be great enough to keep me going if there’s drenching rain…hmmm…

And one last update to cover.

G’s 33rd birthday!

In keeping with the British tradition, we decided to host G’s birthday drinks at the pub with friends this year. It was great fun and we had a great turnout. Turns out G’s pretty popular…oh, or maybe it was those Chewie’s cupcakes that brought out the numbers? 🙂 We’ll also see the new Phantom sequel ‘Love Never Dies’ this Wednesday as G’s birthday gift. Stay tuned for our critical review.

So…how have your plans and life priorities changed over the last year?