In midlife, a lot of us land in a season we didn’t quite choose. One thing has ended, or it’s in the process of ending. A role, a marriage, the shape of your household as the children move out, your own body changing. And the whole time, we keep telling ourselves the same thing. We’ll take the trip we actually want once we’ve finally figured everything out. Once it all makes sense. Then I’ll go.
I want to gently suggest that we have that backwards. The clarity you keep waiting for was never going to arrive from inside the old life, from more thinking and more lists and more waiting. It tends to arrive out in the doing, on the trip itself. So this is the adult gap year, reimagined, and the first thing to know is that it doesn’t have to be a year. It doesn’t have to be a quit-your-job leap, or anything as big as you’re picturing. It can be a month, a weekend, or one small thing you do this week without going anywhere at all. And no, this is not Eat, Pray, Love.
In this episode:
- The season you didn’t choose
- The trap of thinking harder
- The habit discontinuity effect
- A quiet month in Florence
- Interrupting one autopilot
“You will not think your way to your next chapter from inside the old one.”
Damianne
What if you have the order backwards?
We tend to believe the solution to everything is to think harder. To plan more, research more, wait until we’re sure. And I’ll ask you what I ask myself, often. How well is that actually working? Because if what you want is real change, and it has been hard so far, then more thinking is not the missing piece. A pattern interrupt is. Something different. Living your way into it instead of reasoning your way into it.
Travel is one of the ways you find out what you want in the first place. It is not a prize you collect once your life already makes sense. You don’t even remember all the things that used to bring you delight, before you became this version of yourself, before you became what you are to so many other people. A trip is a chance to get reacquainted with the person underneath all of that. And you won’t feel ready before you go. That is its own episode, but the short version is that the readiness comes from the going, not before it.
But what if the job can’t survive without me?
This is the one I hear most. I can’t just leave. The job won’t be fine without me. Who else will do all the things I’m responsible for? So let me put you at ease right off the bat. If the job truly hinges on you always being there, then the job is broken. That kind of fragility is too much to rest on one person, and it isn’t sustainable for the work either. Which makes the time away more important, not less. Especially if you’ve been unhappy, or quietly buried under everything being asked of you.
There’s usually some perfectionism hiding in here too. I studied math, and when we hit a problem we couldn’t solve, we didn’t just stare harder at it. We made it smaller. We found a version we could solve, and then we built it back up, bigger and bigger, until we reached the real one. It’s the same move here. The real question isn’t whether you can take a year. It’s how you make a little space, in the life you already have, for the thing you’ve been dreaming about.
The reason a trip works (it has a name)
Here’s the part I told you to keep in your pocket. When I lived in Carp, Ontario, my family moved house. Only a few blocks, less than a five-minute drive. And I cannot tell you how many times I drove home on autopilot and sailed right past the new place, heading for the old address. My hands just took me there.
That is what runs most of our days. Think about it for a second. What do you do without ever really deciding to? In your kitchen, you reach for the cup or the glass or the rice without thinking. Your drive to work, the same turns, the same faces, all of it quietly cueing the same choices, day after day. It makes it so easy to keep choosing the same things.
Researchers actually have a name for what happens when you break that. They call it the habit discontinuity effect. It builds on decades of work showing how much of what we do is cued by our surroundings, running quietly on autopilot. When you change your environment, even a little, even for a little while, those cues begin to loosen their grip, and you get a sliver of space where you can choose again. All of a sudden the old program can’t run, because it can’t find the things it’s looking for. And in that little opening, you get to ask, what are my choices here? What do I actually want to choose? That is the real gift of a solo trip.
A quiet month in Florence
I’ve given myself a lot of these little windows. In 2022 I spent a month in Florence, when the world was just opening up again after everything had been closed for so long. My sister lives there, so I’d been before, but every other time the city was packed. I remember the line wrapping all the way around the cathedral and thinking, there is no way I’m getting on that line. Going when it was quiet, it felt like I had the whole city to myself.
One morning I walked into the Duomo, a place I had only ever seen full, and it was completely empty. I stood in that enormous quiet, said a prayer of gratitude for my grandmother and my ancestors, and felt like one of the luckiest people alive. What I understood there, and keep coming back to, is that you can find an opening even inside a constraint. I have to work, most of us do. But I can choose where I work. I can choose to be somewhere while it’s quiet, instead of waiting until everyone else comes back. We get so caught up looking at what we don’t have that we walk right past the openings sitting there for us. That is part of what makes a trip worth it, and it has very little to do with how far you go.
Your invitation for this week
The trip itself doesn’t wait for your life to make sense. You look for the gap, you find the gap. And you don’t need a plane ticket to start. So here is your invitation for this week, and it’s small on purpose, because even a small action creates momentum. One small action gives you the chance for another, and on and on you build.
This week, interrupt one autopilot. Just one. Maybe it’s the route you drive without thinking, the seat you always take, the coffee you always order, the scroll you fall into on your phone without even deciding to, until you look up and hours have gone. Catch one of them, and change it on purpose. Take another route. Sit on the other side of the room. Order the thing you never order. It sounds almost too small to matter, but that is exactly the point. You’re practising the very thing a trip does, except on an ordinary Tuesday, in your own life. And if a little fear comes up, that’s okay. Fear doesn’t mean stop, it means pay attention. There is information in it. If you feel uncertain, of course you do, that’s completely normal when you’re doing something new. Stay with the curiosity, because curiosity is a doorway. This is the same muscle as the small, brave decisions I talked about in a recent episode, and it builds the same way, one ordinary choice at a time.
Join my next worshop
If you want some company for the bigger step, the actual trip, that’s what the workshop is for. On June 20 I’m running the Solo Trip Decision Workshop. You come with one sentence about the trip you want, and you leave with one real decision instead of one more list to overthink. That’s the whole thing. One hour, one decision.