When elephants take flight

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.

Anaïs Nin

I was sitting at my desk one day this past week, which is to say at my dining room table, where my laptop happened to be at the time... and it suddenly occurred to me that not only had pigs taken flight in my life but elephants too.

I'd just completed an online conference call attended by people in the UK, US and Europe and during the course of that morning booked travel to Toulouse, Paris and Reading. Each of these trips is for work and I'm no doubt going to pop in through an airport, a hotel, a meeting room, and then out the other side, having seen very little of the places themselves. Not as glamourous as it might at first sound - and there's absolutely nothing glamourous about Reading, I assure you! But... and this is a big but... when I was painting my dream work scenario in a conversation with a friend about two years ago, I said that I would like to be working independently, still travelling for work but that this travel should include places beyond the boundaries of the UK again, and it would be wonderful if the business could be properly geographically independent - that is, based wherever I'm based, linked to the world technologically so that I'm free to be anywhere or in no one place exclusively to run it. There's much more to it than that ('cause it's definitely not all about work) but those things were pretty central to the lifestyle change I was envisioning.

I remember the moment clearly, laughing to myself and with the friend I was talking to about how, in order for this to happen, it was more likely to require elephants taking flight than mere pigs. I could articulate the dream but I had no real expectation then of it becoming a reality. That's how far away it felt at the time. It was more a desperate voicing of what was furthest from my current experience, where I felt trapped and desperately unhappy. I was so work-worn and confidence-crushed that the scenario I'd just sketched out seemed like something I was destined only ever to dream about. Not just a dream but a pipe dream.

I look back at that conversation now and I wonder at the journey I've travelled from there to here. How did that happen? I know it's involved a couple of painful wake-up calls, lots of good luck, the faith and support of many lovely people and a fair bit of hard work and "what have I got to lose?"ness but still, it seems incredible. I hardly dare believe it. Although I cannot deny what I see...

The dream is not yet fully realised - very, very far from it - but it is taking shape. Real shape. Elephant-with-wings shape. Isn't that amazing?!?