Destination Unknown

According to shows such as X Factor and the Great British Bake Off, we’re all on a journey.   For many of us it can become a bit of hamster wheel journey though, beating the same path every day.

I tend to think that for many of us it is a downtrodden rat race. We are kept overtaxed and underpaid so that we are too exhausted from just getting by to question the never-ending cycle, whereby our labour keeps large corporations' profits in multiple billions.  Other people call it ‘earning a living’.  The truth is somewhere in between, we need to work to live, but we probably also need more time to actually enjoy living. 

Years ago, on one of my prolonged tours of anywhere but here, I was whiling away my day sitting on a beach in Ecuador.   The beach was part of a small town, with colonial buildings and streets that had clearly seen better days.  It had just about everything the locals needed and sufficient scenery and extra accommodation, including a genuinely shabby chic guesthouse with the emphasis on shabby, to cater for the odd tourist.  It wasn’t an obvious tourist destination.  It was incredibly quiet, there were no restaurants, everyone ate in their hotel or guesthouse and pigs and dogs wandered casually around the streets and occasionally into the shops or the one café  I quite liked it, it was definitely more interesting to me than if it had been full of fast food joints, bright lights and nightlife, and I don’t think quaint tea rooms and tourist focused gift shops with fake antiques would have worked there either. The person I was chatting to said that the townspeople could make it a fantastic resort and make ‘serious money’ if they were just willing to work.   I asked him if he meant that they should clean up the colonial buildings, build a few replicas with all mod cons, find employment as waiting and cleaning staff in hotels and restaurants and, in summary, give up their laidback lifestyle, drastically cut down on their leisure time and change the entire nature of the town so that wealthier tourists could visit there for their few weeks per year of laidback life.  He looked at me as if I were a simpleton.

I don’t necessarily want to live on a beach in Ecuador.  I would like to live a more laidback life though.  Every weekday I sit on a train to London and then walk from the station to work.  Depending on the reliability of the trains it takes about 1.5 hours door to door, three hours commuting each day.   The routine sometimes makes me want to scream, I find myself like a small child needing constant occupation on the journey, taking different walks to and from the station, counting my steps to calculate the distant.  2,000 of my steps is about a mile - why do I even feel that I need to know this? The question I ask myself more and more frequently is “why?”.   I need to earn a living, but is this the best way to earn it?  I don’t dislike my job and I really like my colleagues, but I want to break free from the drudgery of getting ready for work, travelling to work, working, travelling home, eating dinner, going to bed, laying awake for hours asking myself “why?”  I feel as if I have spent much of the last 20 years having a mid-life crisis and I am no nearer the answer to that question. 

Every few years I give up on the answer and ‘take a year out’ to go travelling.  I never think “why?” when I am travelling.  I choose an area and just travel around it, staying or moving on as the mood takes me, there is no purpose other than it appeals to me.  That is more than reason enough.  The problem may be that I have never found a career or even a job that appeals to me.  I need to work, both to pay my way and to have a purpose in life, but I need to find more of a purpose.   At school they did little in the way of careers advice, but they did occasionally waffle on about what our ‘vocation’  may be.  Clearly I misheard because I have spent more of my life on a vacation, but what happens to people like me, and I know I am not alone in feeling like this, there are thousands of us, if not millions, who don’t have a vocation of haven’t realised  it?  There has to be an option somewhere in between the three hour commute and the life on the beach.