Which Way Now?
Well, here we are, already three weeks into 2019. This started as a short post on Instagram to accompany the #bestnine photos of 2018, but soon became too big for that. I’m a little ambivalent to those #bestnine posts - so many people do it and we know that it’s always the bikes that get the likes - but after reading an insightfully honest post about 2018 by Erin Sullivan, I wondered whether it was perhaps also a little useful as a moment of reflection on a tricky year. A few words became a few too many for an Instagram post and so, as I said: here we are.
The spring and summer of 2018 were pretty fun. Although back in London, I was starting a second year of working part time but, refreshingly, in a different industry. Whilst I was still looking to break away from environmental consulting, working just three days a week in a forward looking, motivated environment felt really productive - I was nailing work in those days, and having plenty of time for everything else.
Everything else included a bunch of bike events - Bearbones Winter Bivvy, GetWildMatty’s North York Moors Ride, Brother in the Wild, Charlie’s Surly Dorset Gravel Dash, Pannier’s Desert of Wales and Swift Summer Solstice Campouts, a weekend bivvy on the Gower peninsula, as well as my BC L3 mountain bike leader training with WyeMTB and pedalling the SayYesMore Waterbike for a day through Nottingham collecting litter…
Bear Bones Winter Bivvy
I embarked on my first year living afloat, on board a 71 ft narrow boat (Daisy May), which I bought in the autumn of 2017, and which has brought its share of amazing and challenging times in the past 12 months. Boat living demands some additional time to deal with life’s basics - laundry, fuel, water, moving regularly, keeping things clean and organised in a small space, and fixing stuff that breaks - and as long as you make time for that, it’s all cool. For the rest of the year, I had plans to get some mountain bike guiding experience alongside the part time work, to do more photography, try to write regularly, to start playing around making some small films, and to get a bunch of boat work done before winter.
Daisy May (now Edie), on the Lea Navigation
But, then came the turning point: I was offered an additional part time contract for three months with a company I’ve worked with before, but have never had a part time opportunity with. It would take my existing three days a week back up to five, just in time for the summer, and was back in the oil and gas industry, from which I’d been enjoying a break.
I really debated whether or not to take the work, but partly seeing it as an opportunity and partly through fear (I thought my existing contract would expire in a few months), I accepted it, even though the idea made me feel a little sick in my stomach. I rationalised it - it was just three months full time, and even though it was back in an industry that I’m slowly trying to escape, it made a lot of sense - it might give more part time work opportunities in the future, and I would feel pretty stupid if my existing contract did end and I’d missed the chance for some ongoing work.
Predictably, my existing contract got extended once, and then again…and again, and the new contract that was meant to be a nice two days a week project was actually way more than was manageable in that time, and turned into a nine month project rather than just the initial three. And so I went from part time working with lots of time for all the other things, to a stressful full-time-plus, two-contract juggling act, with no time for anything else.
Matty’s North York Moors weekend
Some friends / colleagues tell me just to take advantage of the situation and ’work more’. I’m a contractor working for myself and I get paid more if I work more, so partly I get this and in some ways I wish I was more capable of it. But I’ve come to realise that doing work that I don’t love and/or in an environment that I don’t value, takes a lot of energy. And when the work is also challenging at the same time as things becoming overloaded and stressful, this sucks so much energy away from me that everything else that’s important to me falls away. I lose focus on exercise, relationships, photography, reading, writing. I stop making any progression in other areas that I’m interested in, that perhaps one day may be pulled together into an alternative career. I stop planning trips away at the weekend - I just want to sleep and get some life admin sorted before the week hits again. I start to bail on social events as I’m too tired or won’t be able to leave work in time. Commitments to friends and relationships start to feel like added stress instead of the joy that they should be. I miss gym sessions and start to fail to find the time to exercise. For a while last year I wasn’t even managing to commute by bike as the boat was in a yard for some repairs too far away, and I was instead commuting by car around the M25 five days a week. Most definitely not living the dream.
The difference that this shift in balance has on my mental health and motivation is marked. I move from feeling in control, able to make progress in other aspects of my life, feeling capable of putting 100% into work and then also maintaining focus on other interests, to being in an exhausted, demotivated, feeling-out-of-control rut, and then all I can think about is running away.
I've never quite understood why I find it so hard to maintain a balance between intensive work and everything else, apart from feeling that doing this work pulls me mentally so far away from who I am that it takes me time to centre myself again, before I can then put energy into all the things that are important to me. It's probably partly just that after spending 9 hours staring at a screen all day at work, the last thing I want to do in the evening is stare at a screen to write or work on photographs. But that’s not all of it. Maybe I’m just totally not suited to this kind of work? I mean, I know I’ve wanted to escape for a while now, but I’ve never actually said this out loud before: what if I’m just not naturally very good at this?! Perhaps thats why it seems to take so much of me. You’d think that after nearly twenty years in the industry and ten years working for myself that this might have crossed my mind as being the reason that I wanted to escape…
Pannier / Swift Summer Solstice Campout
In the middle of this, my 95 year old Nan had a fall and suddenly ended up in hospital. After she was discharged, she needed help at home for the first time, and so I spent a lot of time at her place in the following three weeks. Sadly, she ended up in and out of hospital a few more times over those weeks before passing away. I was so lucky that I happened to have a pause in work right at that time so that I could be there for her, but it was a pretty fraught month, as were the few weeks after. She was an amazing lady who just kept on going with a cheeky smile and her passing is significant for many reasons beside the fact that she was my Nan. With losing Mum 6 years ago, and Dad back in 1995, I'm now the oldest person in my direct family. Nan was our last tie to growing up, to our home town, and to all the things we knew about Mum and our family, as well as many untold stories, that now remain so.
To top the year off nicely I got literally chased down, dragged off my bike and assaulted by two guys in a car on the way home from work in mid December, who took offence to my front light flashing in their side mirror whilst waiting at traffic lights. I was fine, shaken but not hurt, but really, I literally have no words…
So all in all, I felt pretty battered by 2018. It’s not a fair assessment of the whole year, and of course even the second six months had their share of good times. But I can pinpoint the difference between the first and second halves of the year to my naive decision to take on two part-time contracts that I could have predicted would end up needing much more of me than I anticipated. Yes, other things have happened, but that’s what changed the tone of the year, what skewed my balance completely the wrong way, what depleted my ability to deal with the rest of the ups and downs.
Gower Peninsular overnighter
Obviously some times are a little harder than others, and sometimes shit just happens. And, whilst I found the year challenging, I'm still healthy and free to make my own decisions and am lucky to have choice and options. So, the important thing is to understand what I’ve learnt from this time, and what I’m going to do differently. These are the things that feel important to take forward...:
Limit the day job. I know that I need to limit the day job, at least whilst its main value to me is just to provide income, to no more than four days a week. I started to work part-time for a reason, and I need to keep that in mind. If I’m going to continue to do work mainly for the money, I need to make sure that it doesn’t take over my life, that I continue to allow time for the things I’m interested in, and for discovering, exploring and testing new stuff that I don’t even know I’m interested in yet!
Exercise is key. It has to be a daily (or mostly daily) activity, that always comes first.
Sleep is the bigger key. This is an area I’m traditionally really bad at managing. After a day of work, I get caught up in the pleasure of doing things I want to do, or just forgetting about the day, often at the expense of an early night. It’s such a simple thing to change, and I know how much impact it would have on my days, on my ability to deal with the work and my motivation to get on and do all the other things I enjoy. If I address one thing now, it has to be this. As dull as it can sound, early nights need to become the new black.
Make a plan for an alternative future. Rather than repeat the cycle of recent years - where I work too much, get exhausted and then run away on a bike trip, hoping to have an epiphany about what else I might do for a living, I know that I need to actively work on finding and making an alternative career. This is why I started working part time, so that alongside whatever income generating work I’m doing, I would have time to explore, test and trial all the other things I have in my mind - those things that I’m interested in and that in some combination could form an alternative career, even if I haven’t figured out exactly how yet. To help this, as a starter, I’m going to do the following two things…
Whilst I’m still in London working on the remainder of this second part time project (only 4 days a week!), which will last until the Spring, I’m going to do the Escape the City Career Change Accelerator, which is designed precisely to help this process. I’ve considered it over the last couple of years (once not signing up because I was too busy and stressed at work to be able to commit to it - oh the irony!), but now its booked and paid for, and will run through February and March. It won’t give me a solution in ten weeks, but it’s the start of a process, of a different way of thinking, and it feels pretty good to have finally committed to it.
After that, I’m moving over to the outskirts of Bath, where I’ve found a mooring for the boat. I’ve wanted to live over near to Bath and Bristol for a while, and the past few months of work pushed me to make it happen. This means getting out of London, getting me to a place where mountain biking is so much more accessible, and where I already have a network of friends. I’m not going to take on any further traditional work initially, to give me the time to really make the most of being based over there and really enjoy this summer. With the time I’ll have I’m going to, at the very least:
Get to know a bunch of local trails in the Bath and Bristol area, and use my British Cycling L2 Mountain Bike Leader qualification to get some mountain bike guiding experience with some local companies
Build enough of the right kind of technical / remote riding that I need in order to take the assessment for the L3 MTB Leader award
Potentially do a commercial drone operators course, not only to give me a really good grounding to work with my DJI Mavic Pro on bike trips but also as a potential opportunity to earn income working with drones
Get back to posting here regularly. At the least, I want to post here monthly - even that would be 11 times more than last year [January - tick!]
I'm also starting to look at options for some overseas trips - I've not undertaken any bike travel of even a few weeks since Baja in 2017, and am excited by a few ideas for this year - and there are a number of other things I'm interested in exploring that I hope the Escape the City program will help me form into a plan.
I haven’t written about much of this - work and career thoughts, moving onto a narrowboat, even last years bike trips - here before. In fact, my posts have been really limited over the past couple of years as I've started to use Instagram as a microblogging platform more and more. In itself, thats great - it’s a good platform for that, and great for making connections - but it was never my intention to use it at the expense of more fully featured posts here. I get frustrated with myself when I’ve not been writing here, and yet I’ve totally let myself default to Instagram instead. Partly it’s the ease of sharing with a wider community there, and the ability to share images quickly without even the need for a laptop, but perhaps I just got a little lazy. I also find some aspects of using Wordpress frustrating and had a whole lot of spam on the site to deal with at one point. I'm considering moving this site over to Squarespace to make the whole experience a little easier (although there have been some updates to Wordpress that are making composing this post a little more user friendly than it used to be). If anyone has any insight or experience of using Squarespace, feel free to add something in the comments.
In the meantime, I'm getting a few things in the diary for this year, starting with the 130 km Dirty Reiver in April. So, for now, a slightly belated Happy New Year. I’m really looking forward to 2019 and all that it may bring - all the riding, camping, growth, change and opportunities that are there, just waiting to be grabbed. I hope you are too :-)