How to keep one’s self entertained while unemployed.

Mastering the art of enjoying being un-employed is an important lesson in life. The most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in life is figure out what to do with my life. We distract ourselves from this Herculean feat by constructing life plans such as university-marriage-work-kids-retirement. We work for retirement, filling our lives with distractions and then reach retirement only to realise we’re running out of time. In fact, many people die within a year of retirement because they’ve lost purpose, forgetting the original point of working in the first place. Retirement is when we can’t avoid it any longer, we’re finally staring in the face of the original question we were trying to avoid in the first place when we first graduated: what do I really want to do with my life?

When you’re unemployed, you’re facing this same dilemma on a basic, daily, unavoidable level: what do I really want to do with my life – TODAY?

-It’s so great to have you in town to go on bike rides with. I can’t remember the last time I had the time to do something like this.
-Well, I have all the time in the world.
-If I had all the time in the world, there are so many things I’d like to work on for my portfolio. So many creative projects I wish I had the time to flesh out.
-I know. I have so much material to write about – like when that Spanish boy climbed into bed with Taser while we were asleep in Latvia. But I feel like I’ve been too busy to write. But really, what the hell do I do with my time?
-When we have the time, we don’t know what to do with it.
-And when we don't have the time, we're inspired to dream of what we'd do with it. I think I’d rather have the inspiration, and feel I don’t have time to fully realise my creativity than lose my inspiration. I’d rather be inspired than have a lot of time.

I’m used to being very very busy, and get annoyed when people claim they don’t know what to do with their free time. If I had free time I’d: learn Spanish; cook more; take an art class, probably pottery or glass blowing; sign up for a dance class; practice more piano; garden; cycle downtown every day, organise all my old photos; do my taxes; the list goes on…

Lists are good. They help us break up our days into manageable pieces. Just before I graduated from my first degree when I was 2o years old, I had such a heavy course load yet I could barely force myself to concentrate on my studies because I was too busy planning what I wanted to do with my life once I was "free". I made a list of things I wanted to do in my lifetime -- a list of over 8o adventures -- and I still have the list, somewhere. Maybe that's one to add to my list: amalgamate all my existing lists.

Fast forward a few months and I was facing graduation. I’ve often said that the most paralysed I’ve ever felt in my life was when I graduated from SFU in December 2ooo. I had a degree, I sold all my possessions so I had money, and I had the whole world available to me to start my adventures. Yet I was paralysed as to where I should start. I knew how to push boundaries, but without any boundaries to push, I was lost. I felt the same about being creative – in high school when we had creative writing classes, sometime Ms. Morgan would put a blank sheet in front of us, give us a pencil, and say: “write!” I never knew where to start. Other times she would say “write about this ball of paper, in the style of James Joyce”, and I could be the most creative person ever.

As with anything in life, it’s all about perspective, and having a tentative plan to move to the United Arab Emirates has certainly helped me keep a healthy perspective on my employment situation. Travelling around the world also helps.

I’ve been very quiet and mysterious since I got back to Canada, not purposefully, but mostly because I am just as in the dark about my immediate future as everyone else is.

I’m someone who likes to think I’m very consistent with what I say I’m going to do. For the last two months, I’ve had vague plans to accept a job in the United Arab Emirates, but until I have a plane ticket in my hand, I’ve been reluctant to make some bold announcement detailing my imminent move.

Where will you live?
For how long will you be in the UAE?
When do you leave?
What will you be doing?

All I know is that I have been offered the position of “Planning Analyst” with the Planning Department of the government of Abu Dhabi, that I’ve accepted my terms of employment for an initial contract of 3 months, and that I’ve requested to leave on 17 August 2007. I hope to stay at least 9 months to 1 year, but we’ll see how/if it goes. I promise – that’s all I know.

-You’re moving to the UAE? That’s so exciting.
-Honestly, I have the most boring life ever.
-Don’t you dare say that. We all live vicariously through you.
-No, I’m the one who literally lives through you. What have I been doing the last 4 months? Basically, I don’t have a life of my own, and so I fly to other parts of the world and live the lives of my friends for a week at a time. I need to get my own bloody life.
-But your life’s so interesting.
-Really. Honestly. It’s so boring. You have a life, and in your life you look forward to things like travel. So travel for you is exciting. It’s you at your best, and it’s something you can always look forward to, something to aspire to. I travel all the time, everyday I’m doing what most people aspire to do. And it becomes a chore. So everyday I’m faced with the philosophical dilemma of having to re-establish what inspires me, what I look forward to. Because I don’t have a trip on the horizon, my life is a trip. While everyone has this easy answer of what they would do with their vacation time, I’m actually having to live that day, every day, and try to find new ways of making it fresh.
-But that’s so depressing.
-Exactly. It’s much easier to be distracted from thinking about your own purposelessness when you have a trip to look forward to. Or maybe granite counter tops, or renovations on your house. Those activities which deviate from the norm of what we do. So I have to listen to everyone tell me how exciting my life is when really I just wish I had granite counter tops to distract myself from thinking about life. I really can’t complain – I have a super awesome life, with super awesome people in it, and I wouldn’t change it for a second – but it’s not as easy as everyone thinks.

The hardest thing in my life is saying goodbye to a community of friends. The second hardest thing in my life is grappling with constant philosophical dilemmas around meaning, purpose, inspiration, and life in general. I once got in an argument with a friend of mine in Africa about it:

-You white people have everything, and yet you’re always complaining.
-No, you people in Africa always have purpose, and yet you’re always complaining about not having enough stuff! Japanese people have one of the highest standards of living in the world, and they live longer than people in any other country. Yet they have the highest suicide rate in the world. Africans aren’t killing themselves!

So I continue to do exactly as I please, everyday waking up, choosing to just go with the flow, or attempting to tackle one of my lists: my list of things to do; my list of activities I love doing; my list of foods I want to learn to cook; my list of microbrewed beers I want to taste; my list of places I can cycle to from my house; my playlists of songs I like to rollerblade to; songs I want to download; things I want to write; great literature I want to read; films I want to see; friends I want to visit; organisations I want to research; etc. As with life in general, once time starts to become scarce, I’ll realise I don’t have enough of it to accomplish all that I need to do before my departure [or in my immediate case, my departure for the UAE]. This exercise of the last few months of being un-employed and relatively un-distracted may prove to be a prism through which to examine the larger task of constructing one’s life. If I can master this on a daily level now, maybe I’ll avoid a mid-life crisis in the future?

Am I actually complaining about this?
If this is my biggest worry, than my life must be pretty good...

Reflections of a Nomad.

This is my third trip to Toronto where I have attempted to move out of my beautiful home on Brunswick and College. Once in May 2006, once in September 2006, and now in July 2007. Each time I take out another load of my stuff, either shipping it to my parents’ house in Vancouver, or spreading the burden to new households across Toronto.

I've been travelling around the world visiting old friends for over four months now. It certainly takes the bite out of being unemployed [and plants it squarely on the wallet].

Constantly visiting dear friends has finally gotten me used to answering questions about myself. Going to my High School reunion, a mini-elementary school reunion, and having a facebook reunion with people I grew up with in summer swimming has given me a lot of practice. It's been lovely seeing everyone -- everyone looks the exact same and it all feels very ordinary and familiar to me. Yet everyone I've reunited with -- especially at my High School reunion -- has been struck by how surreal it is to see each other, and how different everyone looks.

-So, do you still live in Burnaby?
-Um. I don’t really live anywhere.
-What do you mean?
-Well, I just came back from living in Africa and am probably moving to the Middle East.
-How long are you in town then?
-I don’t really know.
-What do you do?
-I’m an urban planner.
-Where do you work?
-Um, well I do contracts, so I'm sort of a freelancer.
-Ok, so your last contract was as an urban planner, working for whom?
-My last job was in international development, and my job before that was as a researcher.
-But before that you were an urban planner?
-No.

My facebook reunion asked the question more simply: what are you all doing now? I replied as such:

Story #1 - I'm unemployed, unmarried, and stay at my parents' house in Burnaby.
Story #2 - I'm an international woman of mystery who, since ending her swim coaching career in 2000, works half the year abroad as an archaeologist/teacher/waitress/urban planner, and spends the other half jet-setting around the globe.
Story #3 - I secretly married a spy back in 1997 in Scotland.

The life of a nomad can be a balancing act sometimes. Having pockets of possessions dotted around the world can leave one feeling stretched out and un-gathered. But removing all your stuff from a place makes one feel like there’s nothing left there to go back to – the final slamming of the door behind you. The symbolic gesture of having wine glasses, chopsticks, a duvet, and a carpet leave the door open slightly ajar for a possible return.

Stuff.
Place.
Self.
Friends.
Heart.
Head.

They’re rarely all in the same space. The luxury/burden of being spread out across the world. Always everywhere, yet never anywhere.

Whenever I leave a place, I can safely say that I’ll probably see that community of friends again. After living in Japan in 2001, I went back to enjoy my Japanese community in 2003 and 2004. I have had several reunions – in Toronto, Vancouver, and Cape Town – with my Istanbul community. I revisited my Austrian community of France in 2002 when I went to Sicily in 2003. And the list continues. It’s a comforting thing to know that leaving a place is more of an “Aurevoir” than a “Goodbye”.

I have become a bit of a chameleon – immediately adjusting to whatever environment I find myself in, and effortlessly revisiting the facets of myself that surface from familiar friends, no matter how much time has passed since I last saw them. “Every time I see you, it’s as if no time has passed!” It’s like I live neither geographically nor chronologically, actually forgetting all the various time-space experiences that have passed since I last said “aurevoir” to any given community.

If that wasn't confusing enough, I also have a whole community of people whom I only see abroad. We meet under very temporal and contextual circumstances, yet we seem to be one of the few consistent things in each other’s lives. The few people we can really count on seeing are each other, because we literally could be anywhere [and therefore everywhere]. Experiences which seem surreal to others are common for us, and what’s common for others is surreal for us.

Sometimes it can be difficult to explain to people exactly what I do, and it can be a lot easier to be mysterious than to give direct answers. Direct answers always result in the same direct question: how do you afford to do what you do?

I hate to burst everyone’s bubbles, but I am none of the following: an heiress; the beneficiary of a rich Japanese business man; secretly on a CSIS salary; multilingual; have unknowing husbands all over the world writing cheques for me; nor do I take some sort of miracle pill that enables me to do what I do.

I wouldn’t change my life for a minute, but I do what I do because I made sacrifices [and because I have very understanding friends and family who are fabulous and share their lives and stuff with me so I don’t have to transport my own of everything, everywhere I go].

We are constantly making priorities in our life, adjusting and re-prioritising elements of our lives in the face of changes to our own definitions of self-success. No one has all of everything. It’s like you have a pool with all sorts of toys you can fit inside, but the size of everyone’s pools are pretty much the same. I’ve filled mine with traveling and learning, and made sacrifices in the home-ownership and marriage departments. Most people do a better job at balancing which departments they fill their lives with. Whenever people are like “you have the coolest life” I say “but I don’t have anything except pictures and memories. I don’t even actually own my suitcases – I borrowed them from my mother.”

Just when we nomads think we’ve got it all under control, floating around the globe with only our blogs knowing exactly where to find us, it’s when we are packing that it all catches up with us [or when we’re trying to find someone to insure us!]. It can be deeply scary packing everything into a suitcase or two, putting it in a corner by the door. Like THERE IT IS. All you have to show for your life fits into a small corner. But it also fits onto your back, so you can take it anywhere!

I pack the wine glasses and decanter Paul gave me for my birthday when I first moved to Toronto. I’ll donate them to Danielle and Andrea. My duvet that was my grandmas and I brought out east my first winter in Montreal six years ago is at Chrisa’s. My sushi dishes from Japan in 2001, my chopsticks my brother gave me in 1999. They really are nice wine glasses. The kind I would love to have in my own place someday.

The only thing I can’t seem to find are my speakers. How much joy did those speakers bring to my life! I don’t have my phone numbers with me, so I can’t call my Brunswick roommates to ask where I left them. What a convenient lack of organisation on my part -- I guess the door is still open for a return some day. I flick the glass of wine and listen to the long ring that persists, pour some wine in it, and toast to myself a final glass before I give the set to Danielle. I smile and realise I'm not going to find my speakers -- despite three moves, I'm still managing to leave some trace of myself at my beautiful Brunswick and College home after all.