The Season Of The City: How I've Grown In The Last 4 Years
I’ve been able to do things during this season in the city that I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had kept traveling. I am sure of this.
Yet, the memories I have from travelling live so much more vividly in my memory. I can’t tell you what I did in the summer of 2019, but I can tell you the countries I lived in and the projects I worked on in 2016. (I lived in the UK, spent time in Paris in the summer and over Christmas, live-streamed the refugee crisis from Greece.)
No matter how exciting projects at the office have been, they still pale in comparison to my intense 360-degree memories from my time traveling.
Lately, I’ve been feeling the loss of all the things I could have been doing in the last 4 years. I’m starting to get a hunch of when my next long journey will be, and its made me realize that there are some places that I might not return to. When I was in Tanzania in 2012, my sister came to visit me. It’s common for travelers to Tanzania to climb Mountain Kilimanjaro and I happened to be staying at a town near its summit. My sister and I briefly considered climbing Kilimanjaro, but I didn’t give it much thought. At the time, I told myself if I really want to climb it, I can come back and do it. It cost around $1200 to make the 5-6 day trip, and I hadn’t planned to spend that kind of money on the mountain. I was a 21, a university student and just grateful to be in Africa. I hadn’t budgeted for what seemed like a luxury.
I realize now that… I might not go back. There are still so many countries that I want to visit first. Kilimanjaro may never happen.
Four Years In The City: Time Wasted or Time Well-Used Time?
When I landed in Toronto in 2017, I had the sense that this was an important chapter of my life. I needed to reconcile a bunch of things—family, God, faith, my bank account—and staying in one location for a while would heelp. Plus, I had never actually held a full-time job in the first world for more than a few months and this would be a new experience. I already knew how to backpack across continents. This “ordinary” life in a city would be a new adventure. I had good reasons for coming back and staying. But have I wasted this time?
As I look back on the last four years, I feel a twinge of sadness over how meaningless it’s been, how little has changed and how plain my memories are here compared to my memories from my years travelling.
Hang on. Has it really been meaningless? Upon deeper reflection, I ask myself, why did I come here? What exactly have I accomplished here—personally, professionally, spiritually? What exactly has changed?
Though I haven’t changed countries, it doesn’t mean things did not happen. Though I don’t have many Instagram or Youtube remnants to back on, it doesn’t mean I did not create. I do have a phone full of photos and though almost none of them are posted online, it doesn’t mean they don’t count.
Recognizing Change When Things Look The Same
In reality, I know that I have changed just as much, if not more, as I would have changed in four years of travel. The change was quieter, subtle, but still happening. There was no fanfare or congratulations on social media, but every few weeks I celebrated my own growth by reflecting on what I was learning in my journals. The truth is, if I compared the things that bothered me in 2018, to the things that I wrestle with now, they are different. I have grown out of and into many things. I have changed.
There were certain things I’ve been able to do in this Season In The City that I wouldn’t have been able to do while travelling. It’s important for me to acknowledge them, because racking up stamps in a passport and jumping out of airplanes isn’t the only way to push your limitations and grow as a person.
Here’s a look back at the last 4 years and the growth that they brought:
2017: I compiled my Instagram writing from three years into a book, Home Is Oceans Here, and that experience was so soul-filling, I knew that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. I experienced a sense of creative flow for hours and hours that I had never experienced before.
2018: I started a job and learned how to navigate a full-time role. A regular job has helped me to unwind from my years of scrambling and trying to be an entrepreneur. It’s given me a chance to take work easy, which was a big revelation for me, after trying so hard and so desperately 24/7 as an entrepreneur. My soul needed this time to recalibrate.
I learned how to work with a manager and a small creative team. I learned how to have boundaries with my workload and that of my coworkers. At first, I felt responsible for the success of the whole team and it took me a while to lay off and realize that if God hasn’t made me the manager, it’s not my job to be the manager. I’ll do my piece and trust God is taking care of the rest of the project.
I learned a lot about working in professional environments that will serve me for the rest of my life. I worked on several big campaigns for conferences. I still got to make videos for work. Work was fun and different.
I commuted to an office and back. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do this for too long or too much, but I have a lot more compassion now for people to have been subjected to the 9 to 5 grind for years. I can only imagine what that kind of stress does to their soul and psyche. At the same time, that time commuting was also thinking time. Although I don’t remember specific details of what I processed, I’m sure that I thought through a lot during my commutes. I watched many sunrises from behind my steering wheel, tangerine rays painting the highway like a golden road to heaven.
2019: I tried to create original content on top of working full-time and I did it! I started waking up early and writing in the mornings. I started mapping out how I could film videos on Saturdays. I started making lists of things I actually wanted to share. And I did it all. I pushed the boundaries of what I thought I could produce and it was a huge revelation for me to see that I could do this! But then, I had to stop because…
I started a master’s degree! I started this largely because it felt “right” and like I was “supposed to.” Now I’m over halfway done and I’ve grown a lot through this. Its helped me to reconcile my relationship with God in ways that could fill several blogs. (I’ve been writing about it here and here.)
2020: COVID. Then COVID hit in March 2020, and one of my secret dreams, which was to figure out how to work remotely again, came true. However, just before COVID, God managed to squeeze in two unexpected trips for me: making videos for a wellness retreat center in Jamaica and for a memoir writing retreat at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.
Those two trips pushed me over an edge as I realized that I mentally could not 1) work a full-time job, 2) do the coursework for a masters degree and 3) do freelance creative projects. My brain was exploding with the mental work and the emotional load of trying to hold multiple dreams in my heart. Something had to give. In the spring of 2020, while wrestling with my master’s research papers, I realized that I needed to surrender my creative dreams and projects. I had done this kind of surrendering a few times before, like when I first got the full time job, but this time, I really let it go. I came to trust that when God wanted me to create original art and content, time would open up.
Like many people, I spent the first few months of COVID overwhelmed as I transitioned to work-from-home life. However, one thing that helped a lot was….
I moved into a place of my own! I moved out of my parents and into a little townhouse that I now share with a few housemates. I had been repotted and I was excited for the the growth that would follow! My first few months of moving into the new house were spent making my housemates feel welcome and exploring this new town. I did many biking trips and got to know my neighbours.
Autumn 2020: As COVID extended into the autumn, I wanted to figure out how to do work remotely well. It was time to start writing again. Since being part of the memoir writing workshop in Guatemala, I had barely done any creative writing because my brain was overloaded with papers I needed to write for school, new projects for work, and editing my freelance videos. Finally, it was time to discover my personal creative rhythm.
2021: I discovered I could write more papers and write them fairly well! This January I enrolled in extra courses in order to get through my electives faster and this turned out to be a mind-bending, boundary-busting idea. Since I knew, I had more papers to write than the rest of my cohort, I started planning them out. Then I started tracking my time and realizing that I can get better and better at this. I also took a World Religions course that reopened topics that I had let lay dormant (like, what am I supposed to do about what I know about other spiritual paths?!) and I felt God give me permission to be all of me.
I finished jobs. In January, I also sensed that my time at my full-time job would be coming to a close. I wasn’t growing much anymore professionally, and I wasn’t passionate about it anymore. As someone who is often emotionally and spiritually connected to the work I do, I knew I couldn’t work in this job much longer. No one could fix this. No one could bring that passion back in me (other than God) and I was sure that God was pointing me onward.
This summer I got offered another job, and it’s slowly becoming clear to me that this is the perfect thing for me for my next stage of growth. I’ll tell you more about it soon, when the papers are signed and details ironed out later this autumn!
I turned 30! Yes, I can’t forget this. I turned 30 this February, and all of the contemplating I’ve been doing about this transition into womanhood is bearing fruit. I have grown. I can feel it. I am growing into the woman I feel like I’m meant to become. The woman God created me to be.
The greatest gift of all
I think the greatest and hardest gift to quantity is this deep foundation of trust I now have in God, the Universe, the Source of Life, the Cosmic Love and Intelligence that holds the stars and my heartbeat.
My sense of faith and trust in God now permeates every facet of my decision-making, my future, my past and my present. Christian beliefs are obviously woven into this, perhaps even the foundation of my beliefs, but my now faith has become a flourishing garden of understanding with seeds from Jesus, Christianity, yoga, Buddhism, Sikhism, philosophy, ethics and other spiritualities. They are all alive and blossoming, often at different times, but still in the same garden.
I have this deep certainty that no matter happens in my life, I am guided, supported and loved along the way. This peace is priceless, and if it cost me four years to arrive at it wholeheartedly, it was worth it.
So now, when I think about this things I haven’t been able to do in the last 4 years, I realize that they are either things I have done, things I got to make some headway in, or still could do in the future. For each thing I did less of, I got to do more of other things:
Travel: While I didn’t hold my rate of averaging 5 countries per year, God did throw in those two trips to Jamaica and Guatemala for me! Plus, there is still a lot of time in my life to travel. As long as I’m conscious that this is a priority for me, and I plan accordingly, I can still do plenty of travel in my life!
Unique Experiences: I haven’t surfed or backpacked South America, but there is still plenty of time for me to do this! Instead I had experiences doing more “normal” work in the city that certainly be helpful in my career and I learned how to be productive in ways that would have taken me much longer if I had kept free-floating. While I didn’t become conversant in Swahili, I did get to learn some beginner Greek for my masters!
And in return for the tradeoff, I got to do things like this:
I learned how to make a space beautiful! I learned how to do interior decorating.
I’ve learned to sing and play ukulele! This will come in really handing the next time I go to Hawaii or work in a retreat centre.
I have a home base! I’ve set up my room here so that it can be a highly creative and productive workspace for years to come. I invested in furniture for my creative workshop that means a lot to me, because it is a sign of a craftswoman.
All the Good From This Season: Arriving Home
It is only when I look at my whole self as a budding woman, that I can see now what the last four years of living in the city has done to me.
If the seven years of travel in 2011-2017 stretched me high, then the last four years, 2017- 2021 have stretched me deep.
I’m starting to feel like I can hold all the good and all the gifts from this Season Of The City in my heart. Where before it felt like I had to convince myself that I wasn’t wasting my time here, now I believe it. I see it. I live it.
Looking back on the last four years, I feel a sense of accomplishment.
I did so many of the things that I wanted to do when I landed back in 2017. I got a “real job.” I did the 9 to 5. And I happened to end up with a house, while, while not my plan, is not such a bad thing. I made the house beautiful. I did not let the city kill my passion. I learned to thrive. I’ve become a true artist and creative.
I know who I am, who’s got my back, where I stand and where I’m going.
Perhaps this is what it really means to arrive home.
<3
Infinite Love,
Anita
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P.S. Some Thoughts On The Future
Perhaps, because I’ve done so much of what I wanted to do here, this season will be wrapping up not too long from now. But, there is one more thing I wanted to do when I came back, and it’s a big thing. I wanted to write and publish a real book. Yes, I self-published one, Home Is Oceans Here, at the end of 2017, but even then I could sense that I wanted to do more of this inner probing and of a deeper, higher quality. Most of the writing of that book was originally done for Instagram and I didn’t change it up too much, just refined, organized and compiled the trains of thought. Now I want to learn how to execute long, well-thought-out pieces and to do it regularly. I want to figure out how to tell my stories from my travels in a way that is meaningful for me and others. Let us see what the future holds!
