Some years ago my husband and I went on a great summer holiday. 

We stayed in the honeymoon suite in a lodge high on the dunes. We started our days with long walks on the beach. The rest of the day was spent rotating from the main pool at the beach bar, to the lodge pool and, finally, the splash pool on our deck. Delicious meals, ice-cold cocktails, oily massages on the sun deck and long afternoon naps were the tracks that our days ran on.

At the end of the day, four course dinners under a visible milky way were followed by a wine-wobble walk back to our suite.

We spent our trip back home debating where this holiday stood in the rankings of our top holidays. This holiday felt like “needs met”. Total body and mind relaxation and spirit restored.

Days after we returned home we no longer felt relaxed and restored. This didn’t feel like the usual “coming down from a holiday high”. This felt more like realising we were the proverbial frog in the now boiling water.

Proverbial frog in the boiling water

We had been wrestling for some time with our dissatisfaction with our lives but kept diminishing our feelings by telling ourselves things like: everybody feels this. It’s part of being an adult. We’re just feeling burnout or we’re probably having a midlife crisis. Or we need to do more of this or if we just added that to our lives we’ll feel better.

This holiday was supposed to be part of our solution but it just highlighted how we could feel but weren't feeling. 

We had our own business, which we’d started from scratch, and our days were focussed on our clients and 15 staff. We were often working 16 hour days so the only time we had to express our feelings to one another was during our early morning walks with our dogs.

One of our other favourite things to tell ourselves was that we should be grateful for the lives we were living. Many others would appreciate what we had. But no matter what we told ourselves we just felt worse.

During our sunrise walks with our dogs we started to fantasize about running away from what we had created and starting over. One of my husband’s favourite fantasies was to buy a plot of rural land and build a log cabin. At six foot six and built like a rugby player all he needed was the plaid shirt, an axe and a saw and he was ready for his new lumberjack life.

We started to fantasize about running away

I was concerned about what we’d do once the cabin was built.

One morning, as we were coming to the end of our walk, I told him that my concern was that we had designed this life and we needed to make sure that whatever design flaws we’d built into this life we didn’t replicate in the next phase of our lives. What we were feeling wasn’t someone else’s fault and we needed to understand why we were feeling the way we were before drawing up designs for whatever was going to be next.

But, let me tell you, we felt desperate and trapped. We would typically characterise ourselves as happy people but there wasn’t much in our lives making us happy at this point. 

The more we gave voice to our feelings the less we cared about what “we should be feeling”. 

My husband told me that he wasn’t even sure he liked himself anymore. We were twisting and distorting ourselves to fit into the life we had made.

Our relationship was our joy but we were worried that, if we continued this way, it would eventually break under the pressure of our dissatisfaction too.

We consider ourselves to be problem solvers and, working together, there wasn’t much that we felt we couldn’t. But, in this instance, we started to feel like we were spinning our wheels. We just weren’t gaining traction. Eventually, our conversations started to sound like a script - we were adding nothing new, just repeating ourselves.

Spinning our wheels

We recognised that we were not making headway and that frustration just added to our intense feelings of discontent.

Mentally, emotionally and physically we felt exhausted. A virtually constant exhaustion that we couldn’t escape.

I am a voracious reader and, some years prior, I had read From Sex to Superconsciousness by Osho. There he talks about digging a well. You know, an old fashioned well. 

When you dig a well you start by removing things. Clearing the area, removing stones and sand to get to the water that’s beneath. Creating space so that the water can well up.

Reading this really stood out to me. So often I would look at adding something - we must do more of this, add this, and that will change things. However, sometimes we need to look at what we must remove. 

If the environment is cluttered no matter what you add it will just be drowned out by what’s already there. There’s no space to contain what you have added.

If water rises up and you haven’t cleared space for it you don’t have a well - clear water that you can use - you have a muddy, marshy mess.

Inspired by this, we started to look at what wasn’t working for us in our lives. It turned out to be a long list.

Although this provided us with some clarity it also added to the pressure we felt to escape our lives because we now saw evidence of the list everyday.

Being an entrepreneur can be a lonely experience. It has unique stressors that not everyone shares. We knew this from our own experience and from being a listening ear to our clients, often also entrepreneurs.

Grinding our gears

We still didn’t feel any progress or relief. We were grinding our gears. We needed to add some oil so that our gears could engage and we could move forward. From our personal experiences of therapy and counselling, we knew that the right third party could provide the perspective, objectivity and insight to shift our gears; so that they could engage again.

It was at this point that we started seeing a Life Coach. Someone that we were both comfortable with.

Being able to share the burden of our frustrations and how trapped we felt brought us immediate relief. In these sessions we started to explore and question the design of our lives and the beliefs that these designs were built on. We debated, struggled and uprooted things we no longer believed but were still acting on. We learnt new skills to use in building our metaphorical cabin and well.

Thing is, fear’s a bitch. It’s scary to let go of what you know, the life you’ve created, the business you’ve built.

It’s scary to let go

What were we thinking? This was going to be our most profitable year since we’d started our business. Suddenly there were so many good things about our lives!

Still our unhappiness persisted.

Then, one day, we reached a tipping point. We realised that our fear of things remaining the same was greater than our fear of things changing. We had to choose our fear.

But what were we choosing? What was next? We had little to no idea.

Letting go of what you know is scary, but having nothing to grab onto is fucking terrifying. 

Void. What if we create the space for the well and no water springs up? What if we’re wrong? What if we fail?What if? What if? What if?

There were many, many, many reasons why we thought we couldn’t do it. But each obstacle we looked at we saw as a hurdle to overcome. Instead of accepting that we couldn’t conquer the barrier to what we wanted, we looked at how we could change things so that we could.

But what if we succeed? What if we create the life we dream of?

A string of questions eventually brought us round to a different string of questions. What do we have to hold on to? Each other. Our skills, talent and experience. Our desire to learn. Our desire to change. Knowing that we’ve changed before. Holding onto other times in our lives that we took a risk and it paid off. 

As Maya Angelou said: when you know better you do better. We were going to bet that we could create a better life moving forward because we had developed new skills. We know ourselves better and what we want.

We weren’t creating a life for someone else. We were creating the life that we want to live. It didn’t have to work for anybody else but us.

We got lost for a while. Sometimes we make decisions in life in reaction to life’s events. They seem perfectly reasonable at the time. Enough of those decisions eventually led us off course and we realised we ended up somewhere that we weren’t choosing to go. Our lives were so busy that we weren’t choosing our own path; we got knocked off course by life’s little dodgem car decisions.

So we got a new life, right? Not so fast.

Even though we had reached that tipping point of fear, where we knew we were going to choose the fear of change over the fear of things remaining the same, we still didn’t know exactly what our new life entailed. We knew what values and beliefs we’d build on but we didn’t have a clear idea of what the actual building blocks would be.

We didn’t feel ready to start building yet. We were depleted, empty and bone-weary.

We decided to start the work of clearing the stones and the sand to create space for our new life well to spring up. Keeping only the things we knew we wanted to take with us, we dismantled our lives and took a sabbatical to explore, experience and learn. Learn a new way of being. Learn new skills. Learn new hobbies. Learn to live with the fear of not knowing.

We loved having nothing in our diaries and stared gleefully at the emptiness and lack of commitment it represented. Then we forgot to put the rubbish out one Thursday and decided, okay, we’ll compromise and put that one thing in our diary.

At no point did we conquer the fear, the very many fears. We just became more practiced at living with them. We worked on developing skills to handle them.

There were days where we sat on the couch and escaped into Netflix. There were days when we asked ourselves: what have we done? Many, many days, many, many times. 

But the space we created for ourselves mentally, emotionally and physically allowed an internal well to spring up that gave us the strength and fortitude to move forward. We focussed these resources, guarded them and nurtured them until we were strong enough to start building again.

We became better at living with the fear. It doesn’t end. Each time we try something new it’s there, but every time we do it anyway we tip the balance and learn that we can do it. We do fail, but we rise and try again.

We started on this new path when we reached the tipping point where our fear of things remaining the same was greater than our fear of things changing. Now the scales tip in our favour each time we accomplish something, in spite of the fear of doing it.

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