A move to London
There comes a moment – after you’ve spent 4 hours frantically trying to figure out why your work emails aren’t getting through, you can’t confirm ANY of your bank/email/apps/accounts because they’re all trying to authenticate through your Canadian phone number which is no longer active because you’ve gotten yourself a UK number, you’re jetlagged, sitting in bed in pyjamas pants with a cider stain down the front (it exploded on you last night and you didn’t have the energy, or extra pants, to do anything about it) – that you begin to almost question if this call to adventure that brought you to London, England in January of 2022 was such a great idea after all.
Almost.
Hello. I know it’s been awhile—10 months—since my last real blog post (Philosophy of the Absurd posted on April 3, 2021). I’ve been working on (and processing) a few big things behind-the-scenes that have been occupying my time and energy. Even though they still haven’t quite come to fruition, sitting here in London-town I realized that a) I’ve definitely manifested something here (if not everything just yet) and b) that there might be people curious to follow along on this adventure as it’s happening.
As you may have now guessed, I’m living in London! No, not London, Ontario but the real OG: London, England. If this comes as a surprise, be comforted by the fact that it came as a surprise to a whole bunch of my close friends and family too. The pandemic (amongst many other things) has made me reticent to share plans before they happen. Life feels uncertain and the loom of cancellation seems great – I know y’all know what I’m talking about.
It wasn’t when we packed, or got on the plane, or got off at Gatwick Airport, but rather it was the first morning that I woke up here that I had the thought – oh shit, this is real!
My partner and I have been dreaming of a year abroad for a few years. Well, he was dreaming of a bunch of different options but when it came down to it, I had to admit I was only dreaming of one place: London.
I’ve visited London a couple of times as an adult, and each trip has cemented that this is a place I could live. Which is an interesting and peculiar thing, isn’t it, the way we feel we can visit some places and live in others? There are many beautiful cities I’ve loved visiting – Barcelona, Paris, Lisbon, New Orleans, Guadalajara, Stockholm, New York, even closer-to-home Vancouver. For some reason I can’t imagine living long-term in any of them.
London is different for me and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s something about the golden, wet quality of the light, the way people still read—actual, paper books—on transit, the way every other person out running looks like they’ve never gone for a run before in their life (something about the arm/knee/foot coordination – do people get taught to run differently here? Is this a regional stylistic thing??). I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something about London feels like it could be home.
So why am I here? Well, the grown-up cocktail-party answer is that I’ve been accepted into a PhD program here (yes, it’s true) and I wanted to check out some archives and get a sense of the university. I also had a big scholarship application that I could really do from anywhere in the world, so why not here? But really, my plan is to treat the next few months as a sabbatical.
A sabbatical is a purposeful break from a career. Designers like Sagmeister have made the idea famous in design circles – he takes a year off every seven years for what he calls “experiments”, which he also claims feed into all his best creative ideas in the years afterwards.
This trip to London is my first real attempt at a sabbatical: stepping outside of my ordinary world into a real-life experiment. I’m not quite at year-long-Sagmeister-levels yet: our current plan is for 3 months. That being said, we only bought one-way tickets, so who knows where April or May will take us?
I will be sharing some of my adventures on this blog every week. If you’re curious about what it might be like to live in London – or how my experiment doing my first mini sabbatical goes – then I invite you to follow along!
