Forty-Four Days - Learning to Leave Without Escaping

Battersea Park - a small area that juts into the Thames is the coolest place to be on a hot day. One of my great joys is riding the river path to sit here and write.

It’s forty-four days until I depart London. It could have been thirty-one.

I’d planned to leave London much sooner than this, starting the process in October last year. Crossing into 2025, I questioned if I was ready and hesitated while wondering: where will I go? What will I do?

After the clarity of my integrative March experience, I knew that my time in London was ending, and I set a date nearly six months ahead—for the flat, for Sooti… and for me. I extended my stay ever-so-slightly based on a work contract projected to conclude at the end of August.

That contract collapsed two weeks ago—the day before the prospective buyers of my flat withdrew their offer, and I couldn’t help wondering: what does it all mean, if anything at all? We humans are meaning makers — seeking a coherent narrative for the perfectly choreographed, yet seemingly chaotic unfolding of our lives.

It would be too easy to dismiss that work contract as nothing more than a well-timed injection of income from my network, but it was too perfect. Nested within it was yet another cycle of closure. The work: the kind of job I haven’t truly done at that level since I started work in Dubai fifteen years earlier. The company: the last company I was contracted to deliver training to before I left Dubai. The mirror: a leader whose archetypal behaviour would have led to an uneasy conflict in the past. The unseen thread: for a while I’d been wondering if I should return to Dubai for work, career and life.

Jolted out of deep sleep at 5:00 am each morning, I was daily reminded that Dubai had come to me with my own work-day now aligned to the UAE team. I wasn’t fired like the three consultants before me, but I also didn’t collapse when pushed by the behaviour of this dismissively transactional leader either.

What shifted was a recognition of an old pattern, and how I could easily fall into an old response in the face of it. Instead, I let curiosity replace judgement, and humility take the place of entitlement. Stepping out of the potential minefield of reactivity, I realised that the behaviour (although intolerably rude) had nothing to do with me, and I had several choices. I chose to ignore the BS, focus on the task and limit the engagement to the essentials for thirty-three days.

On the surface, the contract finished earlier than planned when they found the replacement hire they were looking for. At a deeper level, it ended in right-timing because I’d closed the open loops in my own field, and I’m grateful for both the insight and the opportunity to return to more harmonious routines. I could stop jiggling the mouse for eight hours, wondering if the ‘boss’ was going to issue any instructions that day.

At a much broader level, I’ve come to appreciate the gift of the threshold space that could too easily be framed as a prison I need to escape. My greatest joys in this transitional space are the simplest things I’d once taken for granted—coffee made with kindness at 2Love Tea & Coffee in Clapham Junction, cycling the streets of London rather than suffocating on buses, tubes and trains, the sounds of the birds at dawn and dusk echoing through open windows on a cool summer breeze, and the scent of jasmine or honeysuckle filling my nostrils along the many streets I walk or cycle to Battersea Park where I often go to write and reflect.

These things aren’t new—how I perceive them is.

In past moves, I was wedded to a short departure window with little consideration of what it means to truly leave a place ‘whole-heartedly’. The compression created momentum, endless to do lists and it meant I entered new places with the clutter of the past. The slower pace of my flat sale has come with the silver lining of letting me leave with that feeling that I have savoured the memories, release the old scaffolding with grace, and the space to be intentional about what I take. This unintentional slowing has become much more about I depart, with a corresponding impact on how I arrive in the new.

Does forty-four days from this vantage point feel too long? For someone who’s used to moving at a rapid pace, this is practically glacial. That alone forces me to sit with these questions:

Why am I still here?

What is time doing with me here?

Firstly, Sooti-chan—my sometimes furry overlord, and longtime feline guardian is the main reason I am still here. I promised I wouldn’t abandon him. The Australian Government is exceedingly precise on how he may enter, and the hurdles we’ve had to jump through mean six months is the minimum time you must wait.

Secondly — the time it has taken to ‘leave’ has helped me recalibrate to a deeper level of trust that everything unfolds in right timing. Through periods of massive discomfort and occasional despair, I’ve been shown that I can be resourced and sustained financially along the way without the pushing, forcing and effecting of my past.

Throughout the past eighteen months, the invitation has always been to choose between a return to the corporate world—where the promise of my old salary comes with a dysregulated nervous system, and a lack of space/time to appreciate the parts of my life that have become more meaningful—or to live more simply, with a new lens of discernment and a greater sense of agency and choice than I expected. That recalibration and attunement to trust has been hard-earned for a strategic-thinking left brainer like me.

It could have been thirty-one days. Instead, it is forty-four.

This isn’t because of the contract that dissolved or because I will have stayed too long. For the first time, I’m staying until I’m truly ready to go. (And there may just be another work contract between now and then, with another loop to close 😋).

What becomes possible when we don’t rush the in-between?

When we don’t push through the cocoon, but allow ourselves to be rewritten within it?

Ahead of me lie four months of movement without striving, a journey with no questions to answer, no side job to ‘manage’, and importantly, no-one to ‘be’.

Last year was the sabbatical. This year is the space to remember so many things I’d forgotten.

Perhaps the true arrival doesn’t happen at the destination, but somewhere in the dissolving.

When the grasping quiets.

When the self we thought we had to become no longer needs to be constructed.

When we pause long enough to realise—we’re already here.