Should I stay or should I go?

How to make a big-assed life change.

A midwinter afternoon in Aotearoa.

We decided to move our entire lives across the world over a coffee.

It was Easter 2023, the third morning of a two-week trip to Aotearoa-New Zealand and an idea began to form about living here. My mother-in-law was the catalyst; very much in her Cranky Crone era, she was pissed off at widowhood, her increasingly failing body, and rapid cognitive decline. It was a shock to realise she was entering the last season of her life.

Could we leave everything we know to be here for this?

This was my first trip back to my homeland in over a decade—the only time I had been in NZ as a sober adult. I’d been so desperate to leave! I’d had a map of the world on my bedroom wall and began collecting Lonely Planet guides as a 14-year-old. I listened to The Smiths and Billy Bragg and dreamt of leaving this insular, unexciting place for a thrilling life in London.

Who would I be if we lived here now?

Returning in my fifties was a sweet surprise: How had I missed the walkable community, the Maori and English placenames, and the fact that someone packs your groceries for you here?! Life felt more relaxed, kinder, and easier than I remembered. I felt like I was seeing it for the first time, and yet everything was so familiar.

We would be five minutes from our whanau/family.

It never occurred to us that we might want to stay until we got there. And then the choice was in the air.

So we talked it through every day for the rest of the trip and for weeks afterwards: what would be difficult about living in (still v. insular) New Zealand, what would we miss about England (almost everyone we love is there!), what felt like the right thing, what about work, bringing the pooch, and like, why would we do this? What did the family think? And if we are going to do it, when should we decide? When should we go?

When it comes to big life choices: should I leave the job, take a lover, procreate, end the marriage, change careers… there is very rarely a clear-cut, easy answer.

It makes sense that most of us wait instead of choosing. We hold out for the mythical Right Time, a sign from the universe, permission, after the holidays/the tricky time at work/the last straw…

This not-quite-deciding time is often filled with self-doubt: What if I make the wrong choice? What if I blow up my life, and then regret it? What if the reality doesn’t match the daydream?

Here’s the question that has always helped me: are you moving away from something you don’t want or towards something you do want?

The results of these motivations often look the same from the outside, but the energy of each is very, very different.

So many of my big life changes began with I don’t want this. Often, this realisation led alarmingly quickly to me blowing up my life to get away from the intolerable job/relationship/fiasco of my own creation. But those ‘fuck this!’ choices usually left me feeling more anxious, uncertain and often regretful because I hadn’t really considered what might come after.

Moving towards something hits different. There is the headspace to get clear on why this matters and why this matters now.

We’d kind of decided there was an option to move across the world over that coffee.

But then we spent weeks actively deciding. We’d be moving towards the experience of living in our homeland, time with family, especially my mother-in-law, taking a share in caring for her, and even though she is largely indifferent to us being here, we’d know we honoured the end of her life.

These reasons made it a pretty easy yes.

And they have continued to help us keep saying yes even when we have been deeply homesick for our people, when it took Ash six months to find work, everytime his mum forgets we live here, or doesn’t want to see us, enduring two winters in a row!!

No big life change can live up to the ideal fantasy. But I would much rather regret the things I did do, than the things I didn’t.

‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it’ - Bronnie Ware, Regrets of the Dying

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