Move then Begin

Why your first move may be exactly that.

Welcome to the first of a 10-part series exploring the 10 Principles for Moving Forward which underpin my memoir currently in final drafting, The Way Through.

Twenty-something years ago, my wife, Monica, and I packed most of what we owned into our early nineties model Hyundai Excel and headed north, destination Brisbane. To say we were relocating to Brisbane makes it sound far more planned than it was. Neither of us had a job waiting. We also had nowhere to live, and even if we found a place to rent, we barely had enough for the bond.

The plan was simple, albeit flimsy. We would get to Brisbane and if we found work and somewhere to live within a couple of weeks, then we’d stay. If we ran out of time or money first, we’d turn around and limp back to Melbourne.

We’d borrowed a bit of cash from our parents, filled the Excel’s petrol tank and packed it until there wasn’t much room left for us. The trip didn’t feel bold or brave; it felt rushed and reckless but staying in Melbourne felt harder than leaving it.

So, we left.

By the time we reached Kalkallo, about forty minutes north of Melbourne, the sun was rising. Kalkallo was little more than a petrol station back then, but it signaled Melbourne was behind us, and the long part of the drive had begun.

Around that point, I noticed my hands ease off the steering wheel.

Nothing had improved, at least not in any proper sense. We’d left our family, the people we knew, and what little safety we had. We were driving towards a new city with a scant plan at best. In truth, we’d made life far less secure, not more.

And yet, I felt relieved.

Back in Melbourne, I’d been carrying a level of strain for so long that I barely noticed it anymore. That strain sat uncomfortably on my shoulders, constantly in my head, and showed in the way I went through each day. I felt stuck in a life I didn’t understand but kept repeating all the same. Somewhere beyond Kalkallo, with Melbourne even further behind us, some of that strain lifted.

Now, I don’t want to paint Melbourne as the problem because it wasn’t. Melbourne had been home for over twenty years and had been good to me. My family was there, along with people I loved, places I knew well, and memories that still run deep today.

But Melbourne had also become tied to a challenging part of my life. I was hostage to habits I couldn’t yet see clearly, let alone change, and I kept doing much the same things and ending up back in much the same place. After a while, even being stuck felt normal.

Leaving didn’t fix any of that, but it gave me some distance from it, and distance was a point from which I could begin.

Sometimes, before you can grow, you need movement.

For Monica and me, that meant moving to another state. Most of the time, the move required for growth to begin won’t be that big. You may need to change jobs, move teams, or step back from a role that has taken too much from you. You may need to walk away from someone or simply stop giving so much time to something that leaves you worn out.

The move isn’t the growth, but it gives you the room in which growth can begin.

We frequently talk about change as though it all happens inside us. Try harder, sort out your thinking, or show more grit. That advice is fair, but it misses the way our surrounds shape what we do, often without us seeing it.

For example, stay long enough in a place where every task is urgent, and soon you treat every request as urgent too. You say yes before you’ve thought about it, or you take on more because letting someone down feels worse than running yourself into the ground. After a while, being flat out doesn’t feel odd, it simply feels like work.

The same thing can happen to people. If every honest conversation ends in a fight, you learn to keep things to yourself, not because you don’t care, but because saying less is easier. Even your diary can box you in. The same meetings come around each week, more jobs get added, and your time is gone before you’ve had much say in it.

Eventually you think the entire problem is you, and sometimes part of it is. But what’s around you can make the problem much worse, and it can keep you in the same old loop long after you’ve decided you want to change. The problem is you are in the same spot and have little room to grow and change.

This doesn’t mean you should quit each time work gets tough, or pack the car when life goes flat. The move you need may be quite small. It could mean dropping a meeting you no longer need to attend, handing work back to the person who should own it, or taking one part of the weekend before someone else claims it.

None of this looks grand, but it doesn’t need to. What matters is whether it gives you room you didn’t have before.

What needs to move so you can begin?

I’ve seen people leave jobs that had worn them down for years and look better within weeks. They sleep well again, have more energy, and their sense of humour returns. You can almost see the weight come off them and for a while, it feels as though the move has solved the whole thing. Then some of the old habits turn up in the new job. They take on too much, or put off a hard discussion, or perhaps keep work they should pass on because showing someone else how to do it seems like more effort.

Before long, they’re busy again and wondering why a new job feels a lot like the old one.

That doesn’t mean leaving was a mistake. The old job may have left them too tired to see what was going on. Once they got out of it, they had enough room to work out which parts came from the job and which parts came with them.

And that’s when the genuine work begins.

We often expect the move to do too much. A new job won’t teach you to set limits unless you set them. A calmer life won’t make each choice easy and a new city won’t wipe out the parts of your past that you’ve brought along for the ride.

The move gives you an opening, but you still must do something with it.

Brisbane wasn’t a cure for me. I didn’t cross the Queensland border and become a new man. Most of what I needed to face had come north with us in the Excel, packed in among our clothes and belongings.

But Brisbane gave me a break from the life I’d been living. Brisbane didn’t know who I had been in Melbourne. There were no old habits waiting for me each morning, and no one expected me to keep playing the same part. For the first time in years, there was a gap between what had been and what might come next.

Granted, I didn’t always use that gap well. Some things took years to learn, and a few lessons came back more than once because I clearly hadn’t understood them the first time. Growth wasn’t clean or quick, and it looked nothing like the straight road north.

Still, the room mattered.

We often try to change by adding more to our lives without realising they are already full. We sign up for a course, set a new goal, or start another habit, then try to force it into the small time we have left. Nothing else stops, meaning there is little space to fit that new thing.

When it falls over, we blame a lack of grit. But grit may not be the issue, there simply may have been nowhere for the new thing to fit.

Before asking what else you should start, ask what can move. What can you stop doing, give to someone else, or step back from? What keeps pulling you towards a part of yourself you’re trying to leave behind? You may find that the same problem has followed you through two jobs, a few managers, and several firm vows that this time will be different. That’s not much fun to admit, but at least you now know it wasn’t left behind at the last place.

From there, the start is often quite plain. You have the talk you’ve been putting off, or you stand firm, even when it feels awkward. They’re small steps, but most growth looks like that; slow, patchy and messier than we make it sound years later.

Decades on from that northward journey in the crowded Hyundai Excel, I can still picture the road near Kalkallo and remember my hands easing around the wheel.

I hadn’t changed; nothing was resolved, and the life I wanted was still a long way off. Actually, I’m not sure I even knew what I wanted that life to look like.

But I moved, and that move opened a space for growth.

That was where I could begin.