How a two week holiday is ‘too weak’: The life-changing joy of a mini retirement.
Faye Smith is managing director of Sheffield-based Keep Your Fork PR and Marketing, a multi award- winning communications training consultancy she launched ten years ago to serve small businesses and charities around the region. www.keepyourfork.co.uk
Have you got one of those Sasco-type annual planners with everyone’s leave on it in garish vinyl strips staring at you from your office wall as you read this?
And there are your holidays marked- a week off at Easter. Then there’s two weeks in the sun in the kids’ summer school holidays. Roll on the year you won’t be forced to pay triple the price and endure the packed roads and pool-sides to take that well-earned break- sorry ‘family time’. Then another four months before a week of ‘enforced togetherness’ at Christmas. And you wouldn’t mind, but by the time you get to these well-earned ‘rests’, you are usually so exhausted by doing all the work in advance (especially if you are self-employed or freelancing), or dreading what you’ll be coming back to, you end up spending the first part of the break being ill and the latter unable to unwind and enjoy. Sound familiar?
Meantime in your daily life, you are spinning all the plates, juggling teen angst, stressful life-altering exams, spiralling university fees, menopause or ‘meno-Porsche’ health issues, TAT (‘Tired All The Time’ syndrome), mid-life crises, parents suddenly needing you instead of the other way round and more. No wonder Gen X are knackered, on the verge of burn out and wondering if this is what life’s going to be like until we stagger through post Brexit Britain to uncertain pensions and late sixties retirement- if we are lucky.
Is there an alternative we whisper over a well- earned Friday G&T? What if those poxy few days at a time spent anxiously checking emails, struggling to switch off before gearing up for re-entry could be re-imagined into something much more significant?
Well there is an alternative according to multi-million best-selling author of ‘The Four Hour Work Week’, Tim Ferris. Ferris calls it a ‘mini-retirement’… and reader, I took one!
“The mini retirement is not an escape from your life but a re-examination of it. The creation of a blank slate,” claims Ferris. “It’s an anti-vacation where you relocate to one place for one to six months before returning home. It’s not a one-time event, it’s a recurring lifestyle.”
Ferris explains that, “Rather than seeking to see the world through photo opportunities between foreign-but-familiar hotels, we aim to experience it at a speed that lets it change us. This takes time. The effect is not cumulative, and no number of ‘too weak’ sightseeing trips can replace one good walkabout.”
And how long should the ideal ‘mini retirement’ be? “It takes two to three months just to unplug from obsolete routines and become aware of just how much we distract ourselves with constant motion,” postulates Ferris. “Take at least two months to disincorporate old habits and rediscover yourself without the reminder of a looming flight.”
Not possible you cry. Well here’s my challenge and experience. Difficult yes? Impossible no! Worth it- incalculably. Those eight weeks were undoubtedly the absolute best of my life and have changed me for ever.
Not having read the book until I returned from my mini retirement I had wrongly termed a sabbatical, (yes, yes, it was on my shelf as a yet-unread gift from my intern Charleh, but who has time to read?)I found I had actually lived his recommendations accidentally!
In 2011, my children’s father died at 48, and two years later on the same day, unbelievably my 12-year-old daughter Gabi had a rare seizure and died. Unsurprisingly, these deeply traumatic experiences caused me to completely re-evaluate my life.
As a self-employed single parent in a hugely challenging recession, I had been on the treadmill of endless work and supporting two bereaved children for 14 long years when Gabi died.
I recognised that those first six weeks off work (which was effectively ‘crowd-funded’ through the generous support of my friends, family, church and business community, for which I will be forever grateful), would only be the start of a grief journey, I decided I would live my daughter’s dream and keep my promise to take Gabi to visit her friend Martha whose family had emigrated to Australia eight years before, in her memory. I was also keeping a promise to myself, my one ‘bucket list’ must, to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef- a vow I had made to myself as a 10-year-old watching ‘Life on Earth’.
In January 2016, facing my 50th birthday, I walked on to a plane for the first time ever on my own and took off for Australia via three days in Singapore for two months solo travelling, putting my business in the hands of four trusted associates. My son had just left home for university, so we agreed I would fund the trip by selling our family home and moving into rented accommodation until down-sizing on my return.
I had never been travelling. Never had a Gap Year. Never had an adventure. Now, whether I was camping in remote eco resorts, reflecting in an Abbey silent retreat, or Air BnB-ing my way round Tasmania, my eight weeks travelling became a time for taking stock, re-orientating, re-envisioning my life and a chance to grieve again for my daughter away from the usual cycles of work and life busy-ness.
From the Southernmost tip of Tasmania with nothing between my boat and the Antarctic, to the tropical coral atolls of the Great Barrier Reef, I had the best eight weeks of my life. In Australia I was swept into another world altogether. Hiking to waterfalls through rainforest accompanied by rare Lyrebirds at the top of an extinct volcano, discovering the houses of the first settlers in Sydney’s Rocks and being entranced by The Barber of Seville in the world-renowned opera house, exploring aboriginal art in Melbourne’s galleries and wondering at the World Heritage Sites of the early immigrants at Port Arthur are just some of the memories I will treasure forever. Watching the swooping acrobatic displays of the bright young things in surfer-chic paradise Noosa, plunging into the estuary at the end of the iconic Great Ocean Road Twelve Apostles Walk (watch out for eels, the guide said) after a roasting hot day of hiking, splashing in the breakers of Wineglass Bay, a World Heritage Site named one of the world’s top ten beaches in Tasmania after a tough 45-minute hike from the kangaroo-covered car park, was simply stunning. Floating among short eared terrapins and getting my feet pedicured by tiny nibbling fish in one of the world’s handful of perched lakes on Fraser Island, the largest known sand island, was magical. Watching Sydney Harbour Bridge recede from the iconic Manly Ferry was exhilarating. Snorkelling trailing green turtles, manta rays, sharks and tropical fish in kaleidoscopic colours on the barrier reef was the highlight of my trip and every bit the bucket list moment I had dreamed of since I was nine and was entranced by Life on Earth.
On Maundy Thursday 2016, I was back in chilly Britain. What to do until my next adventure and how to bring back that amazing feeling of wellbeing each day? Well I had been well and truly bitten by the swimming bug, so I decided I would go to one of the named best outdoor lidos in the UK, the open-air pool on my doorstep, just 20 mins away in Hathersage. Every Monday, my swim starts my week like that Australian holiday. I have a stunning drive into the Peaks over Stanage Edge- beautiful in sun, rain or the occasional supernatural-looking cloud inversion- an hour’s exercise then a healthy breakfast enlivened by the friendly banter of the café team. I take my diary to plan my week, my Bible for guidance and head space, then start my working week refreshed, energised and raring to go.
I had also learned to delegate and trust my team to an unprecedented level. By ‘giving away’ my own client hours, everyone discovered the business really could run without me to our client’s satisfaction. Every client stayed with us, new clients lined up to join us and Keep Your Fork grew 50% the following year as I learnt- finally- to work on the business, rather than just in it.
Now I am planning my next mini retirement- this time to New Zealand. And telling everyone I meet what my friend Claire told me I learnt to be so very true: ‘you can do anything if you have a big enough why’. We all know it but it’s true, nothing changes if nothing changes. And if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. Go on- dare greatly and plan that life-changing break.