Maybe Mum Was Right

A few days ago, I stumbled across an interview I gave in 2022.

It's a funny thing, reading your own words from another chapter of your life.

Some of them feel like they were written by someone I used to know. Others make me think, Yes. I still believe that.

And then there are the ones that make me smile.

In this interview, I said: “Change doesn't scare me half as much as the thought of not changing at all.”

Little did I know that only a few months later, my life would change in ways I couldn't even fathom.

Some changes I chose.
Some I most definitely did not.
Some arrived disguised as illness, endings, disappointments, losses or plans that didn't work out.

Others started as a feeling.
A place.
A meeting.
An idea I couldn't quite let go of.
A knowing I couldn't explain.

At some point, I didn't have much choice but to surrender to life. And keep following the breadcrumbs scattered in front of me.

Only afterwards could I see where some of them were leading.

My mother used to say, “It's a good thing we don't know what the future holds.”

I'm not sure I truly understood what she meant until these past few years.

Because we want to know. We want the plan. The destination. Preferably a little reassurance that everything is going to work out exactly as we hope.

We want to know where change is taking us before we're willing to leave where we are.

But life, in my experience, is rarely that accommodating. Sometimes all we get is the next breadcrumb.

The things we don't know yet

When I gave that interview in 2022, there was so much I didn't know.

I didn't know that a few months later I would be diagnosed with cancer – or that I would come through it.

I didn't know some friendships would end, while new ones would come into my life.

I didn't know Tuscany would become home.

I didn't know how much my life would change over the next few years, or how much I would change with it.

And I certainly didn't know where all the breadcrumbs I was following would eventually lead.

There's something rather humbling about looking back at an earlier version of yourself and realising how confidently she was making plans with only a fraction of the information.

In that same interview, I talked about writing a sequel to Fly, Butterfly, which I hoped would be published in 2024.

It wasn't.

Apparently, life had a few chapters to write first. And I'm rather glad it did. Because the book I was going to write then isn't quite the book I'm writing now.

My next book, A Place Among the Stars, has travelled with me through Los Angeles, Kaua'i and Tuscany. It has stopped and started. Changed shape. Waited patiently while I was busy living some of the things I suspect I needed to live before I could write them.

Perhaps books follow breadcrumbs too.

Maybe we don't need the whole map

I've spent a good part of my life making things happen. Shaping cultures. Building companies. Creating projects. Moving countries. Setting goals and going after them.

I still believe in that.

But I'm beginning to believe equally strongly in something else: Sometimes we need to leave enough space for life to surprise us.

To notice what keeps tugging at us.
To pay attention to the people, places and ideas that make something inside us come alive.
To follow a breadcrumb without demanding to know where the entire trail leads.

I'm learning to become a little less afraid of not knowing. Because when I look back at the changes that have shaped my life most profoundly, very few of them came with a map.

They came with a next step. And then another. And another.

Until one day I looked around and realised I had arrived somewhere I could never have planned from where I started.

Maybe Mum was right.

It is a good thing that we don't know what the future holds.

Not because everything that awaits us will be good. We know that isn't true.

But because if we knew everything that was coming – the things we'd lose, the things we'd find, the roads we'd take, the people we'd meet, the versions of ourselves we'd have to leave behind and the new ones we’d find – perhaps we'd be too afraid to take the next step.

And sometimes, the next step is all we need to know.