How to Change Up Everything in Your Life Without Messing it Up - Yet

Part 1 - Is It A Midlife Crisis?

Maybe it is a midlife crisis when you decide after 16 years that teaching isn’t for you. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Either way, designing your whole future life around a new career plan that will bring you joy isn’t an easy step to take. But it is worth it.

It could be that you’re wondering what’s next, or whether you’re brave enough to change it all up to build a new future. All I know is that the keynote speaker of a DofE conference I went to was someone who left an office job at roughly my age and went on to climb Everest and has almost climbed the highest peaks on all seven continents, and her talk left a seed in my mind that things like that were possible. Jo Bradshaw’s story was inspiring.

Later on, well established in my new career, I met her as an equal. Okay well, she was still an Everest climber and I wasn’t, but we were both freelance DofE instructors. She was a down-to-Earth, normal, lovely person to work with. And we’d both done it – changed the course of our lives to be doing something we loved. But yes, I was more than a little star-struck when I discovered we were on a job together - when I started dreaming of a future that wasn’t quite so adventurous, it seemed way more possible in the light of her story!

In 2019 I started to realise there were things outside teaching that brought me more joy than being in a classroom. I allowed myself to start thinking creatively about what kind of work I would really like to do that would enable me to do more of those things. For me, that meant spending more time outdoors, and getting to talk about God with more people. I couldn’t think of a job that involved both those things.

I did, however, remember a throwaway line from two conversations held with two different people years apart in which I had declared that if I could do anything, I would really like to run Christian retreats. This from the woman who had not yet been on a Christian retreat. But there was clearly seed planted somewhere in my past about the preciousness of time given to God on retreat. I took the idea and I let my mind run with it… for months! Just turning it over, wondering what it might look like, realising that the kind of retreat space I wanted to share with the world was the space I had found as I prepared for my Hill and Moorland leader and then my Mountain Leader qualifications.

I had to get numerous long mountain walking days in a logbook. I gave up a few days of each holiday to walking in the hills and mountains. Long days that were too long and too far away for friends to be able to join me. It was just me and God. And I soon realised that although the walks were for my logbook, they were actually also for me. I needed the time with God just to talk to him, and then to listen to him, getting his perspective on the challenges I faced, and basically regaining my equilibrium. The walks became an essential part of my own mental, physical and spiritual health. I was on retreat!