Usually while sitting in a van somewhere in Europe, applying for work, writing something, editing a video, planning a podcast, looking at a business idea or trying to find a Basic-Fit.

So, you know. A very normal Tuesday.

I’m 42. I’ve spent about twenty years working and collected enough job titles to make online application forms surprisingly difficult.

I’ve done work I’m proud of, lived in cities I wanted to live in and met people who are still my friends.

I liked that life.

For a long time, I was doing what I wanted to be doing. That’s partly why this next bit has been so difficult to explain.

Then I built a van

I decided I wanted to build one myself, despite having absolutely no evidence that I was qualified to do this.

I bought an empty Peugeot Boxer. Eventually, she became Petal.

There’s something very satisfying about building the place you’re going to live in with your own hands. Every cupboard exists because at some point I stood inside an empty metal box and decided a cupboard should go there.

Some decisions were better than others. But she became mine in a way very few things I’ve owned ever have.

And then I took her travelling.

Four months. Six countries. 16,000 kilometres.

There were beaches, mountains and ferries and ridiculous places to wake up. There were also supermarkets, laundrettes, rain, broken things and quite a lot of wondering where I was going to sleep.

I loved it. Not every second of it. That would be an unbearable thing to claim. But enough of it.

When I came home, I expected that to be the end of the trip. And it was.

What I hadn’t really thought about was what happened next.

Coming home was stranger than leaving

Leaving had been easy to understand. I was going travelling. People understand that.

You pack the van. You say goodbye. You disappear for a few months. You come home with too many photos and stronger opinions about parking.

Coming home should have meant returning to normal. Except normal suddenly felt even less obvious than it had before.

I lasted about two days before driving to Zeeland.

Perhaps a clue.

I’d experienced my life being arranged differently. For most of my adult life, work had been one of the fixed points. You knew where you needed to be, roughly when you needed to be there, and everything else found its place around that.

Once that fixed point disappeared for a while, I started wondering whether it needed to come back in exactly the same place.

That question has turned out to be rather disruptive.

So I left again

This time feels different. There’s no grand route or four-month trip to complete. Petal is just where I live at the moment.

I wake up somewhere, make coffee, open the laptop.

I look for work. Sometimes I talk to people. I write, make videos, work on a podcast, go to the gym, buy groceries, do laundry, call friends. And occasionally I spend twenty minutes trying to get the van levelled and then decide two degrees off is probably fine.

It’s surprisingly ordinary. And I think that’s what I like about it.

I don’t want travelling to be the break from my life anymore. I want it to be something that can exist alongside the rest of it.

I still want to work. I like starting things and working out what the actual problem is when something gets complicated.

I also like being paid for it. This experiment would be considerably easier if money had stopped being necessary.

It hasn’t.

What I’m questioning isn’t whether I want work in my life. It’s how much of the rest of my life automatically has to arrange itself around it.

Maybe a fascinating project with good people is worth staying somewhere for six months. Maybe I work intensely for a shorter period and then leave. Maybe one of the things I’m making becomes something I can earn from.

I don’t need every month to look the same. I want enough structure to build something meaningful, and enough space for things I couldn’t have planned.

There is, however, no master plan

This would all make a much better story if I already knew it worked.

I don’t.

I don’t know whether there is enough remote work at the level I want to work at, or whether any of the things I’m making will become businesses. I don’t know where I’ll be living next year.

Some days that feels enormously exciting. Other days I look at my bank account and remember that a permanent employment contract is, objectively, a very clever system.

I miss people sometimes too.

Freedom sounds lovely until you’ve had complete freedom all day and would quite like someone to spontaneously ask whether you want dinner.

Before leaving again, I lived in my brother’s garden for six weeks.

In Petal, to be clear.

I have roots. My friends and family are part of my life, wherever I happen to be parked.

There are compromises in this version of life. I’m trying to work out which ones feel worth making.

Did I actually choose this?

I still have mornings when I wake up in Petal and wonder: did I choose this?

I know I did. I was there. Nobody secretly moved me into my own life.

But knowing I chose it doesn’t always answer the next question: do I still want it?

That question has also made me think about the choices I made before all this.

Sometimes I’ve been very good at fitting into somebody else’s plan. Things make sense, you agree to them, one thing follows another. Then at some point you wonder how much of it you actually wanted.

When I think about London, Paris and Berlin, I know I wanted to go. Those were choices I made for me. So was building Petal. So was taking the big trip.

I’m trying to be that deliberate about what comes next, even while I’m still working out what I want.

What am I waiting for?

I’m 42. That isn’t old, but it is old enough to have noticed how quickly later moves.

There will always be a sensible reason to wait. Until the next project finishes. Until there’s more money. Until the timing is better.

So I suppose that’s why I’m doing this.

I have a pretty good life. I’m trying to find out what else fits.

I want good work, to make things and to keep moving. I want to earn enough to make all of that sustainable and be able to change my mind.

Mostly, I want my life to feel like mine.

I have absolutely no idea what the final version of that looks like. Which is inconvenient, but also part of why I’m interested.

So I’m going to keep trying things.

And put them on the record as I go.