Tag: freelance life

The Plan

Last week I went for my one and only Christmas meal out with a group of friends and they were asking me about my relationship with Shubham, The Most Handsome Man in Goa, who is currently on a ship sailing around Madeira and the Canary Islands.

“So, what’s the plan?” one of the ladies asked. I scrambled around for an answer, remembering that my original plan was six months in Goa and six months here. Then Covid got in the way.

The following day I thought about that conversation and remembered something else: I do not like plans. I don’t even like the word ‘plan’. When someone tells me they ‘have plans’ for the weekend I baulk internally. The word triggers something in me.

You can listen to me reading this blog post here

I have realised that I have weathered the Covid storm (which continues to rage) principally because I have no plans to scupper. I haven’t booked anything that could have been scuppered, only recently having bought flights to India when the pre-omicron world appeared to be opening up. Those have been cancelled and I’ve got a refund. I will not rebook until I know I can definitely go.

People say to me, “Oh you must be DEVASTATED not to be going to India or seeing your man,” and for a while I think, “Why aren’t I?” But he’s the same as me – of course we miss each other, but our love doesn’t diminish because we’re not in each other’s presence. One could say it gets keener because we continually tell each other stories in our videocalls – how we met, how we split up and got back together, and what will happen when we see each other again. The latter is never a defined plan – we both have a ‘what will be will be’ approach to it. Anything else is just stressful and pointless. We can’t control it, so why attempt it?

I’ve realised that this plan-less existence serves me very well as a freelancer. Yes, I have a set of things that I must work on week to week, but I decide which ones get done when on the day, depending on how I feel. I often work from 11am to 7pm (or even 12pm to 8pm) because that’s when I feel most motivated and creative and I can make the most of the hours of winter light. I never like the fixed-hours culture of corporate life and made mine as late as they could be, avoiding those ‘first-thing’ morning-stealer meetings as much as I could.

I’ve never enjoyed planning too much of my time ahead and love to leave weekends open to chance and spontaneity. I like to book a cinema ticket on the spur of the moment or get up and go on a hike. Mid-hike, I’ll change the plan because of how I feel in the moment. I go with my gut.

I’ve found that the more I plan in to my life, the more open it is to change, and the more open all of it is to commentary from other people. I prefer to keep my ideas fluid and silent like an underground stream. I don’t want to have to explain why I’ve changed my mind about something so I don’t mention it in the first place. As a chronic sharer of things, this new strategy has taken some doing.

So my answer to “What’s the plan?” with me and my boyfriend is, “Why do you think we need one?” Why does every aspect of life need a plan? If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we’re mice when it comes to best-laid plans.

I plan to let life unfold just the way it’s meant to be.

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Agonda Diaries – week eleven

This week the cool winds have blown into Agonda, bringing with them a freshness and relief from the unseasonable heat. The weather pattern is about a month late here, and it’s still doing strange things, with monsoon-like waves suddenly creating a huge sand shelf for most of the length of the beach. Dogs, cows and people are teetering on the edge of it, seeing if they can find a way down to the shoreline below.

I hadn’t realised how much I loved and missed a cool wind until this one arrived. It has been truly blissful to walk on the beach, morning and evening, feeling it blowing in my hair and around my body. I see people running each morning, wearing headphones, and I wonder why you would want to intentionally blot out the sound of the ocean and the wind in chorus: nature’s ‘om’. I really don’t get it. You’re missing everything that is beautiful about the world. Mind you, people always used to ask me what I listened to while I was hiking alone in the UK – nature, I’d say. What is the point of blotting it out with manmade noise? Still don’t get it.

It’s been a week of realisations. One – a key one for me – is how important it is for me to be productive. Over the festive period I had a lull in freelance work which would have been great if I’d allowed myself to relax into it and use it as a holiday. Unfortunately I didn’t, and I started to feel really down about everything. I blamed the full moon or the Christmas forced-fun machine, but actually I think it was simply that I wasn’t very productive. I felt every day that I should be achieving something and I wasn’t. Now I’ve had a new block of work and I feel happy again. There is a structure to my days as I plough through it.

I’ve also realised the importance of doing something you’re good at – that you’re fluent in, whilst you’re learning a new skill. I’m loving my yoga teaching but I don’t yet feel completely fluent and confident in it (despite some nice feedback). Plus I’m still trying to master some asanas (poses) that I’d like to have in my body before I teach them to anyone else. Blending the learning experience of teaching with editorial work where I know exactly what I’m doing is great for me. One without the other seems to throw me off somewhat. Yin and yang, I guess. One can’t exist without the other.

One of the biggest realisations of this new year is that I’ve turned from a sunset person to a sunrise person. I remember previous holidays in Agonda, where sunset would be the highlight of the day, as it is for many tourists here. I would order a cocktail and sit and watch the sun go down, along with lots of people doing the same thing on the beach. I felt a sense of hope and excitement for the night ahead – anything could happen, and it did, while I was under the influence of alcohol.

Now I walk the beach during sunset, glancing at it occasionally, but prioritising the walking over the watching. Since stopping drinking I’ve started to think about why so many people turn up to celebrate the setting of the sun when the rising of it is a much more positive thing. I walk during sunrise, now, and I’ve realised that this is a much more hopeful and optimistic experience for me. Why was I putting so much hope into brain-numbed darkness? The morning, the daytime was here all along. The dogs frisky and tumbling over each other on the cool sand, the fishermen sharing out the overnight catch, the boys singing happily in the Simrose restaurant, preparing for the day ahead.

I am a sunrise person and I want to walk in the daylight, not the darkness. Sadly this means that my time with The Most Handsome Man in Goa has come to an end. No more Nighttime Girlfriend.

The sunrise moment does come with some surprises and yesterday’s was finding a dead rat in savasana on the yoga mat outside my door. Marshan the landlord and I concluded that a cat had deposited it there. Thankfully there was nothing there this morning.

In other animal news, there are numerous puppies at play on the beach, enjoying the adventure of the sand ledge, turtle number three has laid her eggs, and both pigs have now been sold. I miss them. I haven’t seen the foal on the beach this week – I wonder if he’s been sold too. If you stay here for more than a month you start to see animals disappear, including Simba from Sampoorna Yoga School and Foxxy from Samudra Surf School. We don’t know where they have gone.

Time to stop writing this and get on with some productive editorial work. I’m really loving it this week.

Words are my thing, it turns out.