Now several months into a sabbatical, a semi-retirement, career break… whatever it is and whatever it turns out to be, I have had time to stop and think some more, reflect on where I am and where our family is.

My mum’s birthday is coming up. She would have been 70 this year. Unfortunately she is no longer with us and hasn’t been for some time now. Late this year it will be 10 years ago that she left us. She was 60, just too bloody soon. I am still traumatized by the whole experience and regularly find myself lost in thoughts and wading through tears. She was my mate, my inspiration, my sounding board, confidante and our drinking buddy. Mum was all of the same to many others, too.

Mostly I am just angry really. It doesn’t feel right to use those type of words but I can’t describe the feeling any other way. When you are seemingly randomly selected by such an aggressive disease and struck down when you are just 60, with so much life left to live, I think angry seems appropriate.

Mum lived life to the full, always filled a room full of her character and personality, was as blunt as she needed to be, and never sweated the small shit! She celebrated imperfection and loved, unconditionally. Mum wasn’t a patron saint by any means in terms of how she managed her health, but often it was just how she coped and how sometimes she chose to dull the pain. Mum worked tirelessly for an organisation that principally provides refuge for women and children fleeing family violence. The most valuable of work but also the darkest of content. She probably gave too much of herself, to others. But that was just her and its what made her special. For 16 years she toiled away here, a founding member of an organisation that still lives on, bigger and better than ever, today. Something she deserves to take a great deal of credit for. But could she leave all of her work, at work, not really. It came home with her and her method of debriefing was to reach for a glass of wine. A search for solutions to her problems was at the bottom of a wine glass it seemed. As a child I still remember waking up in the morning and seeing a half finished wine glass on the table next to strategic scribbles, full of organisation charts, squares and lines. I had an idea of which of her staff were doing well (or not) based on whether they were crossed out or whether they were circled.  

Because her death was so sudden, just 6 weeks between her diagnosis and the end, it meant she was literally sitting at her work desk 5 weeks before she departed this world. What the hell is that!? Mum would have smashed retirement! Tragically, she never got one. She never got to meet our kids, her grandchildren, as Natasha was pregnant with our oldest when she passed. She would have smashed being a grandma to our boys, that’s for certain.

And this leads me to some of my latest thoughts and reflections. When you lose a parent at such a young age, for her and for me, it provides you, almost immediately, with a great deal of perspective. It takes months and years for you to start to feel like you are recovering, and often still doesn’t, but as you emerge from the darkness and the grief, you do so as a completely different person. You have a different outlook on almost everything. Big issues now seem trivial, the big stuff becomes the small stuff and you learn how to prioritise how you think and act. For me I also developed a sensitivity and can now access a whole different tier of emotional intelligence. This stuff has become a super power in me over the best part of the last decade. If you could bottle this up and feed it to people as an elixir, without the trauma of the loss, it would be a game changer.

As well as the double dose of soft skills I think the biggest take away has been to never take any day for granted. Its perhaps a cliché but there is a reason why people like myself deploy these type of cliches and that is because there is nothing truer to be said. When I think about all the magic time that my mum missed out on, never getting to experience the bliss of retirement, it makes me double down on seizing every day. I feel a sense of pressure even, sometimes, like I need to carry on her legacy, soak up and absorb every experience on her behalf.

Several years ago, as I grumbled my way through a difficult period of work, a tough batch over many weeks and back to back events, I stumbled on a concept called FIRE. A movement, even. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. In a nutshell it means that you establish yourself financially, to a point where you no longer need to earn money, where your investments are working for you, so much so that it covers your living expenses for as long as you live. Essentially it means that you have the freedom to work, or not. I read books and blogs, followed all of the influential people and took a deep dive into the facts, the figures and the formulas. I began building my own spreadsheets and started imagining what FI would feel like. Coupled with the resentment I feel, on behalf of my mum, for what she missed out on when her life was stolen from her, I promised myself this would not happen to me!

My career has spanned a couple of decades so far. I have worked very hard, often created my own luck and been provided with a number of exciting opportunities that I have pursued, allowing me to travel and also deliver some of the biggest cycling events, ever. Setting up my own business, ultimately, I found it allowed me to better monetise my worth, and attach more value to the time I put in. It’s not for everyone but it has worked for me. At home we are deliberate, we invest sensibly, we live within our means, we don’t spend what we can’t afford, we pay cash for cars and we spend, intentionally, where there is genuine value.

A couple of years ago, as COVID took hold, and all of our lives felt as if they were tipped upside down, we suddenly found ourselves with more time on our hands, whether we liked it or not. Major events were the first industry to stop and the last to return, and the business that I steadily built was slowly decimated. We leveraged the time we had available and thought deeply about the journey we were on and what we wanted to create, for us and for our kids. We thought about what was important and what wasn’t. We also considered how we would tackle new challenges that had presented themselves, for us and for our children. Plans we had in the back of our minds moved very prominently to the front of our minds. We actioned them.

The spreadsheets that Natasha would chuckle at from time to time suddenly seemed to have tangibility. What would happen if we made that move to the country we had talked about, allowing the kids to thrive in a community where things are simpler and easier, for all of us. Is our work transportable? Probably… but with a ‘downshift’ in housing, which capitalised on market value differences between metro and regional markets, it removed much of the risk, if any.

We are now more than 2 years into our new life on the country of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. We are doing what my mum would have demanded that we do, living our best life, right now. And not a moment too soon. We are not yet financially independent but we are well on our way. We have the freedom and the flexibility to pick and choose what we do and how we earn money. Natasha has just started a new job, as we switch roles for a while and she applies her powerful brain to a new and exciting challenge. We have time to be present with the boys, every day, as they grow and develop. We try and learn what seems to be the impossible art of good parenting and make room for all of the many challenges. We have breakfast and dinner together, every day.

Whilst I consider what I want to do next, I am studying my diploma of governance, I continue to perform my role on the board at the company my mum helped create, 25 years ago and I have started coaching senior football with the local soccer team. I read, write, garden, learn and try and build value into the house and into my soul. And of course, I ride my bike, plenty! In fact this is already next in many ways. Pursuing passions, now.

And you know what, I too try and find some solutions to problems in the bottom of a wine glass from time to time. In my view it’s a part of living my best life. Mum, wouldn’t we have solved the problems of the world for your 70^th birthday… or at least danced holes in the floor.