We so easily get caught in the rhythms of everyday life: emails, endless pings and notifications, deadlines and demands, social events, family commitments, food shopping, financial obligations, kids’ school, kids’ sport, kids’ social lives, farking life admin… Need I go on? On the surface, it all looks fine. You’re busy. Productive. Progressing. Doing all the “right” things … But we start mistaking movement for momentum. Let’s not confuse all this motion for meaning.
At the times I’ve been most entangled in that relentless everyday rhythm, there’s always been a faint ache humming beneath the surface – a low, homesick longing for something I couldn’t quite name. You know the feeling. The sense that you’re no longer steering the ship, that the current has taken over. You drift on the tide of other people’s expectations, lulled by the inertia of routine, shaped by culture and circumstance until one day you barely recognise the outline of your own life. The rhythm you’re moving to isn’t one you chose; it’s one that quietly chose you.
Existential angst.
It feels safe, doesn’t it? The rhythm. It keeps you busy, gives shape to your days. The world around you nods in approval… yes this is what a good life looks like, they say. But underneath, something quieter is eroding. A slow, invisible draining. And then one day, somewhere warm and far from your inbox – maybe while licking the salt from the rim of a margarita beneath a palm tree – you finally pause the relentless rhythm long enough to look out to the ocean and ask yourself: How the fuck did I end up here? Why the fuck doesn’t this life feel like mine? Is this actually fucking it? Is this really all there is for me?
You know this as well as I do, but it’s worth me stating it again – out loud. If you don’t shape your life, it will be shaped for you – by work demands, by managers, by organisations and meetings, by culture and obligation, by the steady hum of distraction. And if you burn through your health in the process my friend, life won’t just be shaped on your behalf. It will feel like a door slammed shut in your face, the echo of it still ringing long after the dust has settled.
The truth is always in the evidence. Go on, pull out your calendar. Give it a slow, honest look – the last few weeks, maybe the last few months. If it’s crammed edge to edge with obligations, commitments, and all that farking life admin that drains your soul into a quiet puddle on the floor; if there’s almost nothing in there that sparks joy, wonder, or mischief, then you, my friend – aside from having a textbook case of Late-Stage-Capitalism-Western-Culture-Adulthood – are probably drifting. Caught up. Half-asleep. Living a life on default. Maybe it’s time to step off the treadmill for a minute. Catch your breath. See who you’ve become while you were so busy running.
You probably don’t like me suggesting that, do you? It’s not an easy mirror to look into. I’ve been there myself, staring at that hollow disappointing reflection more times than I care to admit. We all like to believe we know what matters most, that we’re living in alignment with it – or at least in service to it. But show me your calendar, and I’ll show you your priorities.
Hard stops.
Life isn’t an endless runway of opportunities. It’s a mosaic of fleeting seasons, each carrying its own possibilities, its own capacities. Kids grow up. Bodies age. Pets pass. Energy softens. Ambition shifts its shape.
There are seasons for share-houses, spliffs and backpacking, for late-night boozing and misadventure with your mates, laughing at nothing until dawn. Seasons when your cat is a kitten and your kids still think you’re cool and want to do everything right beside you. Seasons when your body can run a marathon, climb a mountain, stay up too late and still greet the morning without consequence. Seasons when risk feels like oxygen, when you can still afford to start over, to leap.
And then, often without warning, the season changes. The air cools. The light shifts. And what once felt endless ends with a hard stop.
Bill Perkins writes about this in Die With Zero, a book that cracked my worldview open back in 2021 and quietly rearranged the furniture in my mind ever since. He turns the whole idea of wealth inside out. The story we’ve inherited says work hard now, save and stockpile for later. Treat retirement as the grand exhale – the promised land of leisure and reward.
But Perkins calls bullshit. He argues that money only finds its meaning when it’s translated into experience, and that timing is everything. The real tragedy, he insists, isn’t running out of money. It’s misusing the time – and the health – to spend it well.
We soothe ourselves with “later.” Later, when the kids are older. Later, when work slows down. Later, when we finally feel secure. But later is a mirage. By the time you reach it, the season you imagined may already have passed – its door quietly closing while you were busy earning the right to walk through it.
The end of an era.
In the July school holidays this year, I took my two teenage sons on a three-week surf trip to our happy place, Indonesia. We were sitting barefoot on the beach in Lombok, salt crusting our skin, sun flickering off the waves, plates of nasi goreng balanced on our laps. I was mid-daydream, talking about what we might do for our next trip together. Maybe next year we could go to…
Tor, my eldest, looked up from his plate and said, “Mum, I don’t think I’ll be able to go away at all next year. Year 12. Study. Rowing training. Work. I won’t have any time.”
That one sentence kind of fucking winded me. I sat up too fast, nearly choking on my Bintang. It snapped me back into full awareness. Whoa, whoa, whoa. This might have been the last big trip I’ll ever take with my two teenage boys. What?
My travel-and-adventure season with them wasn’t going to taper off gently, the way I must have imagined. It was ending – right there on that beach in Lombok – disguised as an offhand comment. Tor, all matter-of-fact, telling me that life; school, work, becoming; would soon leave no room for our special little mum-and-two-sons-holidays. And rightfully so. I just hadn’t caught up to the reality yet. I’d been taking it all for granted.
That’s what life does, right? It gives you seasons. And if you don’t seize them consciously while they’re open, they close – sometimes softly, sometimes with a thud. Just like that.
After I got over the initial shock of realising that this July trip to Indonesia might be the last big one we’d ever take together like this, what came next was reflection laced with gratitude. Deep, tidal gratitude. Because you know what? I bloody well had seen that window while it was still open. Back in 2021, I’d made a plan and jumped straight through it.
As soon as that stupid-thing-they-called-the-pandemic looked like it was finally ending, I rearranged everything – blew up my life proper – my work, my finances, the whole kit and caboodle, so that travel with my boys was non-negotiable. I took radical action. I didn’t wait for later. There’s nothing like a few years of lockdowns and curtailed freedom to light a fire right under your ass.
And now, as that window begins to close, I know those choices were the best I ever made. They gave us memories that will outlast the years ahead – the kind that settle deep in your bones. Those trips with my sons were my life’s greatest investments, I know this more than I’ve ever known anything, even when they came at an enormous “expense”.
My greatest investments.
Travel and adventure have always been my love language. My sons are seventeen and fifteen now, taller than me, voices deepening. After COVID derailed the travel plans we’d once sketched out on napkins and long car rides, I made a deliberate decision: adventure together would come first. I wanted to make memories while we still could, to show them some of this incredible world, to squeeze every last drop of life from the season we had left before these little birds took flight and flew the nest.
And so, we took off. And adventure we did.
On our first day in Africa, we box-breathed our way through a turbulent Cessna flight, the plane rattling like a little tin can in a thunderstorm from Dar es Salaam to Arusha. The two pilots looked about twelve – like two boys playing airplane dress-ups – frantically pressing buttons as red alarms blinked across the dash. And me, the so-called responsible mum, sitting there pretending everything was fine, whispering to the boys, “Breathe with me. In for four, out for four.” Somehow, we landed. Alive. Shaky. Laughing with that wild, relieved kind of hysteria that only comes when you’ve truly just found your edge.
In Tanzania we stayed at Maasai schools where the boys played barefoot football in the dust and taught the local kids how to skateboard. At the market we bargained clumsily in broken Swahili, laughter and gestures doing most of the work, until we finally bought a goat and loaded it onto our colourful, clapped-out bus to take as a gift to the village chief.
We spent safari nights beneath the vast Serengeti sky, lying wide-eyed in our canvas tent, chaperoned in and out by an armed ranger. The darkness bellowed with sound -lions pacing and roaring, hyenas whooping, unseen creatures shifting just beyond the firelight. The wild had its own heartbeat, and we were inside it, awake, awestruck and giggling excitedly. And this was all before Loki overdosed on malaria tablets – but that’s another story.
In the Emirates we tore across the dunes racing each other on dirt bikes, the engines snarling through the desert air like a pulse. Later as the sunset we graduated to a souped-up Lexus 4WD, Arabic music on full bore, the V8 growling as sand fanned out behind us in molten waves. We screamed and whooped our way over the crests, a desert rollercoaster of heat and adrenaline. Hours later, sprawled on woven rugs beneath a black desert sky, we feasted with our hands and stared into the silence between the stars – a silence so vast it almost swallowed us.
Switzerland brought a different kind of awe – a pristine, Lego-like alpine wild. We woke to dumps of fresh powder, the kind we’d only ever dreamed about, and opened the wooden shutters of our little Heidi cabin to let the cold rush in. Outside, the sunrise was surreal and hushed, the world thudded under the weight of deep new snow. There were snowball fights after breakfast, all of us howling with laughter, collapsing in drifts as powder sparkled in the air around us like confetti. Long days carving down white slopes on freshly waxed boards, nights of chocolate and fondue, where we learned the trick of sipping warm tea so the cheese wouldn’t sit like lead in our stomachs.
Landing in Finland in the depths of Arctic winter, where Finnair lost our luggage and the air bit at minus twenty-eight degrees, we stepped out of Ivalo airport into pitch darkness at four in the afternoon. The boys shivered in borrowed layers of my Lululemon activewear, all of us laughing through chattering teeth at the sheer absurdity of it. Because of course – the one time your luggage doesn’t arrive, it’s minus twenty-eight outside.
We dogsledded across frozen landscapes, Loki at the helm, us and our huskies against Tor, racing his sled across the blinding white. I hung on by the skin of my triple-gloved hands, white breath breathing heavily in the still, icy air. At night we layered up even more – helmets over merino balaclavas and survival suits – to chase the northern lights on skidoos with heated seats and hand-warmers, tearing across the snow beneath a vast, electric sky. And in the mornings, under a blanket of blue twilight, we learned the slow patience of drilling through more than a metre of ice to fish on frozen lakes, marvelling that people lived their whole lives here – surviving, even thriving, inside this sublime and endless winter.
Closer to home, Singapore was a different kind of wild, all heat and laughter and relentless colour. We wandered through tropical gardens revealing architectural marvels, dinking and racing on hired bikes, sweat slick on our backs, chasing the promise of the hottest-of-hot-hotpots. We found it too – the one that made our eyes water, and our bums regret it for days – a feast so fiery we could only laugh through the burn.
Indonesia became like our second skin. The boys surfed clean waves until their shoulders ached, and we found ourselves riding all-three-abreast on our scooter searching for questionable medical centres, getting sea urchins pulled from feet and sand syringed out of ears. Every meal drowned in sambal, our skin salted and sun-browned, our white grins bright with a satisfaction that doesn’t need words.
And then there was Mt Hotham – broken bones, bruised bums, cousins stacked in bunk beds, giggling and play-fighting long past midnight. The kind of laughter that only comes from exhaustion and thin mountain air, when no screens are needed and nature alone gives you everything you didn’t know you were missing.
Every single one of those trips cost me, big time. I refinanced properties, bent and broke budgets, and pulled more than a few financial and career backflips to make them happen. Mostly it was money I should could have saved or invested. Sometimes it was opportunities I quietly stepped back from.
But I never once regretted it. I’d spend it all again tomorrow – double it, even – and I wouldn’t bat a fucking eyelid. Those adventures gave us more than all the money in the world could ever buy: time, togetherness, perspective, sheer joy. The richest memories I hold with my sons were forged on those journeys. We still laugh endlessly about the stories, about all the times we were stretched well beyond our comfort zones, forced to band together and figure out how the fuck we were going to get out of whatever situation Mum had gotten us into this time.
The life you don’t design will design you.
You know what? I potentially wouldn’t have made any of those choices if I hadn’t gotten very-fucking-deliberate about blowing up and redesigning my life. Yes, it took a full-blown existential crisis during that-stupid-thing-they-called-a-pandemic to snap me out of the rhythm of everyday life and into real awareness. For that alone, I’ll always be quietly grateful to “The COVID”. It woke me the fark up.
Back in 2021, as part of a coaching program I’d signed up for (shout out to the total legends Terry and Ryan at Cashflow Co), I did a one-on-one coaching session called Life by Design. On the surface, it sounded almost too simple: sit down, fast-forward into your future, and ask – if everything went spectacularly well, what would life look like? Who would be beside you? How would you spend your days? What experiences would you be creating, planning, proud of?
But what happened in those ninety minutes floored me. Sitting there with my future self, I realised that everything I truly valued came down to people, experiences, and health. Not stuff. Not titles. Not climbing some invisible ladder for the sake of it. What I valued was time. What I wanted was to own my time, and to curate memories with the people I love. To contribute to people and causes I actually give a fuck about.
Security, in the traditional sense – money, status, career, certainty – mattered significantly less to me than freedom. The freedom to choose how I lived, and who sat where in my front row. It was suddenly so clear, glowing there on the Zoom whiteboard, staring me straight in the face.
That clarity was like finding my true north. It changed everything. When ‘The COVID” finally fizzled out, I knew exactly what to do. I rearranged everything – my work, my finances, the whole scaffolding of my life – so I could fully prioritise what mattered most: health, travel, and adventure with my two boys.
So, what about you?
How’s this all landing, huh?
Is it all “shut up, Rach – enough already with your lyrical ranting and humblebragging, what would you know?” Or is there a flicker of something else? A small, inconvenient truth tugging at your sleeve?
Maybe it’s time to wakey-wakey-matey-matey. To stop hitting snooze and actually get up. To stop blaming adulthood, the grind, the obligation, the noise – and admit you’ve been half-living. Half-dreaming. Sleepwalking through your own story.
In case you need reminding – no one’s coming to shake you awake.
I’ll give you the permission slip, but the rest is on you.
You get one shot at this version of your life. One fleeting window where the people you love are who they are right now.
Get up.
Live on purpose.
LFG.
Rach Taylor is a high-performance career and life coach, life after sport and athlete transition coach,
wanna-be-DJ, speaker, Olympic medallist, and former senior HRguruleader. Rach brings Olympic-level insight, real-world HR and leadershipscarsexperience, a geeky obsession with human optimisation, and a no-BS, heart-led approach to every space sheplaysworks in. Based in Perth, Australia. Working with clients and collaborators globally.
