Meandering

It’s a wonderfully evocative word. Written as 道草, it literally refers to grass growing by the roadside, but it’s also used to describe lingering, wandering or taking your time along the way to somewhere else. It’s the sort of thing we’re usually encouraged not to do.

We’re told to know where we’re going. Have a five-year plan. Set the goal. Work backwards. Build the strategy. Measure the progress. Keep moving.

I’ve spent a fair bit of my working life doing exactly that. And then, quite suddenly, the road changed.

I was made redundant after 15 years in my most recent role.

It’s a strange sentence to write, even now. Fifteen years is a long time, long enough for a job to become more than a job. It becomes part of your rhythm, your identity, your friendships and your sense of where you fit in the world.

Then one day, the organisation keeps moving and you’re no longer travelling with it.

There’s a temptation in that moment to immediately find the next destination. What’s next? What job should I apply for? What should my LinkedIn profile say? What’s the next chapter? What am I supposed to do now?

I’ve been asking some of those questions, of course, but I’m also discovering that I don’t necessarily need to answer all of them immediately.

Perhaps this is a season for michikusa.

For taking the long way around and noticing what’s growing beside the path.

There’s another Japanese concept that I’ve read about before: shinrin-yoku, usually translated as “forest bathing”. It’s about spending time immersed in the atmosphere of the forest, taking in the natural environment through your senses rather than simply passing through it.

I love the idea that you don’t necessarily have to do anything you just move through the bush.

You don’t have to conquer the bush. You don’t have to climb the hill, but you can if you want to. You don’t even have to walk very far, to be fair I’ve just been walking the dogs in our local area.

You simply have to be there, to breathe, to listen and to notice.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with productivity. Even our leisure can become productive. We don’t simply walk anymore we have to track our steps. We don’t simply go outside everything’s about multitasking.

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Perhaps I’m beginning to realise that I need some time when I’m not trying to achieve anything at all.

Walking has become one of those things for me.

Not walking to get somewhere. Not walking to exercise. Just walking and letting my thoughts arrive in whatever order they choose.

Sometimes I’ll start with one question and end up thinking about something completely different. An idea that seemed important when I left home has disappeared by the time I return, while something I hadn’t considered at all suddenly seems obvious.

The path seems to know something that my desk doesn’t.

Maybe that’s why michikusa feels so appropriate right now.

Redundancy has created an unwanted pause in the carefully plotted route of my working life, and I could regard that pause entirely as a loss. There are certainly days when it feels like one.

But there’s another way of seeing it.

A pause can also be space.

Space to look around. Space to breathe. Space to wonder whether the destination I was heading towards is actually the destination I want anymore.

I’ve spent much of my career helping organisations navigate change, communicating transformation, making sense of uncertainty and helping people understand what comes next.

It’s interesting to discover how different it feels when you’re the one standing in the middle of the uncertainty.

You can’t write the communications plan for your own future. There’s no stakeholder engagement strategy for figuring out what you want to do with the next stage of your life, and there’s certainly no executive briefing that will tell you what happens next Tuesday.

That’s ok because perhaps the answer isn’t to have everything mapped out. Perhaps the answer is to walk for a while, to breathe, to pay attention and to allow the unexpected to become visible.

One of the things I like about michikusa is that it doesn’t necessarily celebrate getting lost. It’s more subtle than that. It’s about allowing yourself to be distracted by what’s beside the road.

Because when we’re entirely focused on the destination, we can miss the landscape. We miss the conversation that changes our thinking, the book we weren’t looking for, the person we meet unexpectedly or the idea that arrives while we’re doing something completely unrelated.

We can also miss the possibility we wouldn’t have considered if we’d been too busy following the plan.

Maybe a career transition needs some of that.

I’m still thinking about what comes next. I’m still interested in working, particularly in helping organisations navigate transformation, communication and change, and I’m open to where that might lead. But I’m trying not to turn this period into another project plan.

For now, I’m giving myself permission to meander.

There’s something liberating about that word.

Meander.

It doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means not insisting that every step has to be directly connected to the destination.

A river meanders because the landscape encourages it to. Perhaps I can do the same.

And maybe that’s where shinrin-yoku and michikusa meet.

One asks us to immerse ourselves in the world around us, while the other reminds us that there’s value in wandering along the way and picking up the little details.

Both suggest that life is more than the shortest route between two points.

So I’m walking, breathing and noticing what’s growing beside the path.

I don’t know exactly where the path is going yet, and surprisingly, I’m beginning to think that might be the point.

Perhaps I don’t need to know just yet. For this particular season of life, the most important thing isn’t finding the next destination.

It might be just learning how to enjoy the road again.

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