“There are some years that ask questions and others that answer.” Zora Neale Hurston
It’s been exactly three years since I started writing this Substack.
I started writing it after a trip to Jamaica in October 2022 - the first overseas trip I’d taken since 2019 and the subsequent pandemic, when the world and to a large extent, our lives shrank beyond recognition.
Taking an overseas trip to a country so vibrant and different to what I was used to was a little like taking several Italian-strength espressos after a long, deep sleep.
It jolted me wide awake to life again, but more than that, it woke me up to who I truly am and what I need to do to keep the true me laughing and dreaming and dancing.
Namely, I needed to travel and meet new people and experience new things and soak in the wonder of it all.
I began this Substack as a way of holding myself to account, reasoning that I’d have to create a richer, more interesting and wonder-full life if I had to write about it every week.
And it worked - I started taking solo trips to places I‘d never been to before, writing my books along the way, and testing out life as a digital nomad. With every trip I became more convinced that the nomad life was for me and so, in 2023, I gave away all of my things and gave up my home in the UK to become a full-time nomad, and it felt as if my life became one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ stories, as I ping-ponged my way around the globe.
I wrote and researched books in France, Portugal, Poland and Ukraine.
I taught a writing class in California and took a two week residency in a Writers’ Colony in Arkansas.
I travelled for pleasure in Norway and Sweden and took a month-long brainstorming session in the Netherlands. I returned to the city where I attended - and dropped out of - university, and I retraced my family’s footsteps in Scotland.
And every Sunday I’d write about my adventures here, hoping that in doing so, I might inspire others to follow my lead and create adventures of their own.
It worked! And it was so wonderful to start receiving messages from people who’d read my posts, telling me that I’d inspired them to take their first solo trip, or overcome their fear of flying in order to venture overseas for the first time in years. I even had a couple of people tell me that my posts had inspired them in part to escape the rat race and quit their jobs!
But then my nomad life came to a shock halt at the beginning of this year, when my dad got sick and became house-bound and I returned to the UK to be there for him along with my siblings.
At first I tried being a kind of ‘domestic digital nomad’ living in AirBnbs around the UK within travelling distance of my dad in London. But this wasn’t financially viable for the long-term so for the past four months, I’ve had a home base again.
I’m not going to lie, I’ve found the adjustment hard.
Living a nomadic life was a revelation to me. I loved the freedom it brought, and the lightness of barely owning a thing. I can honestly say that I’d never felt happier.
But I’ve also come to realise that life is all about ebb and flow. And I don’t think it’s realistic to expect to constantly live at full pelt, with everything going your way and entirely in your control. Sometimes life throws us curve balls, forcing us to adapt in response.
I came across a beautiful quote last year from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God:
“There are some years that ask questions and others that answer.”
When I first read this quote I was deep into my nomadic adventures and I delighted in the fact that I was enjoying a year that was an emphatic, joyful answer.
‘This! This! This!’ 2024 seemed to be exclaiming to me again and again in answer to the plaintive question that had been my post-pandemic 2022: ‘How can I rediscover my joy and sense of purpose?’
But now I find myself back in a year that is asking questions.
Questions like: ‘How can I find joy living somewhere I don’t really fit in?’ (a sleepy, homogenous English village) and: ‘How can I rediscover my creative mojo?’ and: ‘How can I live with the fear that I might lose my dad?’
For a good few months, these questions became a kind of emotional quick-sand that I found myself sinking in.
But at the beginning of September my dad got very sick again and ended up in hospital for most of the month. The subsequent feelings of shock, dread and fear - and the sweet relief of him being allowed back home again last week, and just in time for his 86th birthday - seem to have pulled me up and out of the mire.
One thing that has really helped is doing the Morning Pages exercise from Julia Cameron’s book and programme, The Artist’s Way. For those of you not familiar with it, Morning Pages are basically three pages of stream of consciousness writing that you do first thing every day.
The goal is to help unblock you creatively by getting all of the crap out of your mind and onto the page. But I’m discovering that it can really help emotionally too.
There’s something about the act of writing very fast and without censoring yourself in any way that is so liberating, and although a lot of what you might write (and certainly what I write!) could be described as incoherent rambling, it’s amazing how often you also find yourself writing your way to a breakthrough or light-bulb moment.
And that’s what my morning pages led me to recently, when I realised that I was back to living in a year that asked questions - a year of ebb rather than flow, or inhale rather than exhale - but that’s OK.
In fact, it’s more than OK, because it’s the natural way of things. And if I could just stop pining for the answers of previous years and focus on exploring this new set of questions life is posing I could start moving forwards again.
Because, before we’re able to answer a question fully, we have to hold it up to the lens of our wisdom and the light of our imagination and examine it properly.
So, instead of seeing the questions 2025 is posing me as reasons to feel stuck and sad, I’m seeing them as exercises in expanding my imagination and as opportunities to pivot.
And as soon as I made this shift, wouldn’t you know it, life became a little easier and a lot more magical.
If reading this has made you realise that you too are living in a year that is all about the questions I hope it helps make things a little easier.
And if you feel in need of a little kick-start here are some journalling prompts you might like to try…
What questions is life posing to me right now?
Which ones am I most struggling to answer?
If a friend came to me with these questions, seeking advice, what would I say to them?
What are the most beautiful, energising answers I can imagine for my life’s questions?
When I envision moving into a year that answers what would it look like?
Working backwards from that vision, what small steps could you start taking today to help you move into that year of answers?
Until next week, sending you all joy and hope,
Siobhan
This was really thought-provoking for me. Thank you. And glad your dad is home
Thank you for the update on your dad. So pleased he was home for his birthday. And thank you for three years of thoughtful Sundays.