It is a beautiful beautiful frosty day in Copenhagen. I am biking to my garage in Vanløse and thinking… What the båt am I doing?

I am on my way to Thailand and the butterflies are flapping their wings in my stomach, giving me doubts to whether to go forward or not. Since last time we “talked” together, I have completed the Teacher Training at Partner Acrobatics (it was awesome), completed the sale of my apartment, and travelled a bit around Europe. Time has passed by really quick and there has seldom been a boring moment. All good! Looking back, there are lots of great stuff to remember…

• Partner Acrobatics in Spain 🙂
• Hot tubbing in Sweden in autumn colours 🙂
• Autumn acro in Nijmegen – was amazing.
• Teaching my first weekend workshop in Stockholm. Thank you Anna for your support and help 🙂
• Visiting Belgium, Holland, and Vienna – meeting awesome new friends everywhere.
• Trip to Vesterhavet (Northern sea).
• Awesome New Years acro party 🙂
• … and a lot more.

But it still… people have been curious and have asked What are you going to Thailand for? And I have not quite been able to answer them. It has always been a bit vague and this has also made me doubt myself. Is it the right thing I am doing? Being in this transition phase of breaking up my life to go travelling (or set down in Århus later) has opened my eyes (even more) for all the good things and friends I am leaving behind in Copenhagen.

So… here comes a wish list for my up-coming months… putting them in writing may help me keep a focus on them as I continue my travels. They are in no particular order; I think I will try to keep an open mind as opportunities present themselves 🙂

• Acroyoga and acrobatics: Playing around, creating new stuff, making videos, photos, teaching. All is fun! For starters, I am going to join Partner Acrobatics again in Thailand.
• Contact improvisation is still on my todo-list. I have been meeting some wonderful people in this world, but it is still on the edge of my comfort zone – and that, I think, is worth challenging a bit.
• Yoga and meditation is also something I would like to explore more. It is two very deep topics of life, and it would be interesting to see how much of that I can embrace with my engineering mind 😉
• Future plans. What do I want to work with in the future? How will I make a living coming back to Denmark? This is a big big topic and I don’t expect to get a clear all-set plan. I do, however, feel that I would like to utilize my engineering background in one form or another, but how? I don’t know. Let’s break it down and just try to figure out a starting point 🙂
• Computer work. People may ask why do I want to sit behind a computer while travelling? Well, the answer is, that this is where I have time. I have a couple of open source software projects that I would like to contribute to. Move Copenhagen will also take a few hours of my time this year. I would love to get into photography again – and this also takes more hours behind the screen than I think (most) people think. And lastly, this may also be a good time for me to brush up on my Machine Learning skills and try out if that is what I would like to work with in the future 🙂

Recently I heard a podcast starring Tim Ferris¹. It was an hour long podcast about (elements of) his life, his depressions, and how he handled them. Some half-way through the podcast, he presented a tool he called fear setting (as opposed to goal setting). Whenever he would run into a situation where he was contemplating doing some action (such as me quitting my job and leaving Cph) but he had fears of doing it, he would use this tool. The basic idea is to

1. Write down your fears as concrete as possible, and come up with ways to mitigate them.
2. Write down the benefits of doing the action.
3. Write down the costs of inaction – i.e. the cost of status quo.

The last point is important and is what resonated with me.

It is not that I have used the tool as such, but it is actually what gave me the courage to start this journey. When I moved to Copenhagen (Lyngy) it was to get an education and then go back (?) to Jutland. Surprise… didn’t happen. Long story short; I stayed here, got a job and a (busy) life.

Last spring (when I made the decision) I was at a point where I felt a bit stuck in my life. Without going into details with my life here, I realised that I had been in the Copenhagen area for 14 years and barely realising it! I had heaps of good experiences and memories in Copenhagen and there is lots of stuff that I do like about Copenhagen – I just don’t want to stay here forever. My job was starting a new project (with me as one of the main architects) and I felt that I should stay at least 3 years for it to make sense for me. Adding the 3 years to my (then) recent realisation of 14 years in Copenhagen made me feel that if I did not move now, then I would never move. And that was a scary thought.

When I listened to Tim Ferris talking about Fear Setting, I realised that this was my 3rd page of the tool. The cost of staying in Copenhagen was so big that I could not do nothing. And that is why I have to go.

How long will I be in Thailand? When will I return to Dk? Good questions. I just hope that I will be seeing all my friends in Copenhagen (and the rest of the world) when the time comes. An old quote got stuck in my mind….

How lucky I am to have known someone and something that saying goodbye is so damned awful.

Take care 🙂