AM I REALLY LIVING?

It's when you're chest-deep in emails, chasing after deadlines that keep popping up like unrelenting crocodile heads you have to smack down in that famous arcade game, and deskbound in a 9-to-6 (or 7-to-4 in my case), that you really start thinking about the meaning of life.  

Or rather, you start asking yourself: Am I really living?

When I was doing my Master's in London and had just wrapped up a cold and miserable four months of thesis-writing one October, I decided that I had had enough of the greyness in the +44 and that I needed to chase some sun. So very logically, instead of going to California or Florida, I decided to head up to the Great White North and go to Canada instead. I know; I'm still not sure even today why I chose Montreal instead of the beach. I think I just wanted the sun and decided I could deal with the cold. Plus, I wanted to hang out with some really cool friends from Montreal whom my best friend Andrea and I had met while backpacking in Tokyo the year before.

Somehow a three-week trip turned into two months, and by the time I left Montreal back for London, the crisp autumn leaves had already given way to four inches of fresh snow. 

It was totally unplanned and I just lived each day as it came. I started out staying with a girlfriend who was studying at McGill, and then later moved out to a rented room with two random guys from med school in an awesome red brick house near the university. It was just a huge mattress in a big room with an en-suite - that was all I needed. I traveled solo to Ottawa and met really cool Australian girls at a hostel converted from a previous jailhouse, and together we explored the city and chomped on piping hot beaver tails together in the icy cold. I'm still in contact with one of them (Hi Jess!) and can't believe we all slept in cots in cold rooms, literally behind bars. I got to know a whole new bunch of friends and spent afternoons with them walking through downtown, spent evenings over huge bowls of pho or platters of sinful poutine and even made a whirlwind weekend roadtrip to New York with some of these new pals. I spent afternoons with my camera shooting with Michel on the street, capturing in my snaps faces I would see once and never again. We also went to Quebec City and I learnt to survive in negative temperatures without a down jacket and with booties that were clearly not meant for any Canadian winter. There, we spent a whole weekend having a really good time over bison burgers and hot chocolate once I stopped slipping and sliding all over the frozen roads. I helped write press releases and wrote freelance to earn some money to travel, went to awesome house parties hosted by people I hardly knew, and sent dreamy applications to the Globe & Mail and Roger Media. Basically, I did everything that I would never have done as a grad student in wintertime London.

I didn't think it was a big deal at the time, but Tiffany, one of the new friends I had gotten to know, said to me while we were parting: "Do you know how amazing what you've just done is? You left everything you knew and came to a whole new city, and you just lived."

Yes, I just lived. 

It's been a whole five years since that crazy winter in Montreal, but with a ball and chain anchoring me to the rat race now, I really do think it's about time I started to think about living again. Not just existing, but living.

I'm not about to launch myself into some wacky travel plan out of the blue because these days, it's more about chasing the things I really want to do. Five years ago I had the courage to chase the winter sun because I really wanted to, and that was what it meant for me to really live it up then. Right now, courage to live means taking the laundry list of things that I really want to explore way more seriously. Yoga, making peanut butter, exploring the raw food movement, making something out of the numerous ideas that the husband and I throw around all the time, volunteer work, writing, learning to ski...

Time to grab the courage the younger me had and just get out there. Not just to exist, not just to churn enough moolah from the daily grind to pay the bills and put food on the table, but to truly, truly live.

(P/S: Total, total coincidence that I decided to write about my time in Canada on Canada Day.)