Leaving the Bubble - Into Blue Depths

2 THE ITINERARY

Life is probably as much a journey as identifying your true values and principles is. It is quite probable that the latter takes a lifetime, and one might argue that it is not even meant to end at a certain time. There was one major decision to be made when I left my old life behind and started my journey. I had to make up my mind if I wanted to set a time limit and negotiate with my employer that I would return at a pre-defined date. The negotiation was cut short right from the beginning. I had already made an agreement to work as scuba diving instructor for a six months' season, while the maximum time my employer would keep my job would have been two months. As counterproductive as this may sound, I did happily accept it, as I was prepared to leave my job anyways and I was not thrown into temptation to stay in a job that had started to drain a lot of my motivation and energy. So, it happened that I found myself on an aircraft to Ibiza at the beginning of May 2019 and the only thing I knew was that I would fly out of Ibiza at the end of October or beginning of November. However, I insisted to me and others that I did not yet know if I would return to my old life by then or embark on the next leg of my journey instead... a wise choice as I was confirmed later during my journey!

My original dream was quite different than the actual journey, fortunately as I recognized while I was in my first job from May to October 2019. For several years I had been dreaming of working onboard a cruise ship as a diving instructor. I envisioned living the glorious life, cruise ship passengers experience, for several months, changing between amazing places regularly and being surrounded by happy guests and passionate colleagues. It did not happen due to a small detail.

By the end of 2018 I had a work contract of a major cruise ship operator on my desk, ready for my signature, as well as a specific date and port of embarkment to go on board. Timing was the only problem. Due to me becoming an instructor only in November 2018 and my notice period in my old job I would not have been able to go onboard before February 2019, a time by which the destinations with popular diving - Caribbean and South East Asia to name it - had already been staffed. Joining one of these would only have been possible, if I had worked up the guts to quit my old job before joining my Instructor Training Course in November 2018. As risk averse as I was, I considered that no option. In retrospective it would have been a wiser choice to take the greater risk, but not for the sake of ending up on a cruise ship.

When I sat on that aircraft to Ibiza in May 2019, I still considered it an option to work on a cruise ship afterwards. What prevented this from happening in the end were the working conditions on such cruises. As naïve as I was, I kept on believing that working 12 hours a day and seven days a week for six months straight would be great as long as you do what you like. However, working eight hours a day and six days a week in Ibiza taught me an entirely different lesson.

As much fun as scuba diving still is for me, as much direly needed was the Sunday off. Even though it was a different way of looking forward to the weekend than in my old office job, physical exhaustion and working in tourism as an introvert still requested their tribute. After working in Ibiza for almost six months, I direly needed my well-deserved rest, because one day off per week had not been enough for a full recharge of my energy level. One can now easily imagine what six months without a single day off would have done to my physical and emotional state.

Consequently, I returned from Ibiza a little bit wiser now knowing more about being an introvert in an extrovert job. Luckily, I had found out early enough, so that I made the right arrangements and did not go for cruise ship after all. Even though I now argue that quitting my job before my Instructor Training Course would have been a better life choice, exactly this mistake - if one wants to call it like that - prevented me from going a step that I would have regretted rather sooner than later. As there is a countless number of interdependencies between all the decisions we take in life, it is impossible to see all their impacts. Yet it is imperative to take decisions in order to avoid a life in mediocracy. I will reflect a bit deeper on this later in this book.

What were my reasons to choose Ibiza over Thailand or another exotic place? The more I look back and the more I think about it now, the more I get to realize that after all it was just me being scared of taking a too big step out of my comfort zone and entirely leaving my bubble behind. Back at the end of 2018, when my decision for a destination was due, I was of course arguing entirely different. I kept on telling myself and others that I preferred Ibiza over other places because of the high lifestyle in a developed western country and the resulting possibilities to live your life outside of diving. I was proven wrong very soon, when I realized that I got to spent most of my time with colleagues and guests from the dive center anyways and, not a surprise, the native population was living separate from the temporary workers. Now sitting on the beautiful beach of Koh Tao it hurts to confess that there is actually more life outside of diving over here, so I took my initial decision based on false assumptions and could have gotten way more out of it, if I had not been afraid of the big leap that Thailand seemed to be back in 2018.

However irritating this insight is, there was one big advantage of Ibiza though, one that I only started to appreciate when I started to organize for Thailand and was able to compare - the benefits of the European Union! Free movement, health insurance, social security and permission to work in whatever member state are only a few to be mentioned. Sometimes it takes to see the other side to appreciate what you have been taking for granted almost your entire life.

As I am writing these lines on the beach of Koh Tao, it should become very obvious that these first six months of my journey had not been as fulfilling as I wished, since I would otherwise probably be back in my old life by now. If I had returned home after the first six months, I would very likely feel the desire to break loose very soon again. Now, however, after having been here for two months, it feels right to go home in a few months to embark on new adventures.

In November 2019 I spent 18 days at home, in between returning from Ibiza and boarding my flight to Thailand. This turned out to be the weirdest period of my entire sabbatical. When I booked my flights, it sounded great to spend a certain time at home. I would be seeing my friends again and would have enough time to get everything arranged for Thailand. I was even doubting if 18 days would be enough. It was, however, only a matter of days to get everything arranged and it was intriguing to realize how little most people cared that I was only home for two weeks between two legs of what felt for me as the greatest journey and adventure of my entire life. Many of them turned out to be so heavily stuck in their day-to-day affairs that conversations were so much more about the random topics I escaped from in the first place rather than being interested in what I had experienced and what would be next. It almost felt as if people were afraid of even only thinking and talking about topics that are outside the bubble that is called their life.

Consequently, it did not take long until I started to feel bored and stuck in what I had called my life before leaving and I started to wonder if I should have spent less time at home in between. Having been surrounded by inspiring, enthusiastic and full-of-life people for six months, it was painful to realize how mediocre my old life had been. Thus, I was direly waiting for November 18th and boarding my flights to Thailand, even though I anticipated by this time that a way bigger blues and crisis would hit me upon my return to Germany after however many months in Thailand. I expected it to be like the time after graduation from university, when I had found myself without a purpose, as my goal of graduating had been achieved. At that time, it had been a great relief to start working towards my goal of becoming a scuba diving instructor and working abroad for a while. It is therefore probably not a big surprise that identifying a new life goal or a next step played an important role in me getting ready to set a date for my return to Germany, as the reader will learn more about a few lines down this chapter.

So it happened that I found myself on a flight from Frankfurt to Kuala Lumpur, when I was writing the first lines of this book and have by now been living my life as a freelance scuba diving instructor on the island of Koh Tao for two months, something that I would not even have dared dreaming about several years ago. In fact, even when I had set for myself the goal to do this for a while, there was one of my inner voices that kept telling me that I would not do it anyways.

It is quite interesting to look back and realize how differently I arranged my time in Ibiza and my time in Koh Tao. Having worked my entire professional life in project management, I am used to setting targets, drawing timelines as well as defining and implementing action steps, each of these actions having its own due date and contingency plan in case it does not work out. Sadly enough, this had influenced my entire mindset into a direction that I was also writing ambitious to-do-lists for every hour of my free time, squeezing more into a day than I could get done and seeing everything I did - even...