How to Five Years
This past week marked five years since that collective pause. The world stopped, held its breath, and in that stillness, something had shifted within me.
Looking back now, the contrast in my life feels stark.
My New York City life moved at a relentless pace. My days were filled with meetings, evenings with networking, weekends with recovery. Just to do it all again.
Breathing in subway air and ambition in equal measure. Running, always running. Toward what? It wasn't really clear to me.
My identity felt solid then. Entrepreneur. My business card said it, my introduction at parties confirmed it, my schedule demanded it. It was comfortable in its discomfort. Known in its exhaustion.
Then everything stopped.
In the quiet that followed, realizations emerged within me. Not immediately, but gradually, like plants slowly breaking through an old concrete patio. Thoughts that couldn't be heard in the noise before.
What existed beyond the life I had constructed? The identity I had so carefully built might not be the only possible one for me.
The first changes I made were practical. Location. Daily habits. A move across an ocean, that wasn't meant to be permanent.
Now my life unfolds between Lisbon and Sydney. Between ancient cobblestones and oceanside beaches. Applying lots of sunscreen has become my daily ritual, replacing the morning rush for the subway.
The shift in my surroundings has brought a shift in my perspective.
My conversations now happen in accented English, with many non native English speakers as friends, whose journeys to this moment took paths entirely different from mine.
Their stories and viewpoints reshape my understanding of life in ways impossible to predict. Foreign accents that once registered to me only as different now carry nuance, history, identity.
My professional identity has transformed too. From entrepreneur to now investor and author. From creating a single business to supporting many. From telling one story to telling many. Less doing, more reflecting. Less building, more connecting.
But the deeper shifts happened beneath my surface.
I learned to hold my ideas, identities, and attachments more lightly. I discovered that letting go creates space for something new to emerge. I found that curiosity leads to places certainty never could.
Perhaps the pandemic offered me a rare permission slip. Permission to question everything. Permission to release what no longer fit. Permission to begin again without explanation or justification.
In the space between what was and what could be, possibility took root within me.
The lesson from the past five years isn't about my specific choices—Lisbon or Sydney, investing or writing. The lesson is about curiosity itself. About approaching change not as a threat but as an invitation. About moving toward uncertainty rather than clinging to the familiar.
Looking back now, gratitude surfaces within me. For the circumstances that created space for my change. For the people who appeared at exactly the right moment, offering perspectives I couldn't have sought out intentionally. For the courage to follow my curiosity even when my destination wasn't clear.
Five years. So much change in my life, and yet it feels like just the beginning to me now.
The next five years will no doubt bring more change. More growth. More letting go. More discovering.
That's the unexpected gift from these past five years. Not the specific changes themselves, but my capacity to welcome change as it comes. To greet the unknown not as a threat but as teacher.
And that is how I learned to Five Years.
