Let me paint you a picture.
Fresh out of college, I landed a job at one of the “Big Four” public accounting firms. I wore the suits. I carried the briefcase. I worked the long hours. On paper, it looked like the kind of start a person should be proud of.
And then, eleven months in, I quit, bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand, worked on organic farms and sold fruit from a rainbow-painted van.
Drastic, I know.
The thing is, I knew early on that auditing wasn’t right for me. And I also knew, somewhere deep down, that there was a much bigger life waiting if I was willing to go looking for it. New Zealand had been calling me back since I visited during college on a short-term study abroad session to learn about glaciers and climate change. So I finally listened.
What followed was one of the most joyful, grounding, and quietly instructive chapters of my life.
The rainbow van
My first stint in New Zealand was through WWOOFing, which stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, a program where you exchange a few hours of daily work for food and accommodation. The host was a fruit selling company for which I spent my days selling produce from farms on the North Island out of the back of a van. Not just any van. A van painted in broad, brilliant rainbow stripes that you could spot from half a kilometer down the road.
Each morning, my friend and I would set up the stand together, arranging the fruit crates and setting up colorful hand-painted signs along the road in both directions (10 Avos for $5!) We’d sell fruit and veggies to customers throughout the day, and then load up the van and head back home to spend the evening by the fire pit, relaxing and sharing music saved on our hard drives (these were the pre-Spotify days, #nostalgia).
They were long days, and it was, at times, hard work. But there was something refreshing in the simplicity of it. Days spent out in the sun, conversations with locals, an abundance of fresh fruit, and all the avocado toast you could ever want.
Morning egg hunts and Marmite toast
My second WWOOFING host had chickens. A lot of chickens. And every morning, my first job was to find the eggs.
This was not as straightforward as it sounds. Different breeds, it turns out, have very strong opinions about where they like to lay. Some preferred the shelter of the coop. Others favored the base of a particular tree. A few had claimed their own spots under different bushes across the yard. Every morning was a small, delightful easter egg hunt.
Once the colorful eggs were in and labeled with the date, I would tip the ingredients for multigrain bread into the breadmaker and start it up. A few hours later, my WWOOFer friend and I would sit with the family enjoying a lunch of eggs on toast, with a thick spread of Marmite.
Stars over the Catlins
Once I finished my WWOOFing adventures, I went on to travel around the rest of the country. One weekend, a friend from the fruit company and I drove down to the Catlins, a remote and staggeringly beautiful stretch of coastline at the very southern tip of the South Island. One evening after a day of waterfall hikes and eating pasta with canned tuna like the budget backpackers we were, we lay on our backs outside the van and looked up at the sky.
I had never seen anything like it. We held up a glow-in-the-dark star map and slowly, carefully matched it to what was above us. It was the first time I had seen the Milky Way stretched across the darkness like a stroke of white paint on a black canvas.
Now, I am not suggesting you quit your job
Let me be very clear: I am absolutely not here to tell you to hand in your notice tomorrow and buy a one-way ticket to Auckland. That was my particular version of this story, and it was a little unhinged, which I say with full affection for my younger, more daring self.
But hey, if you do decide to quit, consider me your number one supporter.
What I am suggesting, though, is something smaller and more sustainable. Prioritizing yourself is not a one-time grand gesture. It is a practice. It is the trip you have been talking about for three years that you keep bumping to next year. It is the week off you keep not taking because deadlines keep creeping up. It is the destination that has been sitting in a tab on your browser for longer than you care to admit.
That is where I come in. I built this work around a simple belief: the things you keep saving for someday have a way of never quite arriving. And the world is far too extraordinary for that. If you’d like to hear more of my stories, including my New Zealand adventures, sign up for my newsletter. That’s where I share tales of my travels, destination inspiration, and the occasional gentle nudge to finally book the thing.
