The Best of Both Worlds

Finding the right balance in our lives.

My husband and I have spent the last two weekends away from our home in Vienna. Leaving home to visit anywhere means the usual weekend TO-DO list can be thrown up in the air and ignored, but being somewhere entirely different, like the countryside, with a slower pace, also calmed us down.

I’ve often fantasised about living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, only eating the fruit and veg I grow 🤔. As I can’t even grow grass, we would starve to death. I’m also not that good at rural life; I lived in a tiny village for a year when I first permanently moved to Austria (I wrote a story loosely based on this experience). I underestimated how different it would be. Expanding our horizons is good, as I explore in another post; however, I’m not referring to comfort zones here, but rather a way of life that we consciously decide upon or should.

We’ve all had that holiday feeling where we can imagine ourselves staying somewhere, but holidays aren’t reality. As a visitor to the village and surrounding area for a year before moving there, I was treated as such. As soon as I moved, I was confronted with the daily normality:

• being expected to leave my keys in the ignition in case someone needed to use my car;

• the fire brigade entering our bedroom to request a donation while we were lying in bed (no one locks their doors);

• the postman snitching on me to my boyfriend that I’d just crashed his car skidding on sheet ice before I could get back to the village to explain/hide the damage.

Also, the need to use a car to get anywhere and everywhere meant I piled on masses of weight; my idyllic vision of country life didn’t match up.

On my visits, something was always happening – a festival, a trip to the theatre, or my boyfriend would organise a night out with others in a crowd. Those outings and crowds became very sparse once I moved. There wasn’t a lot going on generally. I didn’t realise how out of it I felt until a friend from home called me. “I can’t talk for long. We’re going to a salami festival,” I told her. “But you’re a vegetarian,” she reminded me. “There’s more to it than eating salami. They crown a salami princess and everything.” As the words left my mouth, I knew what she would say. “Who would want that title? Mate, you need to come home.”

But I wasn’t homesick; I was missing city life. I got through the rest of that year by doing a lot of weekend city breaks 🙃.

I've since worked with people who had similar experiences. One woman moved further than I had to live on a mountain in a beautiful part of Austria. It couldn’t compete with her past life living in a tiny flat above a restaurant on a busy high street in the capital city of the country she came from. She described the move as killing her slowly inside. Another had never felt so lonely after moving in the opposite direction from the countryside to the anonymity of a big city.

Moving to a very different environment than we are used to doesn't work out for everyone, but it does for some. Considering certain aspects and preparing is advisable. With clients I’ve supported in advance of such moves, after addressing the practical and professional points, I go through simple questions with them; their answers are revealing:

• What do I like to do in my free time?

• How will I meet people?

• What will I gain?

• What will I lose?

The lists for gains and losses usually vary in length. However, once complete, I ask them to focus on the list they are most drawn to, which makes the length irrelevant and usually provides their answer.

Sometimes, upending our lives helps us find the right balance; we all have different needs and wants. However, our weekends away were confirmation for me that it doesn’t have to be one or the other in life; we can achieve balance by including a bit of everything in the doses that suit us (ironically, I now holiday every year for a week in the region I used to live).

If a move isn’t necessary, which it isn't for most of us, what can we do to incorporate other elements that would balance our lives, and how regularly can we manage this? It’s good to ask ourselves these questions from time to time.

After going from the extreme of living on the outskirts of and working in London to village life, I’ve found a happy medium in Vienna, which has enough to offer but isn't overwhelming. Here, the postman isn’t friends with my husband, we’re expected to lock our doors, and I haven’t been invited to one salami festival in 20 years 😉.