Goodbye to my mango smoothie life

The end of my sabbatical and the start of a new chapter

I finally look up from the rhythmically spinning wheel of the rider in front of me. I have spent the past 30 minutes focused on physically keeping up with the group, stay close — but not too close— to the wheel in front, keeping the right cadence, avoiding potholes and stray dogs. Basically trying my best to not crash my bike, lose the group, or have them regret bringing me along.

Having been off the main highway for a few kilometers and sufficiently warmed up now, I put all that focus on pause, lift my head, and look around. I’m cruising through a pineapple farm. There are different shades of green everywhere, with blue-tinged mountains cropping up in the distance. A flock of small birds flitter above us.

I’m in Thailand!

I exclaim to myself, as if I just realized where I was.

I’m in Thailand and I’m riding a bike really fast through a pineapple farm. And life is freaking fantastic.

That’s more like it.

60 is the average age of the group that I am riding with. Retired from various professions and with different financial situations, they all have their own story of how they made their way to Thailand and picked up a road bike.

One thing they have in common? They will never go back to their old lives.

Why would they? These guys have it real good. The cost of living in Thailand is ridiculously low, while good healthcare and other requirements of healthy living are in abundance. There are world-class outlets for time-consuming hobbies like golf, scuba diving, and road biking. Every second Thai person speaks excellent english, and the Thai people are extremely friendly to tourists and newcomers.

Life is so easy here.

There are only 2 difficult parts of my day. The daily bike ride, and deciding where to get my next mango smoothie.

Our son goes to a wonderful school and we enjoy some sedate sight-seeing on the weekend. It would be easy enough to slip into a daily rhythm of exercise and mango smoothies…. forever.

But I’m not done yet.

I am walking away from the mango smoothie life.

As I wrote about in my earlier post, 5 lessons from 5 months of sabbatical, I was in desperate need of a respite at the start of 2024. After selling my company and working through an earnout, I was tired and bored. I ruminated about completely abandoning the industry of retail media, where I had scrabbled and grinded for 9 years to make a place for myself.

After 7 months of time out, I am ready to come back to the fray.

I am excited and fresh, with a new project in the retail media space that I’ll be announcing that in the coming days on LinkedIn.

The energy and clarity I needed to launch this new project was 100% borne from the time I took out.

I will extoll the virtues of sabbaticals and career breaks, in the hopes of normalizing them and allowing more people to have longer, more fulfilling careers.

Unsurprisingly, it’s usually not the workers who are resistant to this idea of course, but I do want to make the case for employers who want to retain critical team members to consider a sabbatical program like long service leave in Australia, or even the ability for employees to sacrifice some of their salary additional time off (salary sacrifice or salary packaging).

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With 23 years until I’m 60 myself, I plan on taking several more sabbaticals before I permanently take up the mango smoothie lifestyle. I may be ready for it by then!

But I don’t want to be limping toward the finish line.

Just like most mornings out on the bike, I’m making progress when I’m paying attention to my cadence and keeping an eye on the guy in front of me. But I’m actually living when I occasionally pull my head up and look around to enjoy the perfect scenery around me.