I want to start with what I expected: nothing dramatic. I booked the Away stay because a colleague had done it and said it was "interesting." Not life-changing. Interesting. I was in the middle of a restructure at work, mildly burned out, and genuinely unsure what I wanted next. I figured four days on a farm would at least give me some fresh air.
I was wrong about the "nothing dramatic" part. Not in the way those sentences usually go, though. There was no single moment of clarity. No sunrise epiphany. What happened was slower and harder to describe — something in my nervous system gradually stopped bracing itself, and by day three I noticed I was actually present in a way I hadn't been for years.
"By day three something shifted that no workshop had ever been able to move."
The property was Stoneleigh Farm in the Yarra Valley — about ninety minutes from Melbourne. Bec Nguyen runs a market garden there with her partner, and she's the kind of person who talks about plants the way other people talk about people. Not in a precious way. In a way that makes you realise how much is actually happening in a square metre of soil at any given moment.
What the days looked like
We started early. Not brutally early, but earlier than I'd started anything in years. There was a kind of rhythm to it that felt different from the routine of my commute — purposeful in a direction I could actually see. We were planting, weeding, harvesting, moving compost. Bec explained what she was doing and why, but she didn't teach at us. She just worked alongside us and let us ask questions.
The meals were the part I didn't expect to matter as much as they did. Eating together, three times a day, with food that had come from the same land we'd been working — it sounds like a cliché when I write it out. It wasn't. There was something about the physical connection between effort and meal that I hadn't experienced since childhood, if ever.
The evenings were long and mostly unstructured. The Away people had suggested we keep phones away after dinner, which I'd privately thought was a bit much. By night two I was grateful for it. We talked for three hours the second evening — me, two other guests, and Bec's partner — about all kinds of things. Not about careers, mostly. About what we'd noticed that day. About what it felt like to work with your hands. About what we thought we'd been doing all these years.
What I came home with
I did not come home with a plan. I want to be clear about that, because I think Away sometimes gets described in a way that implies you leave with a new career trajectory mapped out. That wasn't my experience. What I came home with was quieter than that.
I came home with a clearer sense of what had been making me so tired. Not the job specifically — the posture of the job. The way I'd been holding everything. The relentlessness of being always-on, always-preparing, always performing competence for an audience that wasn't actually watching me that carefully. That posture had become so habitual I'd stopped noticing it was a choice.
Four days of being somewhere where none of that was relevant showed me the contrast I hadn't been able to see from inside it.
Six months later
I'm still in financial services. I haven't become a market gardener. But I work differently. I've restructured my schedule in ways that felt impossible six months ago. I take Friday afternoons off. I've started growing vegetables in containers on my apartment balcony, which is comically small-scale compared to what I saw at Stoneleigh, but feels continuous with something I found there.
I'm also enrolled in the Away Deeper Programme. Not because I'm certain I want to change careers, but because I'm curious enough that it seemed worth continuing to explore. That feels like exactly the right reason.
Away didn't tell me what to do next. It gave me enough distance from my ordinary life to see it more honestly. That's rarer, and more useful, than any career advice I've ever received.
