The Version of Us That Stayed

I was partway up Lynn Canyon with a newborn strapped to my chest when I started to understand that we were probably going to leave.

I was hiking with a friend. She had her newborn strapped to her chest too, which is a thing you do out there without anyone finding it remarkable. It was the rainforest, so everything was green in about nine different ways, and my calves were burning in the good way, and I remember thinking that this was one of the best places on earth to be a person.

And I was having the conversation with her about leaving it.

---

Here's where we were.

Colin and I were living in Vancouver, renting, saving up to get married, and doing the math that anybody who has ever tried to buy property in that city has done. The math does not work. It especially does not work for two young people with regular jobs and a wedding to pay for.

So we did what we'd been taught to do, which was invest where the profit is best and not where you live. And it worked. We figured it out. We were buying real estate on the other side of the country while living in a rented place in one of the most expensive cities in North America, and we were making it work.

Then our son was born, and something rearranged that I could not have predicted and could not talk myself out of.

It became very clear, very fast, how much we wanted the grandparents in our kids' lives. Not visits. Not FaceTime. Actual presence. The kind where a grandmother is just around, unremarkably, on an ordinary Thursday. Family is the thing for us. It always has been. And living across the country from all of it started to feel like a decision we were making on our kids' behalf without asking them.

So we left. Vancouver to Georgetown, Ontario, where our daughter was born and where we lived on the main floor of a house with our own basement rented out. And then Georgetown to Moncton.

---

And I want to be honest with you about the part that doesn't wrap up.

I still wonder if we got it wrong.

It has been years. YEARS. And Vancouver still sits in the three of us like a place we're supposed to get back to. Colin and I look west and go, wow, that was such a great place to live. And so does our son. Who lived there as a baby. Who has no memories of it whatsoever. He has somehow inherited the ache anyway, which tells you something about how we must talk about it.

It has this almost mystical place in our family. Not a regret exactly, but a whole life sitting over there in the corner, fully formed in our heads, that we never actually got to live.

Because here's the thing that makes it impossible to settle. We \were\ investing while we lived there. We had figured it out. Which means we could have stayed, and kept going, and possibly ended up somewhere close to where we are now anyway. Maybe with the same business. Maybe with a better one. Maybe with a much worse one.

One never really knows. That's the whole problem.

---

And I am not a person who is naturally good with "one never really knows."

I want answers. I want to understand. When something happens, my instinct is to reach for why, and I will keep reaching for a long time after it's clear there's nothing there to grab. But WHY. That's my default setting. I want the reason.

And a lot of the time there just isn't one. Not a satisfying one. Not one you could write down.

So here's what I've landed on, and it's the most useful thing I know about being a person who wants explanations in a life that doesn't hand them out.

Gratitude lets me engage with something without needing to understand it.

That's it. That's the whole mechanism. I don't have to solve it. I don't have to know why it happened or whether it was right. I can still be in relationship with it. Gratitude is the door that opens when the why door is locked, and it's the only one I've found that actually opens.

It gets me through the good and the hard. The wonderful opportunities and the exciting things and the moments of real pride, and also the parts that are just difficult, that don't come with a lesson attached, that are only hard.

---

It took me a long time to get there on Vancouver, though.

And I wish I could tell you it arrived as a moment. Something cinematic. It didn't. It was small and undramatic and honestly a bit boring to describe, which is why I think it's worth describing.

It was just that I finally had the time to sit with it.

To walk through everything that happened between that hike and now, in order, without rushing it or grading it. Some of that is the meditation I do, which I don't talk about much, but which is where a lot of my actual thinking happens. Some of it is a headspace that our life here allows for and our life in other places did not. And some of it is just grace, I think. Getting a bit more comfortable with the idea that a decision can be okay without being provably correct.

And somewhere in that sitting, this landed: we had to leave to get on the road we're actually on.

Not "it all worked out." Not "everything happens for a reason," which is a sentence I've never been able to swallow. Just that this path required that exit. The one we're on needed us to go.

Do I know that for certain? No. I just said one never really knows. Both things are true and I've stopped needing them to fight.

---

I was reminded of all of it yesterday, when we pulled into our driveway here in Moncton after a week at the beach.

Which, by the way, is a moment that feels a little unfair. You spend a week in the best version of your life and then the car turns onto your street and the whole rhythm changes back.

But here's what I noticed this time.

The rhythm it changes back to is realistic. That's the word I keep landing on. Not enviable, not impressive, not something anybody would put on the internet. Realistic.

It's a twelve minute drive instead of an hour and a half. It's a whole bungalow, both floors of it, ours, after years of living on a main floor with someone else's rent coming out of our basement. It's a pace out here on the East Coast that is genuinely slower than the GTA and slower than the Vancouver version of us was ever going to be.

Colin took a few extra days off so we could come back down gently instead of slamming into Monday. There are not a lot of expectations on this week. We are going to ease back into work and family and school prep the same way we're going to finish the laundry, which is to say in multiple loads, over several days, without anybody pretending it's going to happen all at once.

That's the thing I'm actually grateful for. Not the house. The permission to land slowly.

---

Now let me bring this over to your side of the table, because I think there are two things here and you're probably carrying both of them.

The first one is the decision you keep re-litigating.

You know the one. The property you passed on that somebody else bought and did very well with. The one you did buy, that you're still not sure about. The partner. The market you picked. The refinance you did or didn't do in the window you did or didn't catch. You've run it a hundred times, usually late, usually when you should be sleeping, and you're no closer than you were the first time.

And you can't get closer, because there's no control group. You only got to run it once. There is no version of your business where you made the other call that you can go check the numbers on. The other life doesn't have a spreadsheet. It just has a feeling, and feelings are undefeated in arguments, because they never have to show their work.

Here's the cost, and I don't think most operators see it. Re-litigating an old decision runs on exactly the same attention that the business in front of you needs. Same fuel tank. Every hour you spend auditing a call from 2019 is an hour not spent on the portfolio you actually have, which is the only one that responds to being worked on.

You don't have to conclude it was right. I have not concluded that. You just have to stop paying rent on it.

The Install

The Slow Landing. One small thing you can put into your business this week.

The second thing is smaller and it's happening to somebody reading this right now, because it's August.

You went away. Maybe it was a week, maybe it was three days, maybe it was one Saturday where you genuinely didn't check anything. And then you came back, and within about forty-eight hours the whole thing was gone. Not just gone from your calendar. Gone from your body. Like it hadn't happened.

That's not because you're bad at relaxing, but because nobody plans the coming back. We plan the going. We plan the leaving. And then we return with no plan at all, into a pile that accumulated while we were away, and we try to clear the entire pile at once at a pace we would never sustain in a normal week, and by the middle of the week we've worked so hard catching up that we've spent the whole rest we just earned.

The return is where you find out whether the time off counted.

This takes about twenty minutes and it is meant to be done on the day you get back, or the night before you go back, or honestly right now if you're reading this three days late and already underwater. It works for a week away, a long weekend, or any stretch where the business piled up while you weren't looking.

Step 1: Empty the pile onto paper. Answer nothing. Open every place things accumulated. Email, texts, voicemail, the app, the group chat, the note on the counter. Write one line per item. That's all. You are not responding, you are not deciding, you are not "just quickly handling" the easy one. The moment you answer one, you're in it, and the pile owns the day.

This part is usually shocking, and in a good direction. The dread is shapeless and therefore infinite. The list is fourteen items and eleven of them are nothing.

Step 2: Give each one a day, and let very few of them have today. Beside each line write an actual date. Not a priority. Not a star. A date.

The only question is: does anything genuinely break if this waits? Not "will someone be mildly annoyed," and not "will I feel behind," because you will feel behind about all of it. Does it break. Rent, safety, a hard deadline with a real consequence, a person who is actually stuck waiting on you. Those get today.

Almost nothing gets today. That's not you being lax. Most of the pile is just loud, and loud has been doing a very convincing impression of urgent for years.

Step 3: Hand the whole thing to AI and make it build you a landing. Open whatever free tool you've already got, ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and paste this above your list:

I'm a Canadian real estate investor with a full-time job and a small self-managed portfolio. I've just come back from time away and everything below piled up while I was gone. Each item has a date beside it that I've assigned. I want to come back gradually instead of clearing it all in one exhausting day. Do five things: (1) spread these across my next seven days, respecting the dates I set, with a hard cap of 45 minutes of business work per day, (2) tell me which items are genuinely time-sensitive and which ones I have flagged as urgent that probably are not, (3) name anything on this list that I should simply delete, decline, or let go of entirely, (4) group anything that could be handled in one sitting instead of five separate ones, and (5) give it back as a plain day-by-day list I can save. Use only what I gave you. Do not add tasks I did not mention, and no productivity advice.

My list: [paste]

Adjust the forty-five minutes to whatever is true for you. Twenty is fine. The number matters less than the fact that there is one, because a cap is the only thing that stops a re-entry from quietly becoming a sprint.

\\*Then do the one part that isn't logistics.\\* At the bottom of the page, write down one thing from the time away that you want to keep. Something specific. The way the mornings went. A conversation. How your kid was in the water. Write it where you'll see it while you work through the list, because the whole point of protecting the landing is protecting that, and it is remarkably easy to forget what you were protecting the second the pile is in front of you.

The Slow Landing is a real brick, and it's yours now. Run it once and the week after your next trip will feel noticeably different, and so will the trip, because some part of you already knows how it ends. But a plan you build by hand every time you come back is still you, building it by hand, and it only protects the returns you remember to point it at. The layer underneath is the one where the pile never gets to that size in the first place, because the decisions and the records and the handoffs already live somewhere other than your head, all year, whether you're coming home from the beach or sitting at your kitchen table on an ordinary night in February. That one isn't a brick you install from a newsletter. That's the house.

---

You've heard me say we're building that. The website is coming along, the doors open before the fall is out, and I'll tell you here first.

But I'd rather ask you something this week than sell you anything.

What's the decision you're still re-litigating? The one you've run a hundred times with no new information. Hit reply and tell me. You don't have to write much, and I'm not going to solve it for you, because I can't, and neither can you, and that's sort of the point.

I just think there are more of us carrying one of those around than anybody says out loud, and I'd like to know what yours is.

---

So that's where I am this week. Home, mostly unpacked, three loads deep, still a little sandy in places I won't find until September.

I don't know if we should have left Vancouver. I've decided I'm allowed to not know. What I do know is that the life we built here is one I can actually live at the speed I'm actually going, and that a version of me on a trail in a rainforest with a baby on her chest could not have told you that would be the thing that mattered.

If you're sitting with a decision that won't resolve, I'm right here with you. You don't have to solve it this week. You're allowed to just be grateful for where it put you and leave the rest of it alone.

Next Sunday, I'll be back.

I'm glad you're here.

— Nicole