FREE SPIRIT

I have a friend, well, let's call her an acquaintance, I worked with ten years ago. She was popular and friendly; no ego, but also super-cool, with a sort of distant relationship to the rules of work. She used to float in, and then float out again as though she belonged to a slightly different universe and was merely tolerating the physics that bound the rest of us to our desks. I liked her.

Because she is who she is, she amassed thousands of friends on flipbook and rarely went on a blocking spree. And because I am who I am, I fell off her radar but not her friends list, and so, improbably, she's still there in my feed, ten years later. And although I have a tempestuous relationship with fizzlebook, it does show me her timeline every now and then. And it's interesting.

How does she do it? She seems to be living a sort of dream, travelling around the world in a camper van. A Danish beach here, a Sierra Leone jungle there, next she's in Surrey with a drone taking overhead photos like helicopter shots from 400ft, and then she's off somewhere else exotic. Ten years later and she's still floating around the globe with a sort of single, independent freedom. How does she do that?

More to the point, how do you get to be someone for whom the normal grinds of life no longer apply? How do you disconnect yourself from the chains the rest of us have to carry? How do you do that?

Yes it is possible that she's independently wealthy. But she didn't come across like that back in the day. Perhaps while I've been off flimpybook she started, grew and sold a business for an astronomical sum and now she's travelling the world? Hats-off, if that's the case.

Sure, that's not any of my business, but there is definitely something about the mindset of someone like that that I find compelling. Occasionally someone asks me what my dream job is and I pick either composer of movie scores or jingle writer or something like that, but really my heart wonders why I have to have a 'job' as my dream at all? And are we all like this?

I'm not saying I don't wish to work. I believe we're designed to do that. I think I just mean that so many of us get sucked in to this black hole of careers; we never stop to wonder what else we could do, and what else we could be. How could we work in a way that doesn't mean squeezing into tube trains, or sitting in front of screens? How could we organise ourselves so that there's more to life than shutting a laptop and relaxing with the TV, or engrossing ourselves in family drama so deeply, that that's all there is?

I'm not saying I want to bomb around Europe in a camper van either - though you bet I'd write about it forever if I did! No, I'm looking out of a rain-washed window, through tiny droplets that fell out of a grey sky. I'm lit by the glow of a work laptop that brings me glum news all round and even though I'm home and well, dry, I can't help thinking I'd like to be living a bit more freely somehow.