On stopping, opening up, and what I found when I finally had a moment to figure it out.
By Mark Munroe
I’m sitting at my desk in Valencia, looking out at the city on a warm, sunny morning, and I can’t help but reflect on how different everything looks from here.
Not just the view through the window. Everything.
A year ago I knew I was leaving Toronto. I’d lived there for over twenty years, grown up an hour’s drive away, built my career there, built my life there. And somewhere along the way I had stopped feeling like I was actually living it. The business was running. The content was going out. The wheels were turning. But I had no real sense of where the car was heading, or whether I even wanted to go there anymore.
So when the opportunity to move to Spain came up, I didn’t overthink it. I sold or donated everything that didn’t fit into three suitcases. I spent the last few months in Canada saying goodbye to the people I love. And then I left.
* * *
I want to be honest about what came next, because I think people sometimes expect a relocation story to be a before and after. The before: stuck, grey, going through the motions. The after: transformed, golden, everything solved.
That’s not what happened.
The first three months were a blur of paperwork and logistics and trying to figure out where to buy decent olive oil. Getting the apartment sorted. Making sure Beau and Manny were settled. Learning which buses went where. It was exciting and exhausting and ordinary all at once. There was no dramatic transformation moment. There was just the slow, unglamorous work of building a life somewhere new.
But somewhere in the middle of all that, once the dust had settled and the practical chaos had quieted down, something happened that I hadn’t planned for.
For the first time in about fifteen years, I stopped.
Not physically. I kept working, kept writing, kept building. But I stopped the relentless forward motion that had defined most of my adult life. The fixation on producing, earning, appearing successful. The constant noise of what’s next and am I doing enough and does this look right from the outside.
And in that quiet, I asked myself a question I genuinely couldn’t remember the last time I’d asked.
Who am I now? What actually brings me joy? What do I want my life to look like from here?
* * *
Here’s what I realised, and I think it’s something a lot of people will recognise if they’re honest with themselves.
Somewhere in my thirties, without noticing, I had stopped challenging myself.
Not stopped working. I was working constantly. But there’s a difference between working hard within the walls you’ve already built and actually testing those walls. Pushing at the edges. Trying something you might fail at. Being a beginner again.
Most of us are fearless as children because most things are new. We throw ourselves into experiences without the accumulated self-consciousness of knowing how we might look doing it badly. And then, gradually, we start constructing rules. About what we’re too old for. About what’s realistic. About who we are and what we do and where the limits are. We don’t announce these rules to ourselves. They just appear, one small decision at a time, until one day you realise you’ve been living inside a much smaller version of your own life than you had to.
I had done exactly that. I had built walls so gradually I hadn’t noticed they were there.
And then I moved to a country where I couldn’t speak the language, didn’t know the culture, had no existing social network, and had to figure out how to live all over again from a baseline of almost nothing.
Which turned out to be, unexpectedly, one of the most important things I have ever done for myself.
* * *
Ten years ago I would have laughed at the idea of sitting in a classroom four mornings a week, aged 43, trying to learn Spanish alongside people half my age. I would have said I was too set in my ways. Too old for that kind of humility. Too established to be a beginner.
But here I am. Conjugating verbs badly. Getting corrected by teachers who are younger than my career. Walking home with new friends called Mitch and Meg after a difficult end-of-term exam and feeling genuinely, simply happy about it.
Here I am, trying new food in new restaurants in a new city, navigating a new language, exploring countries I’d never been to, building a new chapter of my professional life from something that actually feels true to who I am rather than who I thought I was supposed to be.
And what I’ve found, on the other side of all that discomfort, is something I didn’t expect.
I’ve found myself genuinely enjoying being alive in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not performing enjoyment. Not documenting enjoyment. Actually feeling it, in the ordinary moments, on a Tuesday morning with a coffee in a city I chose, with a partner I love and a dog who has no idea how much he means to me.
* * *
I want to be clear about something before I wrap this up.
My life is not perfect. My relationship is not a fairy tale. I have bad days, uncertain days, days when the money worries surface and the self-doubt is loud. Moving to Spain did not solve any of that. It was never going to.
Because this was never really about Spain.
It was about me finally giving myself the conditions to stop running, look honestly at my own life, and ask the questions I’d been too busy or too scared to ask for most of my adult life. The move was the catalyst. The real work was everything that came after.
Knowing who I am now, more clearly than I ever have. Being genuinely open to what life has to offer rather than what I’ve decided in advance it should look like. Challenging myself to stay curious, stay humble, stay willing to be bad at something new. Learning to be present in the day to day rather than always living three steps ahead of it.
This is what I’m building toward. Not a perfect life. A real one. A community of people around me who are doing the same. A version of myself that I love and will keep being proud of, wherever the next chapter takes me.
The view from here is good.
I think it’s only going to get better.
What walls have you built without noticing?
The door is always open. There’s always a seat at the table.