Nayla’s Notes on Life

Tag: adventure

  • Torn Between a Safe Career and a Meaningful One

    Torn Between a Safe Career and a Meaningful One

    What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

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    I had a five-year career plan. It lasted until a stack of brochures showed up.

    It was a gorgeous autumn day in Toronto. The leaves were showing off, turning bright shades of yellow, orange, and crimson red. The crisp air didn’t bother them like it bothered me. 

    I’d recently graduated from law school. Yet, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life… until that day. 

    Don’t get me wrong, law school opened many doors. But it was a career I fell into by default rather than design.

    I spent the better part of that fateful morning reviewing a series of pamphlets I had been asked to consolidate. I poured over each one, neatly stacking them on my desk as I finished. Most importantly, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. 

    They talked about conflict.

    Not the destructive kind that we see on social media and the news these days. You know what I’m talking about… the kind that makes you want to click, sigh, and type a comment you’ll regret by Thursday. 

    No, this was the “boring” kind of conflict: conflict resolution. 

    The kind where two people sit down together and have a true dialogue. Where communication means more than people saying “I hear you” and clearly not hearing a thing.

    Before you scroll on, let me also share that I used to hate conflict. (This was, in hindsight, a questionable foundation for a career built on disagreeing for a living, but I digress.)

    I had avoided confrontation my entire life.

    And yet there I was, captivated. Who were these people who called themselves peacemakers*? How had they learned to do what seemed like the hardest thing in the world: helping people who are fighting to work together?

    *Peacemaker: a person who sits between two people who each believe they’re the reasonable one, and somehow leaves with everyone still talking.

    As much as I tried to ignore what I was feeling, I couldn’t seem to shake the inner tug to dig deeper.

    It also made my shoulders tighten. 

    My career was finally shaping up, and the thought of throwing it all away felt irresponsible. The cautious part of me was terrified of failure. It had kept me safe for many years, like an umbrella I carried on perfectly sunny days. I never got wet. But I also never got to feel the sun. 

    I took a deep breath and Googled what it would be like to work in this area. The cautious one spoke up immediately:

    You’re nowhere near as qualified as they are.

    I haven’t applied for anything.

    Yet… That’s what worries me.

    This time another voice chimed in. It didn’t speak in words, but in sensations: a flash of excitement, deep fascination… and a mildly terrifying sense that my whole world was about to change.

    I now know that this was the curious part of me.

    Has this ever happened to you? The feeling of being pulled in two directions by different parts of yourself?

    On that beautiful autumn day, the curious one gained enough courage to put the umbrella down. It looked the cautious one deeply in the eyes: “It doesn’t matter what you think we’re supposed to do… we need to keep going.”

    I could feel the cautious one release its grip… almost as if it was waiting for someone to grab the steering wheel so it could finally step down for a while. My shoulders softened and just for a moment I stopped caring about mistakes, failure, or looking foolish. I simply felt the joy of wondering.

    The next day, I went to a bookstore and bought a book on conflict resolution. The cautious one wanted to be certain I was prepared, so one book became a stack, the stack became a shelf, and eventually the shelf became a career. 

    If you’re feeling torn, you may not have a decision to make so much as an internal meeting to chair. I recommend bringing patience, snacks, and low expectations for the first 30-minutes.

    I never did go back to the five-year plan. I hear it’s waiting for an apology. 

  • Nobody Panic, We’re All Someone Else Now

    Nobody Panic, We’re All Someone Else Now

    The genie grants you a wish. What is it?

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    So, one wish. Here it is: once a year, for one week, everyone on Earth swaps bodies with someone whose life looks nothing like theirs. 

    A long-haul trucker becomes a kindergarten teacher. A CEO becomes a line cook who gets home at 1am. A teenager becomes a 72-year-old retired farmer. A suburban Western mom wakes up as a market vendor in Marrakech, fluent in a language they’ve never studied, haggling like they were born for it. Think Freaky Friday,* but with eight billion people and no hair-and-makeup budget.

    *Freaky Friday: a cinematic scenario in which two people switch bodies, learn a life lesson in under 97 minutes, and are returned with their hair fully intact.

    There are three ground rules, and they apply to all of us.

    Rule one: it never happens during a bad time. If you’re caring for a sick loved one that week, you don’t swap. You stay right where you are, with them. 

    Rule two: nobody has to do anything that goes against their moral code. You’re borrowing a life, not auditioning to be a villain.

    Rule three: everyone gets all of their host’s memories. Nobody learns empathy while hunting for the cutlery drawer in a stranger’s kitchen.

    At the end of the week, we all go back to being ourselves. Just ourselves. We’d still overthink our emails, still have strong opinions about the thermostat, still say “no worries” when there are, in fact, several worries.

    But maybe we’d have a bit more compassion.

    Maybe we’d be a bit more understanding.

    Maybe we’d come home with new ideas about how to make the world a better place, because we’d have spent a week living in the part of it we’d only ever fleetingly wondered about. Multiply that by eight billion, and I like our odds.

    That’s the whole wish. No gold, no private island, just a planet’s worth of people who’ve each walked a week in shoes that don’t fit.

  • The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    A rigorously tested, professionally unqualified method.

    If you identify as a jack of all trades like me, you already know the real secret to a successful DIY project isn’t skill. It’s delusion sustained over several weeks. 

    Here’s my fail-proof, five-step method for DIY’ing your own pixie cut, developed over a lengthy YouTube playlist, a mild identity crisis, and a very expensive drawer of barely-used scissors. 

    Step 1: Tell everyone.

    Not just your partner. Not just your group chat. Everyone. Your coworkers. Your dentist. The guy who delivers your packages. This isn’t for accountability… accountability implies you might back out. This is so that when it goes wrong, it goes as spectacularly wrong as possible. 

    (But whatever you do, don’t tell your family. Friends offer skepticism. Family opens an inquiry.)

    Step 2: Research extensively. Apply nothing.

    Build a DIY pixie cut YouTube playlist so long it starts to feel like a relationship. Watch every video twice. Sit with your popcorn, expertly judging strangers despite the fact that you’ve never held a pair of clippers, let alone filmed a YouTube tutorial. Most importantly, let yourself believe that watching someone confidently cut their hair is basically the same as doing it.

    This belief will not survive contact with actual clippers. Deep down, you already know that. Ignore it.

    Step 3: Buy every tool you could possibly need… plus several you can’t justify.

    Clippers, guards, hairdresser scissors, thinning scissors, texturizing scissors, and sure, why not… a thinning razor you will use exactly zero times. This step isn’t really about hair. It’s about the deep, specific comfort of owning tools that outrank your skill level by several years. 

    None of them will help. All of them will feel like progress. 

    Step 4: Wait until it’s too late to back out.

    Let your hair grow just long enough that it has to be cut, and just short enough that undoing a mistake means starting over from nothing. This is the sweet spot. This is when fear finally shows up… right on schedule, arms crossed in the bathroom mirror, daring you to blink first. Ignore it. Pick up the clippers. Close one eye (for reasons that remain unclear even to you). Let the muscle memory you don’t have take over. 

    Somewhere, a professional stylist will feel a disturbance in the force.

    Step 5: Reveal your results to a deeply unimpressed audience.

    Here’s the part nobody warns you about… after weeks of buildup, the internal spiral, and the one-eyed leap of faith, your friends will not gasp. They will not so much as flinch. One will simply walk past you. Another will look directly at you and ask if you got new earrings.

    Eventually, you will not be able to take it anymore, and you will do the thing you swore you wouldn’t… announce it yourself.

    “I did it! I cut my own hair!!”

    This will be met with the same energy as someone announcing they’ve reorganized their sock drawer. 

    So there you have it. Five easy steps to a pixie cut, tried and tested by me, on me, with no professional supervision whatsoever… a method that will change absolutely nothing about how people see you, and everything about how you see yourself. (Not as someone with a good haircut. As someone who is clearly ready for the next bad idea.)