Thursday Nights

Most Thursday nights a few of us play cards. It's how the weekend starts out here. Over the last few months the table has got smaller. People finish their contracts, or move to Riyadh, or go home, and the group that was ten is six, then four.

This week one of us was leaving for Riyadh, so we made an effort and got seven around the table. Good stories. Honest talk about work, and about families a long way away. At one point we rang a mate who recently went back to the UK and passed the phone around. Good times.

It was an ordinary night. That's what made me reflect on where I am.

I've wanted to work overseas since I was a kid. My dad did it for years and I watched him go. In 1998 I got six months of it, living with him in Hong Kong, and it's where I proposed to Justene. Then I came home, and for twenty-five years it nearly happened. For various reasons though, it never quite did. Somewhere in my forties I thought the opportunity had passed.

I love Sydney, it's my home, and always will be. It's where I built my family and career. I worked with some great people, true industry leaders, not just in Australia, but globally. Something that's unfortunately been lost. If I understand complicated projects, and I think I do, that understanding was built on the marked trail in Sydney, one development at a time. It was a good career.

But by 2023 I was in a rut. Professionally, and if I'm honest, personally too. Very competent, a bit jaded, and thirty-five kilos heavier than I am now. That's the version of me that stayed. He's still at the same desk. He's still good at the job. Nobody's worried about him.

Then the thing I'd given up on landed, and I went.

Here's what I didn't expect. I expected a place to change me. What actually happened is that the place revealed what was already there.

The technical depth was real. I'd half assumed it was the company, or the market, or the people around me. Put it down in the middle of nowhere on one of the largest developments in the world, surrounded by people who didn't know me and had no reason to be kind, and it held. That's not something I'd have said in Sydney. I didn't need to.

The confidence was there too, and I'd never used it. When you're thrown in with people you don't know, under real pressure, you've got two choices. Back yourself or walk away. Back home there's a third option, which is to keep your head down and let the organisation decide. I'd taken the third option for years without noticing it was a choice. Out here it's not available.

The calm surprised me most. I've always struggled to leave alone the things I can't control. Nearly three years of constant uncertainty and I've learnt to draw the circle small and work inside it. Not because I read a book about it. Because the alternative was being stressed every day, and that wasn't sustainable.

And the friendships. New people, new place, nowhere to go on a Thursday but each other's kitchens. It isn't normal, and that's the point. Trust that takes a decade at home takes a few months here, because there's no other way to get through it. That's what the card table is. It's a community that built itself because it had to.

Some of what it exposed I'd rather not have seen, and some of it was hurting the people closest to me. I've faced it, and that's all I'll say here.

None of this was new. That's the bit that took me a while. All of it was there in Sydney, sitting in the same chair I was, and nothing in that career ever asked for it. A marked trail doesn't ask. That's what makes it the marked trail. It gets you a long way, and it built me, and it would have taken me quietly to sixty without ever finding out.

The interesting ground, off piste, is where you find out. I'd assumed that was a line about places. It's really about yourself though.

So the question isn't whether you should move to the middle of nowhere. Most people shouldn't, and I wouldn't say I recommend it. The question is smaller than that. When did anything last ask you for something you weren't sure you had?