“So, what do you want to do with your life?”
I was twenty-two when someone first asked me that question.
Not what job I wanted.
Not what I was studying.
Not where I hoped to be in five years.
What did I want to do with my life?
I knew immediately that I could answer.
Not because I had prepared one, but because it was a question I had been asking other people since I was about fourteen. Teachers. Friends. Almost anyone willing to wonder with me. I was endlessly curious about what called people, what gave them life, what they longed for.
Yet somehow, no one had ever turned the question back towards me.
Until that afternoon.
I climbed the narrow staircase to the attic office of Frontier, the Society for Environmental Exploration, on Old Street in London.
The air grew warmer with every flight until, by the time I reached the top, the office felt almost tropical. It hummed with conversation. Phones rang. People leaned over desks in animated discussion. Books overflowed from every shelf. A vast map of Africa stretched across one wall. Dust floated through shafts of sunlight beneath the sloping roof, suspended in the heavy air.
It felt less like an office than the rainforest I had spent years imagining.
Outside, somewhere beyond the small attic window, stood the towers of the City—glass, finance and another version of success.
Inside, surrounded by maps and possibility, another landscape was quietly unfolding.
I had applied for an administrative role with Frontier Tanzania.
It wasn’t the job I wanted.
It was the closest doorway I could find to the life I wanted.
I wanted forests.
Communities.
Conservation.
Africa.
I didn’t yet have a master’s degree. I didn’t have the money to pay for one. I had no clear route from where I stood to where I hoped to be.
But I knew what drew me.
The Executive Director, Eibleis Fanning, welcomed me into her office.
She seemed young to me then. Perhaps she wasn’t. Memory has a way of preserving presence more faithfully than age. What I remember is her confidence. Not loud. Not performative. Simply settled. Entirely at ease in herself.
She smiled.
“So, what do you want to do with your life?”
Something in me leaned forward.
This wasn’t an interview question.
It was a life question.
I forgot entirely about the administrative role.
Instead, I told her everything.
About forests.
About Africa.
About people.
About conservation.
About the life I wanted to build, even though I had very little idea how I would ever build it.
She listened.
Then she began imagining possibilities.
“What about this?”
“No.”
“What about that?”
“No.”
“This.”
Even now, I smile remembering how certain I sounded.
Not certain of the path.
Only the direction.
Then something happened that has stayed with me for more than thirty years.
She didn’t flinch.
…
She didn’t smile politely before redirecting me back towards the job I’d applied for.
She didn’t suggest I might want to be more realistic.
She became more interested.
Looking back, I realize she didn’t give me permission to dream.
My father had already done that.
He was a dreamer himself.
Together we dreamed of athletics, of travelling, of lives that stretched far beyond the horizon we could see. He never laughed at my dreaming. He entered it with me.
That gift has stayed with me all my life.
But elsewhere, dreaming could land differently.
My enthusiasm, certainty and intensity didn’t always have somewhere to rest. Without anyone ever saying it directly, I became adept at reading the room. In some places I could arrive fully. In others, it felt wiser to soften the edges of my longing—to become a little easier to hold.
Perhaps we all learn this.
We become remarkably sensitive to where more of us is welcome…
and where less of us feels safer.
Sitting in that attic office, I had no language for any of this.
I only knew that I had answered with everything I had.
And Eibleis hadn’t asked me to make it smaller.
She welcomed it.
There is something quietly life-changing about being welcomed in that way.
Not admired.
Not praised.
Not fixed.
Simply welcomed.
Only after almost half an hour did either of us remember there was supposed to be an interview taking place.
Eibleis laughed.
“Well,” she said, “perhaps I should ask you the actual questions.”
“Do you drive?”
“No.”
“Do you type?”
“Yes.”
At which point I demonstrated my version of typing by enthusiastically stabbing an imaginary keyboard with one finger from each hand.
She laughed again.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You competed against four hundred applicants to get this interview.”
Then she paused.
“And I can tell you…”
Another pause.
“…you don’t have the job.”
Before disappointment had time to arrive, she continued.
“But I’d like to offer you the role you’ve just described.”
A month later, I was in Tanzania.
For years I thought that was the turning point.
The job.
The plane ticket.
Africa.
These days, I’m not so sure.
I think the turning point came much earlier.
It arrived the moment someone made enough room for the whole of my longing.
Before I left that afternoon, Eibleis offered one final piece of advice.
“Don’t get on the plane until you’ve organized your master’s degree.”
“I don’t have the money,” I admitted.
She looked at me as though this were simply another practical problem.
“Go back to the people who believed in your undergraduate work,” she said. “Tell them what you want. Ask them to support you.”
Again, she wasn’t rescuing me.
She was refusing to let my circumstances become smaller than my calling.
When I remember that day now, I don’t first remember the conversation.
I remember the room.
The heat.
The map.
Dust drifting in the sunlight.
The constant hum of people immersed in work that mattered to them.
As a geographer, I’ve spent much of my life wondering how landscapes shape us. Mountains, coastlines, forests and rivers leave their imprint long after we’ve left them.
Perhaps rooms do too.
Perhaps some places become thresholds.
Places where more of us arrives than when we first walked in.
I’ve continued asking people the same question ever since.
What do you want to do with your life?
These days, though, I hear it differently.
It’s no longer a question about careers.
Or ambition.
Or success.
It’s a question about aliveness.
About the parts of ourselves that have been welcomed…
and the parts still waiting.
When I think about that attic now, I realize it wasn’t simply where my career began.
It was one of those rare places where I experienced what becomes possible when another human being makes room for your longing without asking you to reduce it.
I’ve often wondered how different our lives might be if we became that kind of presence for one another.
The kind of person who doesn’t simply see another.
Or even understand them.
But quietly says,
More of you is welcome here.