Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - How to Start Over

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

What happens when life upends you? Things seem to be running smoothly, then all of a sudden you lose your job, someone walks out on you, you graduate, you retire. Some big shift happens — now what?Do you ruminate about the past, or do you honor it and reflect on how to move forward?My guest today chose the latter. Sib Jackson is a German living in England as a Cambridge tour guide, amongst other fun things. But she didn’t start out that way. In this episode, we talk about how Sib’s story unfolded like a literary novel. Seriously, I think her life is a beautiful time capsule of our age. You’ll see what I mean on this episode. In the next episode, Sib and I will talk about all the experiences you should have in Cambridge.Today is more about rolling with life and being present with it. Enjoy. ***I’m passionate about helping as many people as possible avoid the Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a list put together by palliative carer Bronnie Ware:1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.5. I wish I had let myself be happier.Every day could be our last, no matter what we have planned. Someday is today. Take action on the dreams that scare you. Today. Give voice to what you believe in. Today. Bring joy to someone. Today and every day.Want to talk through what a braver life could look like for you? I’m here for you. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to Live Without Borders, a podcast about how to live the good life through stoicism, personal development, and cultural exploration. I'm your host, Sarah Megatel, an American in England who's here to help fellow citizens of the world like you make the most of the brief time you have here on Earth. It is time to make every moment matter. What happens when life just totally upends you? Things seem to be running smoothly. Then all of a sudden, you lose your job. Maybe you get a diagnosis. Someone walks out on you. You graduate. You retire. Some big shift happens. Now what? Do you ruminate about the past about what could have been different? Or do you honor the past and then reflect on how to move

forward? My guest today chose the latter. Sib Jackson is a German living in England as a Cambridge tour guide, among several other fun things. But she didn't start out that way. In this episode, Sib and I talk about how her adult life unfolded, and it sounds like a literary novel brought to life. Seriously, I think Sib's life is a beautiful time capsule of our age. You'll see what I mean in this episode. In part two of our conversation, Sip and I are going to talk about the experiences that you definitely need to have in Camberton. In fact, I met her because I went on one of her tours. So that is in the next episode. Today is more about rolling with life and being present with it. Enjoy. Welcome, Sib. Thank you so much for joining me today. You're welcome. It's a pleasure to do this podcast with you, Sarah. You are German, but you've been living in England for a long time. So what first brought you here? Yes. Well, I came to England in the summer of 1989. I was in my very early 20s. And Germany hadn't even united yet. We still had two Germans then, Western and Eastern Germany. It's absolutely incredible to go back to that now. So I have lived in England half my life, more than half my life now,

and I first came to London. And that had to do with my apprenticeship I was doing in, of course, what was then still West Berlin, will you believe it, in an art gallery, in a contemporary art gallery, because I was very into contemporary art, and that was sort of my career path number one, let's say.

And that gallery in Berlin, a lovely gallery, had a kind of partnership with a London gallery and they, after I finished my apprenticeship in Berlin, asked me to join their London space. I moved to London in the summer of 89. Then the wall came down in Berlin, which was a weird kind of experience,

having just left West Berlin and then all of a sudden these seismic changes were happening there. And I wasn't there. I had just moved to another place. And I remember quite vividly how the reaction in England amongst the older generations, let's say, was very un-ephoric about this kind of change in Germany. And that made it even more difficult, more challenging, I think, being here.

Wow, tell me more about that, because I think most of us, when we think of the wall coming down, especially when we're visiting Germany, it is euphoric. Like, wow, coming together again, this is the end of... Yeah, I mean, we were brought up in West... I come from West Germany. I mean, it was actually written in the German constitution that we are striving towards a reunification of the two sides of Germany.

And it always seemed like a completely unnatural separation. I remember at school, I was visiting my school friend's grandmother who had stayed in Eastern Germany in East Germany, because you were allowed to do visits there if you had family. So I once went into Eastern Germany. Germany in 1985, I think it was. And it was such an incredible experience how different life was there, you know, under the communist regime post-45 to where we grew up. And I also remember vividly this feeling of freedom when I went back over the border into West Germany and how lucky I

was in a way not have been brought up in Eastern Germany. It all felt very claustrophobic and serious and dark and it smelled of brown coal, which was the material they were using for heating. And yeah, it was a kind of depressing place, I must admit. But I was grateful for the experience. So when all these events unfolded in 89, so unexpectedly, so quickly and peacefully, it was an absolutely incredible change and experience.

And to then be here in England, to see it sort of from the distance, It was particularly awkward, I must say. But on the other hand, also very revealing, revealing in the sense of how, well, the whole sort of sentiment after World War II were still very much alive between the winners and the losers of the war, the suspicion towards Germany, the fear of it becoming a power again, because it had, of course, economically done very well after the war, possibly better than England, Great Britain. And so these kind of feelings really came out of people's bellies. You know, it was real kind of gut reactions I was feeling from people. And that was quite remarkable, I must say, yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating.

What other cultural differences did you notice when you moved here? I remember what I loved about West Berlin was this kind of sense of individualism. And that I grew up in a very provincial town in Germany, where it mattered who your parents were, what social status they had, what you were wearing in terms of clothes, these sort of external insignificant things. And then I moved to West Berlin,

which was quite a hip, experimental, artistic place where none of that was important anymore. And I love that about Berlin, that you really just counted as an individual and how you made the most of your time there. And I love that kind of thing. international crowd in London and lots of different religions and cultures living next to each other, which I hadn't experienced in Germany at all. I mean, now in Germany, you know, it's a much more

international societal setup than it was when I left it in the 90s, in the late 80s, 90s. And that is always something I thrived on. And in a way that's, I mean, Cambridge is not as diverse as London is, but it is incredibly international because of the university, of course, and that's also something I really enjoy. So it's perhaps not surprise I stayed here once I moved here. Yeah, so you came over for the art gallery partnership. And then I believe you were in the music industry for a long time, and now you are tour guiding. So tell me a little bit about this transition. That's right. So when I moved to London and worked in the gallery, I hadn't been to university and at some point I realized I was quite keen to do a course in art history and I wanted to

stay in London also because in those days the bachelor degree was a much shorter degree than the first degree in Germany so only after three years you would get to get a degree in Germany and you know you tend to be a sort of forever student really and I thought okay I enroll in London and do it and then carry on with gallery work but I realized actually I was much more interested in history then art history in the end and sort of moved into history and was planning to become an academic and that's why I went to Cambridge

for a master's after doing art history in London in history and then stayed on in Cambridge for a PhD in history and the subject of my PhD was a musical one pretty coincidentally in a way I mean I've always loved music and I'm an amateur musician but I was looking at the revival

of old church music in the Victorian period in England as a kind of marker of secularization. And so there was a kind of musical subject there I was exploring. And with that, the wonderful, wonderful English tradition of cathedral music, which, you know, has existed since the Middle Ages in this country. And from that, I then got into the music industry because I decided, I did not to become an academic in the end. I'm much more an all-rounder person. That's probably my career path is already revealing.

And by pure chance, I stumbled across a music agency is based in Cambridge that managed classical musicians. And I applied for a job there after handing in my PhD, and I got it. And that was my main career, really, if I look back, for a good 20 years until COVID struck. That's when my next chance. occurred because, you know, the music industry, of course, suffered slightly in the lockdowns.

Basically, you know, all we did for several months was just take in cancellations of concerts. Our musicians were stranded all over the world with the lockdowns happening in various countries. And to top it all, our company, unfortunately, had to fold, had to go into liquidation because we had no income from one day to the next. I'm talking the period March 2020 to May 2020. And so we had to make everybody redundant and closer the agency, which was quite a traumatic experience, I must admit. Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear that COVID had that impact.

And like the lockdowns had that impact on music. It's interesting that you pivoted into travel, which is also one of the biggest sectors that was affected by COVID. Is this because you could do walking tours outside? Or how did this even come about? So I then took a break and kind of went deep and deep inside myself to sort of work out who I was really and what I wanted to do with the sort of next section of my life,

sort of having really put a line under my career as a music agent. And that's quite interesting when you do that, when you kind of remove yourself from, you know, this day-to-day occupation that we're all busying ourselves with. And I became a little bit sort of throwing caution to the wind type person and thought, let's just see what comes my way, really. That's the kind of attitude I adopted. I had a bit of money saved, so I wasn't in a very, very tight spot.

And then I stumbled across this company called Footprints that were doing tours in Cambridge. and they were looking for new guides. And I immediately felt this is something right up my street. And in a way, a chance for me to sort of go back to my education, my history skills. And so I talked to the founder, Fred, a really nice guy. And he immediately sort of sensed enthusiasm on my side. And then he had me do the test.

of the sort of historical information about Cambridge, and then I did a test tour, and then they hired me. I really want to dive deep into the history, but before we go there, you mentioned something about taking time out when the agency had folded before you were going to jump into something else. I really love the fact that you were really mindful about your next steps. I'm just curious, were there any questions you asked yourself?

What sort of path did that look like? Yeah, I did. ask questions and I think when you do a job, especially a job you get quite involved and identify with for a long time, it does become an identity and I lost that identity and I really had to kind of question who I actually am without this kind of machinery of an office or a work or a job behind me with all the skills and network and sort of sense of purpose you've built up during that time. So to lose all of that, I felt lost, actually, for a while.

Not just worried about where my next pounds would come from or income would come from, not in that sense at all, but really in terms of who I was and what I identified with. And especially in a place like Cambridge where you encounter an incredible amount of highly skilled people. Maybe it felt even particularly poignant. And to be honest, I did a lot of yoga during that time. when I wasn't working every day because I don't know if you're a yogi, but it does really create a sort of sense of worse,

no matter what you do, who you are, where you come from, what social status you have, this is all inside you. And that really helped me incredibly doing that every day in terms of just being happy, not being anything. You want to sort of put it that way. And that eventually, and this was a process, you know, it took me probably six months or so, created a real sense of freedom as to what I wanted to do next and a real sense of use this opportunity while I still have all my senses, while I still very fit and young and open to just see what else is out there that I can do and where, of course, I can use some of my experiences and professional know-how all so-for. And the tours came my way. Then also I'm working part-time as a German language teacher came my way.

And my third occupation at the moment, which I also absolutely love is I'm an archivist. I think that's probably the best description for some retired Cambridge academics where I go to the house and I sort out all their papers or their lives work basically and sort of prepare it. either for publication or just to sort it, you know, to put order into it, and also puts me in touch with, you know, some really interesting people. For example, I'm looking after the work output of a 99 and a half-year-old medical professor here in Cambridge, a pediatrician, and he's also a poet and a writer and a draftsman, and I'm going through all his archive.

And at the moment, we're publishing some of his writings. And I have the most amazing conversations with him, really, because, you know, he has lived for a long time. Has all his wits together still. It's really fascinating. And I'm very grateful for these encounters here in Cambridge. Wow. So your passions have weaved together in a few different ways. I'm curious, like, what are some of the questions that you asked yourself together?

get you on this path to this next phase of life? There were some practical ones. I didn't want to sit in front of a computer anymore so much. I felt I wanted to do something a bit more outdoorsy. I had bought myself a horse because I used to be a horsewoman in my youth in Germany and I wanted to sort of restart that here. And I felt like I'd done that enough. I'd done enough of this sitting in an office all day I wanted to just to do something that didn't bind me to a desk all day

that there was one requirement and the other one was just carrying on meeting people because I love meeting people and of course in the music world going all over the world for concerts and so forth I had a lot of that and I enjoyed that aspect of it a lot

so here now in Cambridge with the tours these people come here, so to speak, I don't have to go anywhere anymore and have this really interesting discussions and encounters with people. And yeah, the other questions, as I said, that I asked myself, were really about identity and what makes a person, what makes you feel worth something. Is it really professional excellence or success in whichever way you define it? Or is it as a good mother I have three children or is it looking after people

I have an elderly mother in Germany who needs a lot of help where is my worth or is it not something you can measure anyway in the end it was really this yoga meditation breathing and just accepting

myself every day as it was not in terms of what I was doing and who I was helping and if I was making myself useful but just by being and that is such an ancient wisdom that you can learn from meditation and doing yoga and I'm really incredibly grateful for that and I don't know perhaps I could have done therapy or something but it was a sort of form of therapy I was doing myself I guess that really

liberated me from these sort of external measurement of success and worth and with the guidance of these really remarkable different yoga teachers that I used. Of course, a lot of it was actually online during the lockdowns, but the local yoga studio immediately offered online classes so that the yoga teacher would just be in the studio by him or herself, but then they would film it live, and so you would bring it into your home, so that was possible during lockdown.

And that sort of very simple wisdom of enjoying every life, every day and not thinking about yesterday, not thinking about tomorrow. And that you really, it's like a practice. You have to learn it in a way. To sort of just concentrate on your yoga practice that moment was really something I found very helpful and enjoyed and taught me so much about just, well, not taking your life to seriously, yourself to seriously and take every day as it comes and be not worried about things so much.

Yeah, be present. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening. Part two of our conversation is all about the experiences you need to have when you are visiting Cambridge, England. Follow live without borders so you don't miss it. Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use

so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarah micotel.com slash blank no more.