Seeing With New Eyes

When I moved to Canada in 2007, people in the UK asked me where I planned to go on holiday now. The answer was simple. Nowhere. I had just moved to one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Canada was the holiday. Every road trip felt like an adventure. Every mountain felt like new territory. Every part of my day-to-day life had the energy of travel without the need for a suitcase. I had not settled down. I had simply relocated to somewhere that made me feel more alive.

The first decade in Canada felt like an extended version of the discovery I first experienced as a kid on ski trips, but stretched out over years instead of a week. I had never lived around proper mountains before. I had never had nature on my doorstep in this way. I had never felt so connected to a landscape. It was like all the travelling I had done before had been leading me here, even if I did not know it at the time. The country felt huge, raw, unfiltered and exciting. Living in a place like British Columbia is a constant reminder that scale matters. Space matters. Silence matters. Those things change you, whether you notice or not.

For a long time, I did not feel the need to fly anywhere. Canada gave me everything I needed. I explored the province, the country and the coast. I snowboarded some of the best mountains on the planet. I carried a camera everywhere, slowly building a relationship with photography that ran alongside design in a way that eventually started shaping how I saw the world. Travel had become internal as much as external. I might not have left the country, but I never stopped discovering.

In 2017 I went back to the UK for a cousin’s wedding. It was the first time I had returned in years. When my dad dropped me at the station, he said, “Don’t leave it another ten years before you come back. Your mum might not be here.” He was right. My mum had been dealing with health issues for a long time and age was catching up with all of us. That sentence stayed with me. Not as guilt, but as a quiet truth about time, distance and the reality of living far from where you grew up. The UK was no longer home, but my parents were still there, and that changed the weight of distance completely.

Two years later, in 2019, two things happened that shifted the direction of my life again. My marriage ended and I went to OFFF in Barcelona. These events were not linked, but together they marked the start of another chapter. OFFF was the first design conference I had been to in years and it gave me something I was not expecting. A sense of creative possibility I had forgotten about. Ben Johnston talked about filling sketchbooks just by walking through the city. Within a day of being in Barcelona he had already taken hundreds of photos and soaked up shapes, colours and textures simply by paying attention. That hit me hard. It reminded me that inspiration does not come from screens. It comes from the world itself, from wandering, from allowing the unexpected to find you.

Then Covid hit. The whole world stopped moving. Borders closed, planes emptied and travel became something nobody even considered. I had no plans to go back to the UK. My mum’s death was a surprise and when it happened, everything shifted. Dual nationality meant I could still legally fly, so I booked a flight and found myself on the strangest journey of my life. I didn’t just have a row to myself. I had an entire section of the plane. It felt surreal, quiet, suspended. When I landed, it wasn’t for the country. It was for my dad. In moments like that, place becomes irrelevant and people become everything.

Once the world opened again, travel became meaningful in a different way. Not the youthful freedom of my twenties, not the wide-eyed discovery of my first years in Canada, but something more intentional. Something grounded. Something done with purpose, not impulse. Lou and I travelled together and those trips reshaped how I saw the world. Japan, Morocco, Malta, Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark. Every place gave me something different. A new perspective. A new memory. A new sense of scale or culture or history. And every time I flew back to the UK, it was never for the country itself. It was to see Lou and to see my dad. Once I had made the effort to cross the Atlantic, I always made the most of being in Europe, escaping to places that offered something richer than nostalgia.

At this stage in my life, travel is not about wanting to escape anything. It is about wanting to understand more. It is about learning from cultures that do things differently. It is about seeing design in the wild. Typography on a street sign in Tokyo. Patterns in the tiles of a Moroccan riad. Colour palettes in the streets of Valletta. Minimalism in Copenhagen. Rhythm in Paris. Travel now feeds my creativity in a way that scrolling never will. The internet can show you the things you already like. Travel shows you the things you did not know existed.

The contrast is stark. Algorithms narrow your world. Movement expands it. And as I have grown older, I have realised that inspiration hits harder when you are not chasing it. When you look up instead of down. When you wander instead of search. When you experience things without needing them to become something. That is when the best ideas arrive. When you are simply present.

Travel in my twenties taught me who I might become.
Travel in my forties taught me who I actually am.
And travel now reminds me to keep paying attention.
I do not travel to find myself anymore.
I travel to keep seeing.