This morning, just as I was making a cup of coffee, my phone rang.
It was Nizuo.
"I'm so sorry," she said before I even had a chance to say hello. "I completely forgot I have to fly to Melbourne this week for a Nu Skin event. It's only for two days, but I just realised it clashes with our coffee. Can we move it to later this week?"
"Of course," I said. "No problem at all."
We chatted for another minute or two before hanging up.
It was one of those ordinary phone calls that should have ended there.
But for some reason, it stayed with me.
As I tidied up around the house, I kept thinking about her.
She always seemed to be going somewhere.
Not in a rushed or stressful way.
Just... moving.
Curious, I opened WeChat and started scrolling through her Moments.
Alaska.
Malaysia.
Hokkaido.
Seoul.
Western Australia.
There were airport lounges, quiet cafés, unfamiliar streets, little restaurants, and the occasional photo from a company event. Nothing looked staged. There weren't luxury handbags or business-class selfies. Most of the photos were surprisingly ordinary.
Yet together, they told the story of someone whose life seemed much bigger than the few square kilometres around home.
I smiled to myself.
I'm not really a traveller.
If you asked me to choose between another overseas holiday or a quiet Saturday in Sydney with a good coffee and a wander through a Korean grocery store, I'd probably choose Sydney.
Twice.
So it wasn't the destinations that caught my attention.
It was the freedom.
Somehow, Nizuo had built a life where work could take her to different places instead of tying her to the same desk every day.
For most of my life, I had always thought of work and life as two separate things.
You worked.
Then you took leave.
Then you travelled.
Then you came back and started all over again.
Looking at her photos, I realised she didn't seem to live that way.
Work and life weren't competing with each other.
They simply travelled together.
I put my phone down and went back to folding the laundry.
The washing machine beeped.
The kettle had gone cold.
Everything around me looked exactly the same as it had an hour earlier.
But something, very quietly, had shifted.
Maybe it wasn't the places I was looking at.
Maybe it was the possibilities.