Day one

Today is Day One.

Not metaphorically, literally. The children went back to school this morning after the holidays, the exit is formalised, the chapter is closed. And for the first time in a very long time, the day is mine to fill with whatever I choose.

I chose a watercolour class.

I have been thinking, across many months of uncertainty and waiting and navigating things I had not anticipated, about what comes next. And what has become increasingly clear, is that what comes next will be built from a combination of things I have always cared about: children, family, art, and technology. Woven together with everything I learned across eleven years of building something from nothing.

That clarity did not arrive from thinking harder. It arrived from getting quieter. From the months of slowing down that were forced on me first and then gradually chosen. From paying attention to what kept pulling at me even when everything else was demanding attention.

And on Day One, when I could have done anything, I went to a watercolour class. Because I want my work to have real depth, the kind that comes from actually understanding the thing you are building around rather than approximating it from the outside. And because nothing teaches a founder the depth of a domain like getting into the field and learning firsthand what it requires.

Something happened in the class that I was not expecting.

Halfway through, an idea arrived. Not planned, just the way ideas come when you are doing something with your hands and the analytical part of your mind has stepped back. A specific idea that connected the work I was doing in the class directly to one of the products I have been designing. A possibility I had not seen before, visible now only because I had gotten out there and exposed myself to the thing itself rather than thinking about it from a distance.

I have always believed in serendipity, as the specific name for what happens when you put yourself in proximity to the things you want to build. Serendipity does not find you at your desk, turning an idea over in your head. It finds you in the watercolour class, in the gallery, in the conversation you almost did not have, at the moment when you are paying attention to something other than the problem you have been trying to solve.

Get out there and let serendipity do its work. That is not naivety, it is the most practical creative advice I know.

Ideas, connections, and possibilities that you cannot see from where you are standing become visible the moment you step into the territory you want to build in. Proximity is the strategy, and getting out there is the plan.

After the class I went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Not as a visitor, as a student. I have decided, in this beginning period, to educate myself in the field I am building toward. To look at what has been made, to understand the history and the craft and the conversation that has been happening for centuries before I arrived at the edge of it.

I am a founder. I know what it means to bring depth to a product, and I know that the depth that lasts is not borrowed, not approximated, not assembled quickly to look credible. It is built from genuine understanding, from time spent inside the thing, from the specific knowledge that only comes from having done the work of learning, not just the work of building.

So that is what I am doing. Learning before building. Looking before making. Getting into the field in the most literal sense, in the gallery, in the class, in the places where the thing I want to create already exists in its most developed forms, and absorbing as much as I can before I put anything out into the world.

I am a beginner again today. In the watercolour class, surrounded by people who had been doing this for years, I was the one who did not know how much water to use, how to let the colours bleed into each other, how to trust the paint to do what paint does when you stop trying to control it. I was the least experienced person in the room.

I have been the least experienced person in the room many times. When I arrived in Australia with seven suitcases and no network. When I quit a career I loved to chase an idea. When I became a mother for the first time and discovered that no amount of professional competence prepares you for that particular beginning. Every significant thing I have built started from not knowing enough, and then learning, quickly, from inside the doing rather than from a distance.

What I know now, that I did not know the first time, is that the beginning is the best part, the curiosity is the asset. The hunger to learn in new terrain, against everything that would suggest I should already know what I am doing, is not a weakness to be managed, it is the whole point.

I love this feeling, I have earned the right to love it, and I am leaning into it completely.

I have asked myself many times across the last year: what would I do if I followed my heart?

Today, for the first time in a long time, I felt that I was actually doing it. Not planning to do it, not preparing to do it, doing it!, in a watercolour class on a Monday morning, on my way to a gallery, with an idea that arrived uninvited and sat beside me for the rest of the afternoon.

I feel at peace today, I feel alive, I feel, standing at the beginning of this, the specific excitement of someone who has a wide canvas in front of them and the freedom, finally, to decide what to paint.

I cannot wait to see how this unfolds.

Day One. I am ready.

— Sabrina

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