Shetland Turf
When the World Retreated, They Advanced
The Bold Choice to Leave Everything Behind for Britain's Final Outpost
🏰 The Philosophy of Strategic Advance
While governments locked down and populations retreated into fear, Sarah Kennedy and I made the opposite calculation. We looked at the global chaos and asked: what if this crisis is actually pointing us toward what we've been missing? What if the world's retreat is our opportunity to advance toward authenticity?
The decision to relocate to Fair Isle—Britain's most remote inhabited island, nestled between Orkney and Shetland—wasn't escapism. It was strategic positioning. When everyone else was trying to preserve their old normal, we chose to build a new normal from the ground up, in a place where normal has always meant something completely different.
This wasn't just a geographical move; it was a philosophical gambit. We bet everything on the proposition that simpler and more connected doesn't mean easier—it means more real. And reality, as it turns out, was exactly what the world needed more of in 2020.
📺 The Shetland Catalyst
Inspired by the television series Shetland, we embarked on a journey that would reshape our lives entirely.
Most people watch Shetland for the crime drama. We watched it and saw something else entirely: a way of living that prioritized place over pace, community over connectivity, substance over surface. The fictional Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez lived in a landscape that demanded authenticity—you can't fake your way through island winters or pretend your way past island storms.
But here's what the TV series couldn't show us: the daily reality of choosing difficulty in service of meaning. The series romanticized the isolation; we learned to embrace the challenge. Fiction showed us the possibility; reality taught us the price. And surprisingly, the price was exactly what we'd been hoping to pay.
🐕 The Continental Companion
Our Scottish Terrier, Skyelark, joined us on this adventure—crossing continents in search of something quieter, wilder, and more real. Think about this: a dog born in one country, traveling thousands of miles to reach an island where the sheep outnumber the humans and the weather changes faster than social media trends.
Skyelark embodies the journey's essential truth: adaptation over comfort, exploration over security, authentic experience over manufactured entertainment. While pandemic puppies around the world were learning to live in apartments, Skyelark was learning to read wind patterns, understand tidal schedules, and navigate terrain where every walk is an adventure.
Dogs don't overthink relocation decisions. They go where their pack goes, adapt to new territories, and find joy in whatever landscape they land in. Skyelark taught us that the key to successful advance isn't complex strategy—it's simple commitment and intelligent adaptability.
🧭 The Fair Isle Framework for Bold Moves
Find Inspiration
Let stories show you possibilities you hadn't considered
Define Real
Identify what authenticity actually looks like for you
Use Crisis
Let disruption become your opportunity for reinvention
Advance Boldly
Move toward your vision while others retreat in fear
Our complete story of pandemic relocation, island adaptation, and the discovery that advancing toward uncertainty can be the most strategic move you ever make. This isn't just a travel story—it's a blueprint for how crisis can become opportunity when you're willing to bet everything on authenticity.
⚓ The Wisdom of Strategic Advance
The pandemic taught most people to hunker down, preserve resources, and wait for normal to return. We learned something different: that crisis creates the perfect conditions for reinvention, but only if you're willing to advance toward the uncertainty instead of retreating from it.
Fair Isle didn't offer us safety from the pandemic—it offered us clarity about what mattered. Remote doesn't mean protected; it means focused. Simple doesn't mean easy; it means essential. Connected doesn't mean networked; it means grounded in something real enough to weather any storm.
The journey that reshapes your life entirely isn't the one you take to escape your problems. It's the one you take to discover what you're actually capable of when everything non-essential gets stripped away. Fair Isle was our laboratory for that experiment, and we're still collecting the data.
Continue the Journey
Share your own strategic advance story in the comments below.