"Place" influences our thinking, whether we are aware of its potency or not. That’s why, on one extreme, a change of scene can be a powerful renewal experience and, on the other, it seems to deepen the rut we live in.

Any break in everyday routine—from a stolen hour to weeks of vacationing—offers a chance to "veg out ", and it also provides opportunities for a fresh look at personal priorities.

PLACE: Longbeach—British Columbia’s Pacific Rim National Park

Some find the greatest benefit is derived from visiting a new location or experiencing something as different from the familiar as possible. Others thrive on returning to a beloved spot to spark creativity. We can alternate approaches depending on our travel opportunities and the thinking to be done. Often it’s not where we go, but our attitude towards the change and, therefore, how differently we act and react while we’re away. When you leave home, do you drag your rut with you, reproducing all your likes and dislikes at the new location? Or do you deliberately take advantage of the chance to live differently?

Too many times, we feel a specific change of location is good for us, but we are not conscious of how and why this ideal urban, rural or natural environment stirs us. Without this self knowledge, how can we can turn the boost to our advantage? The more we understand how "place " influences our thinking and decision making, the better able we are to set the stage for fresh thoughts and clear analysis when we need our forward thinking to be most effective.

My regular trips to British Columbia’s Pacific Rim National Park, on the isolated west coast of Vancouver Island, are a return to a thinking spot that has cleared and refocused my thoughts since university days. For me, strategic forward thinking and personal priorities become clearer at natural locations with which I’ve had long-term relationships. Seeing the same settings through the passage of time, helps me measure my progress and expands my horizons even further.

Kilometers of seemingly unchanged hard-packed, white sand, accented with black volcanic out-croppings, give this wind-swept beach an invigorating other-worldly feeling. The continuous pounding surf is so different from the city sounds that normally surround me that I can distance myself from my everyday life. Over the decades, each return to this edge-of-the-world landscape has put my life—the good, the bad and the ugly—in perspective and peeled away the incomplete and disrupted thinking that is a by-product of today’s fragmented fast-lane urban lifestyles.

Yet, this natural setting is only part of "place." Revisiting the remote communities of Ucluelet and Tofino at either end of Pacific Rim National Park helps me evaluate my reaction to societal change. Increasing numbers of tourists and new residents are pouring into these towns from across the country and around the world. The contrast between protected natural environments and continuous human development helps me evaluate where and how I want to live over the decades ahead.

It’s a challenge to find the energy and time to leap outside our everyday life to plan for a future that seems more difficult to pin down each year. Since this is a first-time-in-history period when people live longer, healthier lives than ever before, few have lived out a decades-long "unretirement" comparable to the extension of life that Canadians have on their horizons. The conscious effort required to individually break new ground, instead of following the well-trodden, end-of-life retirement path of our parents and grandparents, has led many to feel procrastination is the best approach.

Career building, at any stage of life, increasingly involves creating strategies in uncharted, continually-changing territory.

But doing nothing is the same as moving backwards in this multi-media, information-saturated world.

In every sector, lifestyle marketing campaigns based on stereotypes of aging and retirement misdirect and distract us when we think about everything from shopping and home buying to career and future planning. Everyone is under "age" attack. for instance, today’s youth (now defined as under 30) have been manipulated into craving "must haves" dictated by advertising and into feeling dissatisfied with what they have and who they are. You may tut tut others drawn into this artificial value system, but are you immune to the same false influences intent on making you feel deficient if you don’t have the latest and hottest possessions and lifestyle trimmings?

If you are overwhelmed by the pressures of planning for tomorrow while you’re trying to get through today, the first step might be discovering your definition of "place." Discover that somewhere to break away even if you don't leave town. A visit to a new neighbourhood or a day without your cell phone may be the beginning of your achievement of valuable mental space in which to explore what really matters to you.