The End Of The Year
… and what a year it has been.
As I write these words, I'm sitting comfortably in my corner of the kitchen, eyes straight onto the open garden door.
Lili, bless her, just came down from her nap and is now licking up her whole bowl; took her two minutes to devour her pouch of duck in gravy haha!
It's November and I can’t help but feel into the year so far and all it has brought my way. I’ve grown so much, probably the most one can in a year.
Rewinding back to November 2022 last year, we were embarking on a whole new journey my partner and I: moving out of London where we’d spent the best part of our twenties.
That container really was everything I knew at that point, a home I had come to love.
I can feel my throat tighten slightly as emotion stirs up; I see us back then, packing our whole lives into boxes and driving away to a new place we knew we needed, even if it sounded a little crazy and felt scary.
Both of us knew it was time for a change and we trusted our instincts.
The advantage of moving out of a buzzing capital city such as London is that you get another perspective on what life can be I guess. The chance to afford a bigger housing and a little more privacy is also definitely a plus ahah! Today I'm enjoying waking up in a three floor house with enough garden land to plant more vegetables than I could dream of.
Pfffew, yeah - it was the right move.
Come March 2023 this year we were packing again but this time only two cabin sized bags to fly to Iceland (my home country) where myself, my partner and his family would spend two weeks exploring Reykjavik and the South of Iceland: Gullfoss, Geysir, Thingvellir and the Blue Lagoon – you name it! Truly ashtonishing places, Paradise on Earth to say the least. ( :
It had been some time actually since I visited Iceland at that point; a few years to be exact.
Little did I know that it was of the utmost importance that I got to reconnect the bonds with my family as my father would be diagnosed with pancreas cancer stage 4 on the same day I flew back to Liverpool, 11th of March 2023.
... just writing these words I can feel the heavy and the tender sitting in my body.
Later that month I was back on a one-way flight straight to Reykjavik, on my own this time, which would be the beginning of a few trips back and forth - eventually leading up to my fathers funeral on the Wednesday 17th of May 2023.
Blessuð sé minning hans.
I remember this strange feeling within when looking at his lifeless body in the casket that day, it was a feeling of “yes I already knew this” combined with “sh*t, this is a huge realization right now” - a voice in my head was saying: so this is how it ends.
You get a life, you do things, you have people in it, you create bonds and ties but in the end your body is no longer and this life of yours is no longer.
It was a certain wake up call for me, something was telling me to not waist time living a life that felt average or purposeless. Because in the end, it doesn't matter. You gotta live for you.
I know that my father's soul and fiery spirit lives on and I connect to him often so it’s not the journey of the soul and life after death that I'm talking about here; it’s really the physical life on Earth that we get that I'm referring to.
When I settled back into my routine in England after this, a few drastic measures were taken.
I believe it was a couple of weeks in that I gave my 1 month resignation notice at my corporate recruitment job. On my phone's calendar I can read my notes for Friday 30th of June 2023 "last day as recruiter; beginning of yoga, wellness and fitness facilitator career + music and art and youtube and business and coaching and just everything for me".
Seeing this fills my heart with joy and reminds me of my vision and the fact that i can choose my lifestyle.
Today I get to dive in a little deeper each day into my true self and what I came to do here on Earth.
I feel that I owe it to my father to an extent.
He was my inspiration in life in so many ways, but he helped shape me through his death also.
His legacy will live on in me, my brothers and everyone he touched; for many decades to come.
~
These days I’m reading a delicious and revolutionizing book by Genevieve Rackham called “Sexy Money” and what I love about it is that it goes deep into the silly blockages one can have when it comes to living a happy life, shining as your real most child-like joyful self, yet being determined, focused and absolutely the number one leader and CEO of everything you do.
•‿•
One massive take-away I’ve noted so far halfway through the book is this: sometimes we kind of know what we want but we’re not at all prepared to receive it, step up to it, hold it and trust ourselves with it – and that is the beginning of a very honest but liberating self-love work and mental societal deprogramming.
As I take a sip of my iced coffee and chuck down some quality street for lunch haha, I’ll leave you with this and wish you the most wonderful rest of the year. May it be a gentle yet transformative season for you.
With love,
Helga