Let's Be Adventurers

It's brewing ever so mildly and steadily within, but I can feel it picking up strength - this feeling that we're on an adventure, that we've taken bold steps towards a new way of living and opened ourselves up to so many things that were previously off the agenda. It's not huge stuff in the scheme of things, just lifestyle stuff, kid-raising stuff. Gardening, food sourcing, choices about consumption and how we pass our time. Here we can do it, whereas previously it was difficult or impossible. Here we can grow food or buy it from the person who grows it. Here we can step back from that cycle of want/buy/discard/want more. Here we can move away from screens and into the backyard, and spend time together at home rather than having to escape it at every opportunity to outrun the cabin fever of too-small spaces.

Our big step away from what we know has been relatively safe. We didn't sell up and quit jobs and sail off into the unknown. We still own a house in Sydney, we've brought our work with us, friends and family are only an hour and a bit of freeway away.

But yet we took the step. And however small and however safe, it feels like a rollicking great adventure to me, and hopefully the first of many.

So this Saturday, I'm grateful for adventures, big and small. And, as always, grateful for the ones taking the ride with me.

Joining in with Maxabella.

Print purchased here.

Grateful

There's a lot of gratitude swirling around on the blogs I read, it seems, and lots of thoughts on how good a bit of intentional thankfulness can be. I went through a stage once (probably back in my self-help book reading days) when I would write a list of five things I was grateful for each night before going to sleep. It was good for me. Good for keeping things in perspective, good for making me focus on what I had rather than what was missing, and what was working rather than what was not. I've been sneaking glances at the Grateful link thing over at Maxabella loves... for a few months now. And it's a new year, and the topic is 'beginnings', and suddenly it seems apt that I join in.

So here I am, still in the first week of the new year, grateful, oh, so grateful for this new beginning here in this new town. It was a serious slog, and a little bit crazy to try and squeeze the move in two weeks before Christmas after one of the busiest ends of the year ever. But I knew I wanted to be in this house, in this new town, when this new year began. It just made sense.

And having survived the end of that year, I'm just incredibly grateful to be starting this one here, where there's room to run, space to breathe, no need to go anywhere if we don't want to, nature in all its glory in every nook and cranny, and three gorgeous little girls and their lovely dad finding their feet, in this new life, with me.