The last few months have swept past. In many ways they feel like the end of an era for me — a closing of doors — while the sun is streaming through some newly opened windows. I am at my own personal sliding doors moment. I glance one way, and then the other, and I know that, right now these two paths diverge, and create very different possible outcomes for me.
I have always felt that life has a measure of fate. It’s the detail that we create and manifest through choices and perspectives; but the journey will take us whichever way we are meant to go, no matter how much we avoid and resist it. Eventually we have to let go. And trust.
Last year, in August, I went to see a psychic. She had been highly recommended to me by various friends and happened to be in Ubud, Bali at the same time I was.
I wanted to get some insight into my business. I was thinking about stopping my 1:1 mentoring and instead having a digital product biz. We sat down at the little table outside her apartment and she asked me what I wanted to know about. Then I shuffled the cards, so my energy could weave its way into the reading. She turned over the first 3 cards. You’re not pregnant are you?
I laughed at the absurdity and replied with a firm no. She smiled, and I shuffled again. Well, kids are most definitely in your future.
We hardly touched on the questions I had about my business. Card after card after card showed: house, marriage, kids, kids, house, marriage. My business questions were answered with an assurance that my work would flourish and come into its capacity when I have dirty-fingered chubby little ones of my own. The words that remained strongest in my memory were these:
When you choose to see the magic in the mundane, you will find your destiny.
I left that reading feeling confused, shaken, overwhelmed and a little bit sad. This was not part of my master plan. Not that I even had a master plan. It is just that domestic bliss didn’t really factor into my life.
I am independent woman, with the world at her feet. I am healthy, educated, financially secure, well-traveled, intelligent, with a voracious appetite for tasting every nook and crevice of life. I have the freedom of choice.
I decided to forget about the reading. I enjoy visiting psychics and palm readers, as much as I enjoy receiving massages and mentoring. They help me see life from a different perspective, and open areas up in myself, that might otherwise be closed. I know that their words, however, cannot define me. Only I can do that.
Now, fourteen months later, I am observing real, tangible differences in my life. I am sitting under the crisp, white sheets of a hotel room in northern Thailand, enjoying a delicious week to myself, while my boyfriend is volunteering with elephants in the jungle. I have space and time to just think.
For many years I chose an untethered, impulsive, and freedom-fueled life. Yet, recently, other desires have been creeping in.
Recently, I noticed the charm of travel start to fade. My patience for the ignorance of other travelers has worn thin. My frustration with how tourism is changing the integrity of tribal cultures is high. My curiosity about other people and places and ways of life has been replaced with a sense that I have absorbed all that I need to know, for now. That instead, it’s time to create something, and make a difference in my own world, with all the experiences and insights I have collected.
After twelve years of gallivanting across every edge of our beautiful earth, I have had enough. I am craving stillness and nesting. I am at a point where travel has become more tedious than exciting; it no longer fills my heart and ignites my spirit the way it used to, and instead I keep fantasising on how I want to decorate my home. Which brings me to my sliding doors moment, where I find myself right now. And I keep hearing those words.
When you choose to see the magic in the mundane, you will find your destiny.
I have always had this adventurous vision of myself: me all grown up and getting old; living in some peculiar brick-walled apartment in Berlin or London, or maybe even New York. If New York, I would have married some random person, whom I never saw, for the visa, just because I like doing things that people say are too hard, or impossible. I would be wise and worldly and extravagantly weird; forever single; and yet always in some deeply emotional love affair. A traveling, minimalistic, eccentric, cat-lady, with an eclectic collection of treasures from all around the world.
There is a danger of this kind of life: the risk that you get so comfortable in your ways that you become rigid and make it harder to leave space for the richness that the messy interlacing of other lives bring.
Yet, I kind of mourn for her; that woman I could become.
At the same time I wonder if, by actively avoiding having a home and family, I am missing out on an adventure greater than I can ever imagine. One that is an enormously enriching life experience, and ultimately part of my destiny.
As fate has it, right now, I am sliding into a different kind of world than I had ever imagined for myself.
At the end of this year I am moving to small town, in a country I have barely spent a week in, with a man I dearly love. He is sweet and sincere; grounded and reliable; honest and kind. Our conversations have turned into gently-laid plans: we are looking for a house to buy, preferably from a cute little old granny with a big garden and a white picket fence. There’ll be chickens, and dog, and a goat. Maybe babies.
Even though, not so long ago, I said no thank you, not for me.
The adventurous free-spirit in me is discovering a whole new playing ground.
When you choose to see the magic in the mundane, you will find your destiny.
