Choose Less Live More
Decisions about finances, about where we wanted to live, where we could travel, what work we wanted to do, these were all made before we left our home in Sooke and moved into the Coffee House. That didn't mean we were stuck with those decisions, or that situations wouldn't change and we would wonder what to do next. We were choosing less to live more. On the road, we had space for new experiences.
Change could be exciting, but change was also like a loud bell ringing overhead. We had to choose how we could jump and where we wanted to land. If we let the noise and the distraction of each move slow us down, the weight of that burden was another thing we had to let go of.
We are always letting go because it's not a one-time execution. The result isn't instant or permanent. We wanted a different life, and here we were living it, but not as we expected. The Coffee House felt too small. At one point we looked at a number of Class A motorhomes in Penticton. We wanted to find property we could build a tiny home on. Every small southern BC town was priced high. We created a website and a mailing list with friends and family the first on the scene. The life was unfolding unexpectedly, and so here we were again letting go. It wasn't stuff that we had held onto for years, it was ideas and expectations of our life less burdened.
We discovered the weight of it all, the decisions, the change, wasn't for us to carry around. We sat and watched the sunset over Skaha Lake and felt the freedom we had. The Coffee House wasn't too small, and so what if it wasn't insulated for a Canadian winter. We had the freedom to go where it was warmer. We could head east in the spring because we would always have Williams Lake to go home to. We all have to choose what we carry with us, and those last days of August were the start of choosing the path we are now on.
Are you carrying a burden that isn't yours to carry? If the weight of a decision is heavy, can you let it go? The hardest decision for us to make was choosing to put distance between our daughter and ourselves. She has her life, and we now have ours. She wanted us to have adventures, to see more, and do more. We didn't lose her, which is the weight we felt. By letting go, we created our own stories to share with her, and with you.
The appeal of the next best thing should help you dig deeper and find out what the real problem is. We didn't need a bigger rig to create space for the life we were living. We had to learn how to live in our Coffee House. We had to learn that we didn’t need more, that we had everything we needed. That’s a lesson we come to every day to learn more about.
This blog post was originally published November 15th, 2018 @http://alifelessburdened.com