Moving On
Jamie and I met when we were teens. I was working at my first job, and Jamie was moving to his first place away from home. It was the recession in the early 80s. We didn’t have much, but we were happy.
We realized we could make a life together, and we started down the road of earning a living however we could and keeping a roof over our heads. Neither of us knew a direction to go in. We went from job to job. We ended up broke and having to move to another province to find work.
We spent most of our married life in Alberta, and the two of us became three when Devon came along in the early 90s. We followed the traditional path of purchasing a home and providing our daughter with a respectable education. When she left the nest, we returned home to Vancouver Island.
We went back to the island for family, plus we felt at peace beside the ocean. I was born and raised in Victoria and spent most of my childhood near Goldstream Provincial Park. Home to me was in the forest among the ferns and the giant trees full of birds. We were coming back with work and life experience, with equity to buy our next home. We started a new chapter as empty nesters.
I hadn’t been looking at the bigger picture, the story I was telling myself about my life. I had simply been packing the burden around with me everywhere we went. It was a mindset that I didn’t have the same earning power that Jamie had. I’d never been driven to upgrade my skills or to choose a career. I happily raised a child and focused on our home life. Fear kept me from creating a living from my words, just as it had kept Jamie from pursuing many of his interests.
We felt the weight of our choices become the burden and never found the joy we dreamed we would have one day because we loved the simple things in life. If simple was not having a mortgage, even though that meant not having a foundation for all that I was attached to, and Jamie was attached to, then the actions we took to not have one would carry us forward. We would have no choice but to discover who we can become.
With attachments gone, and the ideas that blocked us removed, we returned to our original path for happiness. We created A Life Less Burdened. We are free to pursue our passions, free to see the world around us, free to be more active, do more reading, and enjoy simple things again. We are learning how not to have or need what we once did. Every scary moment of this big change is our story, and now that we’ve gotten to the end of June 2018, we plan to take you forward into the next season of A Life Less Burdened. Next week join us for full-time living in The Coffee House.