Life Lessons

Any major life change is almost guaranteed to leave its mark on you and teach you things you will remember long after you have moved on with your life. This process of shedding our old life has already taught me a few.

1. We don’t need so many things!!!

Now I have never considered myself very materialistic and definitely am not a mindless consumer. But somehow in the eleven years since I arrived home from living in Brisbane with a suitcase full of clothes and really not much else we had managed to fill our large three bedroom house with a lot of possessions. A large amount of them we had never even purchased, things gifted or handed on to us in the early stages of our relationship that for some reason or other we had kept. I think the act of having to sort through, sell, donate and choose which things we really wanted to store until we settle down again has changed my attitude to life forever. No I am not so scarred that I will never shop again! I have in fact quite enjoyed a bit of shopping lately for little bits and pieces for the bus. But I do shop differently now, I am always mindful that I would rather a few nice things that I really enjoy having in our space then a lot of things that I don’t enjoy quite so much. I am also hoping that aiming for a lack of clutter will make living in a confined space much more pleasurable.

2. I have some amazing people in my life.

It is very easy sometimes to forget how truly blessed you are. The process of saying goodbye to everyone is reminding me how lucky I am. It makes me a little sad at times that I won’t be able to just turn up on these people’s doorsteps anymore, but I have faith that our relationships will survive the distance. And perhaps I will cherish them a little bit more because they are not so close at hand.

3. My husband and I make a great team.

This is more of a lesson reaffirmed, something we lost sight of in the last few years while we were busy becoming a family. Once we have a joint goal to work towards we are both very determined and happy working hard towards it. Next week will be a year since we first talked about running away in a bus, the minute we had the conversation I knew it was a life changing moment and that this was not a dream that would fizzle or change. At times it has felt like it is taking forever to get to the point where we need to be to go travelling, but I look at how much we have achieved in just a year and I marvel at how powerful we are when we are both 100% committed to the same goal. I think perhaps that this is one of the biggest things that was missing from our life and led to us making these changes. And I am full of plans now for us to work towards during and after this next stage of our lives.

4. A house is not home.

When we were trying to sell our house I was always a little sad at the thought of leaving it behind. This was our first home, we brought with having a family in mind and we had loved it from the minute we first saw it right up until we walked out the front door for the last time. But funnily enough I do not miss it at all, yes I still have lots of good memories from living there and always will, but once we are no longer living in the house it really isn’t anything more than bricks, wood and glass. As cliché as it is, home is wherever the people I love most are. I now know for sure that is true, even when it’s a bus or someone else’s house, as long as the three of us are together I am home.

I’m sure that these are just the first of many lessons this new life will teach me, I truly hope I can keep being mindful enough to remember them. Now the day we get the bus back from its alterations is getting incredibly close and will be closely followed by leaving day. It is all a little bit hard to believe that it is actually going to happen. I am eager and excited to see what bus life will be like, I can also feel a little bit of fear in the background as it is all such an unknown, but I think that is human and probably healthy.