A strong dose of Nostalgia...
What am I doing here...
We nestled into bed that night, and for a moment (I’m ashamed to admit,) I felt fearful, fearful of the fact I was unable to see a darn thing, the surroundings were an assault on my senses in contrast to the familiar backdrop of city life.
This was the first time we’d taken a trip to the New Forest, the countryside was still very foreign to me. So used to the hustle and bustle of South London, the street lights, the background noise, the cars whizzing past and sirens in the background.
London was all i’d known..
The sun streamed into our bedroom that morning and it felt like the birds were singing inside the room. The bathroom was painted a seaside blue with white wooden cladding on the walls.
I felt another dose of nostalgia hit me, this time of distant memories from seaside weekends away as a child with my Grandparents, those trips were another welcome break from the fragmented home life I had become accustomed to.
Peaceful Clarity
As the weekend unravelled I felt a similar tangible sense of peace I had experienced as a child in that cottage many years before… Just as the countryside helped me escape from the day to day stress then, it seemed to be giving me the same offering of stillness and peace I must have been subconsciously looking for.
I made a deliberate decision to unplug, which was a rare thing for me back then, my young business was so demanding and seemed to be beating me mentally daily, not a month had gone by where I hadn’t burst into tears from all the stress.
Run down, and living on empty
The never-ending urgent demands were wearing me down. I felt foolish that I hadn’t counted the cost of pushing for explosive growth so quickly.
My business was breaking me, it’s lack of systems and the lack of hands-on support weren’t helping. I was hiring and firing quickly, my staff seemed to come to me with every problem. It wasn’t their fault, I hadn’t had a chance to train them properly.
The truth was… I hadn’t realised how burnt out I was until that weekend. It felt like every-time I turned away from my business, I’d be met with a hefty bill of stress and pain on my return.
But that weekend I didn’t care. My tired spirit was so desperate to just hit pause.
I knew I was at breaking point and needed to give myself the space to think about the future, to think about where we were headed, and to indulge in a little slice of uninterrupted peace.
She was a real life Angel...
Realising this could become my reality.
That weekend we walked through the woods, cycled on an old railway line with my son seated on my handlebars, and enjoyed a cream tea in the summer air balmed with whiffs of Lavender.
I cooked lentils with chickpea couscous, one of my favourites that I hadn’t had time to cook in a long time. We indulged in the cookies the owner left for us.
I Sat for a long period in the orangery, I journaled, read, prayed and my husband and enjoyed a long chat in front of the fire. That weekend felt like oil being poured over my dry bones and spirit.
By the end of the weekend, I realised the Magical Forest had deposited something inside of me that I couldn’t shake. I made the assumption that the deposit was one of the fond memories that would pop into my back pocket…
But little did I know an obvious door was slowly beginning to open, and the only thing that would stop us from walking through it would be a lack of faith and obedience to a path that we were clearly meant to walk on and one that would change our lives forever.
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