I don’t remember much about the drive south to Tassie, after all it was 11 years, a complete overhaul of a rundown farm, a career change, a baby and everything in between and after ago, except for the feeling that is, of being almost light-headed with excitement and disbelief that this moment had come. We were at last on the road less traveled enroute to our new life, as the outer limits of greater Sydney disappeared in our rear view mirror, not for a weekend getaway to escape the life we lead there but for good, and so too the weight of all we’d bound ourselves to in that life and the burden that comes with knowing you are wasting what precious time you have on this earth, being unhappy. It felt like a jolt awake, like we were all of a sudden really living, or about to be, and we couldn’t have been more right, or more wrong. This burgeoning new, “ideal” life we’d imagined for ourselves into being, would lump us with a weight all it’s own and learning how to carry it and appreciate it for what it would teach you, was the real answer to the question we’d been asking, that many people ask, is a happier and more meaningful life waiting for us in a small farmhouse in the country?
Life was about to get a whole lot more varied and we’d soon be thinking, and doing, in ways we never had before and while Sydney had had it’s challenges, it seemed for all our hard work and stress, we had nothing to show for it, nothing real. Money and convenience, the ability to eat out at good restaurants whenever we wanted and buy expensive clothes, live in the thick of it all in tiny spaces, was fun, for a while but it always felt empty and soon it wasn’t even that fun, nor did it feel like it countered what you put yourself through to maintain it. It wasn’t how either of us had grown up and at our core we were unfulfilled and it was the absence of fulfilment which was fuelling us forward, taking us to the bottom of the world in search of it. In search of the sides of ourselves we’d largely ignored, and had grown louder and louder since we’d found eachother, as if in doing so we’d merged our discontent and it was two fold and in the same vein, our passions, and they too would no longer be satisfied with daydreaming and weekend jaunts to be voyeurs of other people’s choices to live differently.
We had to jump in the deep end and learn to swim, or sink…….and we’d never even considered the latter.
We had met in Sydney, the most formative home of my adult life, and until my ten years in Tasmania at Little Oak, it was the longest I had ever lived anywhere, but for Hugo it was the only home he could ever remember having.
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