# 52 Home
My friends Sam, John and I at The Gourmet Picnic in Mount Maunganui. Great food, awesome company - a snapshot of new beginnings.
“What I hope to become at end of this phase is a simpler version of myself. A kinder human, both to others, and less critical of my shortcomings. ”
The house went unconditional a few days ago. Now that it’s almost over, waiting for the settlement is like eating straight from the the Nutella jar. A new jar, you eat it with reckless abandon, but when It’s almost empty, you savour each spoonful. In each scrape, you are hopeful there will be one more, just more one. Pretty soon the house will be gone too.
He was first to go. Next was the house. The last will be my married name. Once the divorce is finalised with a scrawl, who will I be? How much of the old me will remain? It seems with my eagerness to move on, it’s only now that life has finally caught up and I can slowly close that chapter of my story.
Often I talk to people about what this journey has meant for me, and I feel it has been very much about the human connection. In my loneliness I sought to connect, to understand the humanity behind life decisions, to love and lose, and how much control we believe we have over the outcome of those actions. By listening to understand and not just to respond, I have let many people in my life that I otherwise would have just walked past in the street.
Once the house went on the market, I handed my set of keys to our real estate agent. I haven’t been back to the property since. Of course there are details to tidy up, and I will have to return one last time to clean out the last of my ‘things’ from the garage.
It feels cold to call my previous home a ‘property’ - maybe because I haven’t lived there in almost a year and a lot of the emotions that made it a home has since been lost. What once felt like a messy and jaded part of my day-to-day has since evolved into clarity and speckled wisdom. A home is the emotional connection to a place or a situation, and those feelings shapes our memories, happy or otherwise. That house is a snapshot of a part of my life that was both ends of the spectrum, and for me to reminisce just the happy would leave half of the story untold.
In reality, my big reset has reached the point of no return. They say that once you have acquired knowledge, it changes you, even if you choose not to act on it. The more I write, the better I have become organising my thoughts. The more conversations I have, the more expressive I allow myself to be, and slowly peels away filters and forced social graces.
What I hope to become at end of this phase is a simpler version of myself. A kinder human, both to others, and less critical of my shortcomings. Also to be hopeful that the path I choose to travel is now the better one. Clarity comes in the stillness, in the insomnia and the patience. The lesson is that the Universe is always listening. Answers come swift or a complicated maze of emotional baggage, going round and round at the airport carousel.
Home is within us all, and the big reset starts with me. If I want my future to be happy and fulfilling, then I have to decide that for myself, and live it!