Living my best life!

Pinch me!

“Do you like pina-coladas and getting caught in the rain?” one of the pop songs that I grew up with in the 1970’s rang true last week when Darling and I were caught in a deluge whilst cycling home from Sunday evening supper with our family.

We were wetter than wet, right through our underwear!  We cycled as fast as we could on our one-speed-only oumafiets, rain pelting down on us, stinging our eyes but what FUN!!!  

We laughed through it all because by that stage there was no escaping the saturation that we observed a few other cyclists trying to avoid by stopping under trees en-route.  For us, we’d passed that point of rescue and so we laughed in the face of it all, thankful that it was on a very hot summer’s sunday evening and not mid-winter; thankful that we were in it together; thankful that the rain had come to relieve us from the heatwave; thankful that we had a dry, cozy home to get back to; thankful that even in our 50’s we were finally living the line of the pop song “Escape” penned by Robert Holmes back in 1979! 

So, pinch me indeed!  Not only from the antics of yesterday evening, but for the life that I am living, something that I had only ever dreamed about and which is now becoming a reality! 

Scroll back 50-odd years and I imagine that a little farm girl from the hills of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, South Africa might have lain on her back on the grass of a hot summer’s afternoon, studying the cloud shapes that rolled across the blue sky and over the mountain to the west and wondered and dreamed about a world far away across the seas and what those sort of people were like and how they lived…

Dreams do become reality, sometimes by chance/karma/accident but mostly by taking one scary first step into the unknown and laughing in the face of anything and everything that tries to deter one.  In our case, I’m thankful for the faith that gives us the courage to embark on what most see as a reckless, hair-brained, irresponsible caper… so be it!

Added to the “dream” always requires a little temperance to start… Right now we are living in a limbo that is the packing up of a home: boxes and packaging materials everywhere and some sort of organised chaos as we slowly dismantle our wonderful life of the past three years!  It is nothing short of remarkable what one collects and keeps for “just in case” moments and so the moving requires a brutal reality check of what is truly valuable and important. I find myself making a multitude of promises to myself of what I will NOT do next time!

Moving our worldly goods into a storage container is new to us as we have usually moved from one home directly into the new home. This is something of a private joke between us as we wonder why people store things that are seldom missed and virtually never sought out again – it will be more than interesting to evaluate what we have actually missed on our return…

The frustrating part is that so much of the packing can only really be done in the last two days and so we stumble around our memories and skip towards our dream!