An ordinary life

 As many of you know, J and I ended up buying a huge old stone farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in the Ariège, at 500 metres altitude in the Pyrenean foothills. It wasn't a ruin but it did need renovation to turn it into the maison d'hôtes that was part of our plan ... and the 2 year renovation project turned into 4 years of hard, 14 hour a day graft. Days off and days out were few and far between - to bring in some much needed funds I also worked as a massage practitioner at a nearby yoga centre and had a good number of counselling clients too. I wrote about this period in a blog, ironically entitled Slow Living in the French Pyrenees. 

Renovation finally finished, we opened for business ... and immediately found ourselves fully booked from April to October, every year. For several years I cooked for guests 4 or 5 times a week - and here in France that means not just cooking, but hosting and eating with the guests. We had some fab multicultural, multilingual evenings, and were often still around the table at midnight - which is fine if you don't have to get up at 6h30 to prep breakfast! Winters were spent working on the house and garden and trying to grab a few weeks in France.

So long story short, life in the Pyrénées became a repetition of life in North Norfolk. Obviously feeling that 12 hour days weren't enough, in the run up to Brexit I became heavily involved in 2 advocacy groups that were fighting for the British in Europe to retain our rights, and ended up working with (and sometimes against) the embassy in Paris, the UK Foreign Office, the French Ministry of the Interior and the European Commission, often flying off for meetings, to give evidence to a parliamentary committee here or there, to organise mass lobbies and to be present at the many marches. Towards and after the time of Brexit itself this turned into effectively a full time (but mostly unpaid) job, working with lawyers to decipher the Withdrawal Agreement, writing guides that would help ordinary people find their way through it and dealing with endless questions.

It finally took Covid, and the confinement that grounded me and closed down our hospitality business in 2020, to bring me to my senses. I realised that I'd lost any real sense of myself in all the busy-ness over the previous 22 years and that something needed to give before I did. We started to prepare our lovely farmhouse to go on the market, which it did in April 2021. I'd assumed it would take many years to sell, but we had an offer within a couple of days from a couple who hadn't even seen it in person because of Covid restrictions in their country. And once again the madness set in, most of a houseful of possessions to let go of and no real idea where to live. A strange, synchronistic event brought me to stay in Homps - which I'd never heard of - and as soon as I arrived I knew the Minervois was where I was going to live, almost as if I had no choice because it spoke to me so clearly.

J didn't have any other ideas of what he wanted to do so he and I arrived in Siran in October 2021. I desperately needed space and time to find out who I really am now, at this point in my life, after over two decades of filling every hour and week and month with activity but losing myself in the process ... and at the same time I needed to connect, with people who weren't transient guests in my home but were part of a local community that I too could become a part of. I've been lucky to connect with some fabulous people here and 'here' feels so much like home.

Doing a life review

I somewhat glibly put 'doing a life review' on my 70forseventy list, without realising quite what a big and transformative process it would turn out to be. Through reflecting and writing (and I've written an awful lot more than has appeared in this blog!) I've been able to stand back and see my journey so far - and the patterns that have been a part of it - as a whole, not just as a series of linked or unlinked events, and it's already changed and clarified how I think and feel about myself and how I want to live my life from here on. What I've done and what I've experienced so far in my life feels to me to be extraordinary - now it's time to live an ordinary, simple life.

The process, and the personal events of the last two years, also helped me to clarify what I was already aware of, that the relationship between J and I (which had always been 'unusual') had actually run its course a long time ago. I have been so busy with everything that I simply didn't see it ... or looked at another way, the busyness that I created and bought into stopped me having to acknowledge that we are quite different people and that sadly he has lifelong issues that have left him effectively unable to have a genuine relationship or friendship. Real life circumstances now make it very difficult to physically split but I (and now he) have acknowledged our separation and we're trying to find a way to live separately while sharing the same house - fortunately big enough for him to have 3 rooms of his own - so that I am now happily properly single again, albeit with baggage! At the same time I'm letting go of holding the responsibility for his recovery and his happiness (or lack of it) that I realised I'd carried since almost the day we met, and it feels as though I'm shedding a lead mantle.

And once again in the way of synchronicity that has a habit of showing you opportunities just when you're ready for them, I was presented with the chance to take some energy medicine courses based on the Q'ero shamanistic tradition but enhanced with ideas from modern neuroscience and quantum physics. It's exactly what I need to help me envision the next part of my life both on an inner and an outer level, and has helped me to see that my 70forseventy list is not just a bit of fun (though it is that too!) but also a powerful setting of intention ... because without intention nothing much changes.