Sometimes you envision a person – your future partner, your perfect job, your new home so clearly that you can describe him/her/it in absolute detail. But life gives you solutions and gifts and your dreams, if:
(a) you wait patiently with positive intensions, believing in what the future holds;
(b) your perfect person, job, etc. may materialize in a completely different form.
I spent the first four weeks in Marbella on the bus to take me to an interview, to the supermarket, or to the beach: endless waiting, in the late summer heat, followed by endless walking along the narrow path by the side of the dangerous main road. I arrived at interviews under-dressed (having given away most of my belongings in San Diego) and hot and sweaty, but miraculously, within 3 weeks I’d been offered four jobs, so that within a few weeks I had to find a cheap and cheerful car and a place to live. Three months later, I am working as a copywriter for a resort company and am making a fraction of what I earned in San Diego, but there’s less stress. On weekdays, I fly out of the office door at 6pm sharp and drive home along the coast road lit by a different sunset each evening.
Almost everything has changed: this part of Spain is soulful and wild. It’s not a place for a vegetarian (like me) and health foods are hard to find. Service is bad, and everything is closed on a Sunday. I hardly watch TV because I don’t have cable, so it’s either the German news channel or Spanish quiz shows, or the occasional good movie badly dubbed into Spanish. I spent September evenings walking on the beach, and having $5 dinners at the little fried fish bars “chiringuitos”. Now it’s unusually cold and rainy, and it gets lonely at times, so I get in the car and explore places in southern Spain like Ronda, which is one of the most magical places I have ever been to, or Tarifa, one of my favourite places and the world’s windsurfing capital, where the Atlantic Ocean is dark blue and turquoise and the sand is almost white, a hangout for hippy bohemians and surfers.
Looking back over the last 10 months and I can see that 2003 was a year when I really lived. I’ve finally lost a bit of weight and my feet are back on European soil, I’m back to my roots. All I know is that the bigger the risk, the bigger the payback, and unless you get up and out and make positive changes to your life, it will most probably not change. You have to be the catalyst, the believer, without knowing the outcome. Trust in people, use your instincts, do your best to make things happen but don’t force things; for me it has proven true that when you are on the right path, things fall into place and that signs and people who you barely know can show you the way. When it speaks out, ignore the anxious voice inside you that holds your fears and doubts. Listen for the voice of calmness that speaks your truth, that tells you – with no words – that all will be well, and take it from there….
Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey!
Fitzhugh Mllan
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving
Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.
Charles Dudley Warner
