This is the start. The last year has been a time of quiet endings and healing. Almost a year to the day that I closed the door on my old life I am opening new doors and joyfully walking through them. It has been a year of letting go of the stuff that made me the person I was in that old life and really looking at who I want to be in this new life.

What did I learn from moving twice in the last year? I never want to move things that I don’t use or need again. Collecting things will not fill the empty places in my heart. That need is gone; space, light and calm are more filling. I have more holiday decorations than there are holidays, more books than I can read in a lifetime and so many unfinished projects I feel an ache to finish. Also, never buy a couch with rounded sides, they are truly impossible for two people to pick up.

I’m in a new home now that I hope is my forever home. While talking with a friend recently I realized that this is the first place I’ve ever lived that has felt like a warm landing. I finally feel that this is the place I want to return to at the end of the day with no fantasies of running away to a better life. This is my better life and if it starts to turn away from that, I now have the power to turn this life in any direction I want.

This wasn’t the path I thought I would be on at this point in my life, but I believe that it will be a far better journey than where I was heading in the past.