A life built, then let go of.
Before I wrote about losing a life I loved, I built one over thirty years, in ways that looked, from the outside, like I'd figured it out.
The conditioning
Long before I built a life, a life was building me. The beliefs I inherited, the patterns I absorbed and the stories I was given shaped every choice I would make for the next three decades. I did not know I was conditioned. I thought I was free. What I was, mostly, was invisible to myself. The memoir begins with the moment that invisibility broke.
In the saddle
Working with horses brought me a kind of bliss that was difficult to explain. They demanded presence, exposed any lack of integrity, and responded immediately when something in me was out of alignment. Around them, there was no room for performance. Only attention, honesty, and connection.
In the air
Paragliding gave me my first taste of no mind. Suspended between earth and sky, time disappeared, the ego vanished, and there was nothing left to prove or become. In those moments, freedom was not something I was chasing. It was everywhere, within me and around me.
On the water
I taught kitesurfing to others, but what I loved most was the moment the kite caught the wind and I became something other than myself. For a few hours, the person I was supposed to be dissolved into presence. That freedom was real, even if I didn't yet understand what I was actually free from.
In the desert
After the foundations of my life in Australia gave way and I lost almost everything I'd built, Kate and I put what was left into a caravan and drove into the outback. Somewhere between red dirt, endless horizons, and the quiet rhythm of life on the road, I stopped trying to recover what had been lost and started paying attention to what remained.
Knowledge informs. Experience transforms.