Hello, my dear readers,
This week marks just about one year since I published the first blog post on my website - it was ‘The Conversation is the Relationship’. Since then, I have written and published a blog post every two weeks. After about six months, I moved them over to Substack to share them with you as a weekly newsletter, one by one.
A lot has happened in that year… The most significant change has been moving across the world and turning my life upside down. As with any major transition, I expect that I’ll need to figure out how to best navigate this one for a while yet.
But, there are other things that happened over the past year that I am excited about: I’ve changed jobs - this has brought a lot of new learning and many days lived outside my comfort zone. It brought a lot of growth, which has been great. I’ve also finished the draft of my first book, which I am super excited to see published sometime. Having finished the draft feels like a great achievement; now I need to figure out how to get it published, which feels like the next major challenge for my ‘hobby’ 🙂. (Any advice (or words of encouragement) is always welcome.)
I have been on some cool trips and made some great memories with friends and family, and some slightly daunting memories, like that one time when we were stuck on a tree in the middle of a fast-flowing river with the canoe floating somewhere downstream… And so many laughs and joyful little moments.
So I thought I’d use this unofficial first birthday of my blog as a brief moment to reflect and acknowledge some of the things I’ve been grateful for lately:
Lately, I’ve been grateful for:
Time with friends and family
Rediscovering once familiar places
My supportive & caring people all over the world
Late-night and early-morning phone calls with friends
Voice notes I can listen to at all times of the day
One of the hardest and most moving weeks of having to say ‘goodbye for now’ to people and places I love ( - thank you all for making me feel so appreciated)
Good flatwhites (which are hard to find…)
Unexpected messages and letters - they often make my day.
The time people took to read chapter drafts and the effort that went into giving feedback on the book draft - truly grateful for that
The laughs and the silliness
This is a short and naturally incomplete list.
Today, specifically, I am grateful for all you readers of my little blog. And I’m grateful I have a weekend with friends and some family time.
And, after that little reflection, I invite you to pause and reflect on what you are grateful for today or this week, and to take a moment to take in the huge THANK YOU I am sending to you. Grateful for your support & friendship and really appreciate you all.
Thanks heaps. As always, reach out anytime. And, if you think someone else might enjoy the usual blogs/newsletters, please share them with them. In the meantime, I’ll continue figuring out how to get the book into a publishable format, and you will be the first ones to know if there is news on that.
Till next week, when we’ll go back to the usual blog content.
