Horizons Journal – Taking Charge of Our Lives : Leaving South Africa

We are moving. No kidding. After almost 23 years of being expatriates in South Africa, particularly enjoying the last 10 here at the beautiful Cape of Good Hope, my wife and I are relocating to Europe. We are homesick – if you have ever been away from home for any extended period of time, I am sure you know what that feels like.

True to our belief that we can create any type of life we want, we are taking charge and doing it. We’ll miss a lot of people and things in this country, but when one door closes, another opens and we know that there are even better things waiting for us.

How often have we looked out over False Bay from our house in Simon’s Town in the morning ? With a cup of tea in our hands, we marvel at the sunrise over the Hottentot Holland Mountains 40 kilometers across the sea to the east almost every day.

I never started counting. It wasn’t important because we were enjoying the moment, and we knew there would be many mornings like this.

Sometimes in season, there are whales or dolphins to watch, but most of the time it is just the magnificent sunrise at the southern tip of Africa. And some birds chirping in our Fynbos garden, unless the guinea-fowl kick up a racket.

Apart from that – peace and quiet. The comfortable stillness that only nature provides. The content impression that this is how everything is meant to be.

These lines are from the introduction to my eBook ‘Moving Horizons’ and they still ring very true. But we have now dissolved our household, given most of our furniture to friends who need them more than we do, sold the cars, parted with our two cats yesterday – and are ready to move.

On Monday everything will be packed and we’re taking a flight the following Monday. We’ll be back regularly, for holidays and I have work here, but we are moving our base back to Europe – modern technology enables me to work from anywhere in the world, as long as I have a telephone and an Internet connection.

BLUE CRANE and COMPASS will carry on as usual, of course – but for the next few weeks I expect to spend less time with the laptop so I might not be able to write as many articles as usual.

What I WILL do, though is keep an online HORIZONS JOURNAL with shorter messages here at the COMPASS blog to trail my next leap in personal growth in Europe – if you want to be kept informed, please subscribe to the COMPASS RSS feed here or get it delivered by eMail.

I found an excellent article on taking charge of your life this week, by the way : ‘What It Means to Wake Up and Take Charge of Your Life’ by Matt Inglot. Really very interesting, here is a short clip :

‘I was exposed there to a strange freedom that was offered nowhere else. I read some extremely positive literature from people that seemed … happy. This was a world that my programming books had never exposed me to. Never before had I seriously read about ideas like goals, personal development, financial planning, and the idea that becoming truly successfully was something other than luck or born talent.’

What else is new? Steve Pavlina’s forum on personal growth is up and running! It is very exciting and growing rapidly, with anything you can imagine being discussed – I am contributing actively (e.g. please see the thread for South Africa) and if there is one thing you don’t want to miss, it is this forum. Do yourself a favour and register there, it works well and is hugely informative.

OK, here I go – you’ll hear from me soon if you put your eMail address in the box, don’t forget – best do it now.

Until next time, all the best from : Berend