My Year Of Living Fabulously

What if you could just do anything you really wanted for a whole year?

Thanks for coming. You seem so very far away from me today.

Lean in. I made you a background track here.

Many hours’ drive from the nearest city on my farm, you will find me. I can pass several days here very happily without seeing another person.

I’m sitting in my tower office on the hill behind my house. At the back door from the tower and out the left windows, the land steeply inclines twenty to forty metres to the eucalypt treeline almost at the top and far away from the fire danger zone of our dwellings below.

Out the front window, just behind my computer screen, is the orchard that one day will be a poultry forest and, beyond that, the raised productive garden beds of my dreams.

Out of my windows to the right, our darling chookies are laying too many eggs again, chooking as they do under the star jasmine and having delightful dust baths under the mulberry tree. We are all escaping the hot sun for a few hours, praying for a cool change and rain.

It is only the beginning of November, yet the ground crunches with the already scary dry as I walk up here to write. I prefer the crunch of the frost.

There is no running away from this summer. We are behind in our fire preparations, awaiting new systems planned for over three years. Fingers and toes crossed won’t count for getting us through the next few months. We pursue tradespeople, new fire pumps and clever new solutions to cut the eyewatering costs.

One day at a time for now.

The aircon is on. Lola, my silk-eared smush of an enormous Weimeraner, always beside me, sleeps in my grandfather’s old chair.

I write and dream of you.

Your world seems so far away.

My year of living fabulously.

This is it. The year when I do wtf I want, when I want, most fabulously.

I think it’s more fun than calling this year a sabbatical, which sounds like a lifetime of toil has earned me a leave pass. Maybe yes, this year is my leave pass to dare to live most courageously the life of my dreams.

A year where I am doing things I have always wanted to do but dared not speak. My bucket list of things I have had a yearning for since childhood. I made a list of all of the delicious things.

Essentially, if it doesn’t spark joy, it is out of the schedule. So you could say I have Kondo’d the year, and it is blissfully, selfishly all about the things I have always wanted to do.

The Third Act.

It is also the beginning of my third act in life. I had a significant birthday recently, and drum roll……

I have arrived very intentionally centre stage in the last act of this lifetime. I often feel curious about how much longer I have to go. Not in a morose way. I have had several near-death experiences and lived with life-threatening illnesses, so I am reconciled with that inevitability. This is different. This time is about how much living I can pack into the time I have left. I am so crazy in love with my life right now I don’t want to miss a moment.

My maternal grandmother lived to 97 sharp as a tack until about a fortnight before she passed. My grandfather reached 94, and he survived Hellfire Pass as a POW in WW2. Fingers crossed, maybe I will make it to 115 years hale, happy and healthy.

I’m almost embarrassed to share with a world that is more attuned to misery that I am just thrilled to be alive. I am enjoying every moment I can stay sharp and wide awake.

I am squeezing all I can out of this third act.

Once I decided how I wanted to feel this year, I knew what I had to do.

I want to learn, I want to create, and I want to experience new things. I want to know if we can be full of joy despite the long list of reasons why not.

I know the world is full of terrible things right now. I know people are doing it tough. Hell, I know tough intimately. I know misery. I know pain and discomfort and trauma. I mastered misery for my first two acts, and sigh… I am done with it for now. I am open to it not returning in this lifetime.

However, I am also a realist and at ease with the vicissitudes of life that bring grief and disappointments. I also know how to sit in discomfort when life is not going my way. I know how to find silver linings in black clouds.

I do not live in a war zone except for the climate crisis war zone, the war zone of humanity against this beautiful earth, our only home.

Can I feel joy despite all this?

A resounding yes. I think it is a daily practice, and it started for me very late in my life when I taught myself to fall in love with my own life.

Please don’t despair if you, like me, feel this is an illusive ask. Perhaps you are sick and tired of being told to be, feel, and do life a certain way by the wellness and high-vibe tribe, and as much as you pretend to say the words, you just cannot for the life of you feel this thing called ‘loving yourself first’.

It came to me because one day there was suddenly no other choice. I had hit rock bottom, so I had to learn as a beginner in my fifties. I discovered that if I asked myself, “What do I want to do in THIS moment?” and then the next moment, and the one after.

Small baby steps.

The first step was that I discovered ordering a cup of tea in an empty airport lounge in regional Australia was a revolutionary act of self-care and self-love. All my synapses flashed awake. OMG, who knew self-love was really this simple? One small step at a time.

Before this, as worldly and accomplished as I may have been, I didn’t know how to do anything other than look after others first. It was so common for the women of my generation not to know how to articulate their desires. And to be fair, due to some appalling parenting decisions, I didn’t learn about boundary-setting either until my mid-fifties.

Nine years on, I am finally good at this.

In this year of living fabulously, I am doing many delicious things, like building a vast beautiful garden and learning Spanish and the saxophone.

I want to travel to Patagonia to find Frances Mallman, eat in his restaurants and learn to cook with fire as only an Argentinian can. I want to paint 12 completed paintings. I want to release 12 months of excerpts from the book I was writing before COVID wiped my synapses. I am greedy with my long list of desires and ravenously hungry for all future experiences.

Daily gratitude practice helps.

I’m not an incanter of prayers. However, my thoughts are overwhelmingly full of gratitude most hours of the day, and this practice seems to make space for so much to arise.

My altar of gratitude, praise and love is found in my expanding garden and then full vases on my tables, and also in the overgenerous servings of food that I present to whoever sits long enough.

I spend my day in nature, even in my tower office, looking out at the forest, the chickens and the wild birds. I am grateful for every sight and sound of this wild place.

I am grateful for my health returning, my third and most precious husband and the miracle of our wedding anniversary this weekend, where we will stand under our wedding tree and recite our vows as we do every year. I have endless gratitude lists for Mr Joy and the life we have created. I am grateful for my extraordinary grown-up children. I am grateful for the blessings of love bundles that are my grandchildren. I am grateful for food on my table and clean drinking rainwater.

I am grateful for my comfortable farmhouse on Wiradjuri country with the wombats, swans, wallabies and kangaroos visiting me daily. I feel so blessed and grateful for the relationships of dear old friends and the love and closeness of a large, growing family. So grateful.