Cleansing
Last year, I got the desire to make some big changes in my life. This happened after a string of traumatic events: the sudden loss of my partner, and with his death, the giving up of future dreams, other painful events that were part of the fallout of this tragedy, and a complete career change to the Coast Guard. A year into the Coast Guard, I joined the small crew of a sailboat and sailed 15,000 kms across the Pacific Ocean from Panama to New Zealand. I was partly trying to put distance between myself and what had happened, but more importantly, I was trying to heal and to live life as fully as possible. When I came home mid-year for what would become my final Coast Guard patrol, I started to purge and minimize my belongings. While I've always been clean and minimalistic, I had over a decade's worth of collected things from when I moved to B.C. It's amazing how our interior and exterior experiences go hand in hand. I wanted to remove painful reminders and change my life. ...