It has been one hectic week!

New decisions taken and new destinations added to my plans.

At the end of October, I will take some days to visit CrossFit MyBuddy and CrossFit Gogh in Germany. I thought it only makes sense to accept their kind invites sooner rather than later given the proximity to my current location! I’m very excited to meet my first host, Jackie, who’s also one of the founders of H4CF, the ‘A Home 4 CrossFitters’ page on Facebook, which I will be most definitely using as much as possible!

This means my traveling days will start sooner, so things need to be taken care of, now. I am leaving my current home, getting rid of/donating/selling lots of my stuff (with a slight pain in my heart, as I was previously known as the “collector”) and I don’t know where to start from when it comes to making sure that the transition from location-dependent to location-independent is smooth and bump-free.

Insurance, taxes, housing, mobile phone, all sorts of contracts we find ourselves into without paying too much attention – those 3 euros per month for a charity or research or a lottery thing… And, on the other hand, all the things I need to think of and be proactive about. Again, housing, insurance, mobile phone, vaccinations, tickets… Being a control freak to the last detail makes it harder to let things be and take it a day at a time. I’m still working on releasing some of my stress as it seems that it’s pilling up and that’s not helping. I know I should be more excited by now, but knowing myself I will only believe it is happening when I am actually at the airport – the destination airport to be more accurate!

Of course (and thankfully) there is ongoing translation work, lots of training, physio, the qualifiers for the Greek Throwdown, the long weekend I will be judging at the Lowlands Throwdown that’s coming up and I still want to see as many people as possible before I leave!
I’m trying again to balance work, pleasure, stability and freedom, but it’s not easy, I tell you.

Funny thing, now that I’m closer to leaving this country, I’m trying to visit as many places as I can, discover more of its hidden gems and make the most of it. Human nature, I guess. We tend to appreciate things more when they are almost over. Same thing happened when I decided to embark on this journey and decided to leave everything material behind. I suddenly got the urge to read all those unread books patiently sitting on my bookcase waiting to be read for years! Well, this urge lasted only a couple of days. 🙂 Next step is to accept the fact I cannot take all my Nanos with me. My backpack seemed so big at first, but now I realize I have to be very careful in selecting what I will pack. So 4 pairs of Nanos is out of question for obvious reasons. Plus, a girl needs her lifters, right?

I don’t know why, but this whole project seems to be so much out of my comfort zone that it feels as if I’m going to the jungle all alone and must brace myself for the worst when, in reality, it’s my own decision. It is who I am today, it is something I believe in and would love to pursue! I know I will be surrounded by likeminded, open people with whom I share the same passion, yet I am faced with the unknown and that is the most difficult part! Noone can guarantee anything, cause noone will see things through my eyes. I have to make my own choices and through them become the person I want to be in this life. So, all I can actually do at the moment is embrace these feelings and trust myself to do what’s best for me. Ruth Chang’s speach on hard choices on TED Channel was quite inspiring.

“Each of us has the power to create reasons…

It’s here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power; the power to create reasons for ourselves… to wholeheartedly become the people that we are”