So the journey back to Mangawhai wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be.
I went back up north for nearly a month, thinking I had a whole lot of life admin to do as well as keeping working ticking along.
Another round of culling through my storage. Sorting, clearing, letting go. Work. Socialising. Things on the list that I wanted to tick off.
And, if I’m honest, I thought I was going to get through it all by simply doing.
But the universe had another plan.
Almost as soon as I landed in Auckland to my grandbaby and daughter, I put my back out.
Before I had even made it to Mangawhai.
And suddenly, I was stopped.
Literally.
House-sitting for a friend, lying in bed on my own, unable to do all the things I had planned, I found myself revisiting the last nearly nine years of my life in Mangawhai.
And I realised something…
I hadn’t actually gone back there to do all the things I thought I needed to do.
I had gone back to let go.
Those nine years held so much.
There were beautiful moments, but there were also some incredibly tough and lonely chapters.
Solo parenting.
The isolation of those COVID years.
The experience of thinking I might actually die during that tornado.
Escaping the scary flash floods and being scared as hell in the cyclones. Amongst many other hellish and testing experiences.
So many moments of having to dig deeply into myself because there was no one else to do it for me.
Years of shedding layers of conditioning about who I thought I was supposed to be.
Who I should be.
What I should have achieved.
What I should have owned by 58.
The assets.
The security.
The things that society, family and generations before us can teach us are the measures of whether we have somehow “made it”.
And then there was the storage.
Box after box of memories.
Beautiful things that, yes, are only things… but they hold moments with my children. Pieces of our lives. Memories I treasure.
Letting go of them has been both incredibly empowering and incredibly heartbreaking.
And somewhere in all of this, I began to see the deeper layer.
The shame.
The guilt.
The grief.
And the intergenerational conditioning that tells us we have to tick certain boxes to be worthy, successful, safe or enough.
I realised how much of that I was still carrying.
And perhaps the greatest lesson was this:
My life cannot be measured by what I own.
It cannot be measured by the size of my bank account, my assets, my possessions or some imaginary timeline of where I thought I was supposed to be at 58.
What matters to me now is the love in my heart.
The depth of my connection with my children.
My beautiful grandbaby.
My whānau (family)
My friends.
The people I love and who love me.
The life I have lived.
The woman I have become.
And the person I am still becoming.
So I surrendered.
I stopped fighting the process.
I stopped trying to force myself through the list.
I allowed myself to be still.
To feel.
To grieve.
To remember.
To release.
And eventually, when the time was right, I got back up and started again.
And funny enough… I did get most of the life admin done.
It all happened in that final week.
But it happened because I stopped trying to control exactly how it was going to happen.
There was something incredibly humbling about learning that I could go head-on into my life and surrender to it at the same time.
Perhaps that is the balance I am learning now.
To keep moving forward, without dragging my past behind me.
To honour where I have been, without continuing to live there.
To release the shame of where I thought I should be, and become more deeply okay with exactly where I am.
Here.
Now.
At this point in my life.
With everything I have lived.
Everything I have lost.
Everything I have loved.
Everything I have learned.
And everything that is still unfolding.
Maybe this trip back to Mangawhai wasn’t about clearing out my storage at all.
Maybe it was about clearing out me.
Making space.
Letting go.
Coming home to myself.
And remembering that I am already enough.
🌺Hiki te mamae, hiki te pōuri, hiki te taumaha
Lifting the pain, lifting the sadness, lifting the heavy burden.
🌺Poipoia te kākano, kia puāwai
Nurture the seed and it shall blossom
I am with you on the haeranga - journey
…..and please know that I’m holding space for you -those of my whanau and friends who resonate deeply with my sharing here…..
Feel free to message me and share your experiences, they will be held close to my heart with care, aroha and confidentiality.
Arohanui- lotsa love
Lisa
