Exactly 1 year ago I did something wild. I booked a flight and set off on an adventure to LA to meet someone I had never met in person before. We had only ever met many times over FaceTime and I was presented with an opportunity to take a real life meeting, to travel across the world to meet someone I had never met, well never met in this lifetime anyway and I took it!
Despite my initial fear and the ever present feeling of not wanting to go towards the unknown, I released my fears, surrendered to the universe, listened to my intuition and got in touch with my wild, free side again (the one I had almost lost touch with, the one who was lying dormant inside me but like a lion always wanting to pounce out) and I got on the flight without telling another soul about it.
I remember sitting on the plane, excitedly looking at the window as the wheels left the ground of the runway at exactly 11.22, leaving from gate 11 and sitting in seat 22 and I knew I was on a journey that was meant to be. The excitement, the adventure, the endless possibility that was ahead of me vibrated through my being, this….this is what really living felt like!
Taking a moment to really breathe in this feeling, when I soaked in every moment of it I was reminded of the last time I felt like this, the last time I felt truly alive and it was on a trip to Hong Kong 8 years previous to this! I experienced the same feeling as I looked over the incredible Hong Kong skyline (the full story will have to be another time) I know because this moment has stayed with me in detail until now and I know this one will too. I was really living and I was hooked on this feeling.
I was discussing fear with my good friend Jenny the other day and I asked her what her biggest fear was, she then asked me what mine was. Now in this present moment I do not feel I have those huge fears but last year when I was in my marriage I would have told you this-
“My biggest fear was that I would die feeling like I have not really lived”
I now go through life with this mantra-
“I will not die feeling like I have not really lived.”
I now try to go through every day and approach everything in life with this mantra, when I am faced with fear I remember this, when I am faced with the unknown I remember this. Ask yourself, what is the worst that can happen and then ask yourself what is the best?
We often allow fear and the unknown stop us from stepping forward into the life that is waiting for us. It stops us fully living, it stops us fully experiencing life and that means both the best emotions and the hardest because do you know what, it Is better to have really felt than to not have felt at all.
Since this moment I feel I have continued with momentum snowballing forward through life, through fear, through the unknown, continually pushing outside my comfort zone. I now feel like I am really living, really, really living.
Even though this meeting, this joining, this adventure did not pan out in the way I perhaps anticipated it would, it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, other worldly, incredible and I would not change any part of it, it also taught me another valuable lesson. To release expectations from every situation, this learning alone has been one of the most valuable I have had to go through and it was not easy, I imagine it to be like giving birth, it was painful and a slow process but I got there.
If we constantly lived in the fear of what could happen and what ifs in life or not acting in order to protect ourselves from what could be, we will never truly live.
So I want to take a moment to thank this incredible trip for so many lessons, for propelling me forward as a person in so many ways, for giving me the momentum I needed to move forward and to learn to release expectation. If I had not gone on this trip worrying about the what ifs, what if it didn’t work out, what if I get hurt, what if, what if, I would never experienced what could be and what was. I was present, I was really living and I had the most incredible life changing experience and for that I am thankful.
Every single experience in life is a good one and if you experience extreme joy, love, pain, fear, just remember that when you are, you are truly living and truly feeling life!!! I do not want to go through life stuck in the safety zone, barley even a bleep on an ECG machine, I want to wildly and bravely push outside the safety zone and go off the charts.
Now go out, take risks, be wild, and experience freedom and what it is to truly live for that is where the magic happens! Be the storybook of life that you would want to read, be that pageturner, not the one that gets put back on the shelf.
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So much love and light,
Han
xxx