I received a lovely email from photographer Paul Cosgrove (www.photoswordspeople.com) telling me about living out his sea-change dream:
"Thanks for your newsletter Margaret, excellent and inspiring as always. My own dream to take out of the closet was to live a life away from the pressure of a city workplace with time in the garden while still generating income by working with city-based clients whom I could visit or who might visit me. So I moved to the Blue Mountains and took the advice of a friend up here who said "When you come up, relax a bit and let it unfold - see what turns up".
What's turned up, apart from growing a business, has been a lot of photographic work up here as well as in the city, loads of interesting and creative people, a writers group which has opened up a new interest in short story writing, a fortnightly Celtic folk music session which is a lot of fun, lots of home-grown vegies and a weekly local radio programme where I get to play the songs the commercial FM-ers in Sydney don't list. Also I've discovered that people still "pop in" here for a drink or a cuppa. Keeps me busy and fulfilled, but there's still time for the compost heap!"
Congratulations Paul on taking action! When I took a year off from my business in 1998 to live and work in the isolation of the Southern Alps in New Zealand and then travel in America and Europe I discovered that many people had things they wanted to do but kept them as ideas in their head, never actually taking action to make them a reality. And the truth is it often takes a lot of action - I discovered it took a lot of action to go away for a year just as I'm finding right now it takes a lot of action to get fit enough to live my dream. (Yes, all those leg presses and squats!)
Most often we're prevented from taking action by our fear - we don't know whether we can do it or indeed whether we will like the outcome. We'll never find out though if we don't take action - Paul still wouldn't be enjoying his home grown vegies and radio programme. Instead we have to live with the frustration of an unlived possibility. So what small step can you take right now to start putting a dream into action? Lots of small steps can add up to massive action.