The 40 Year Old's Epiphany - Part 1 | Life Love and Hiccups: The 40 Year Old's Epiphany - Part 1
Life Love and HiccupsLife Love and HiccupsLife Love and HiccupsLife Love and Hiccups

Tuesday 18 June 2013

The 40 Year Old's Epiphany - Part 1

Pin It

A couple of years ago I had gone to see the movie Eat Pay Love with some friends. 

I had only gone to watch it because everyone was talking about it, but I really didn't know anything about it other than it starred Julia Roberts as a woman who is unhappy with the way her life is going so she goes to three countries Italy, India and Bali to eat a lot, pray a lot, fall in love and most importantly find herself.

Whilst the scenery in the movie was nothing short of breathtaking, and the emotion I felt for Liz as I watched her go through her journey was very real, the concept of one needing to find themselves was completely lost on me at the time. 

Partly because I thought I was happy with my life, but mostly because I was so busy being a someone I never intentionally set out to be. I was someone who was busy being swept along by a powerful current in a life that I didn’t create, rather I just let happen by itself.

I didn't walk away from the theater that night with any life changing realizations for myself. 

At least, I didn't think so at the time.

Instead I remember going home inspired to add Bali to my bucket list and craving a big plate of spaghetti with loads of Parmesan cheese.

What I didn't realize as I watched that movie was that a seed was being planted in my mind. A seed that would lay dormant for years, as if it were waiting for the right combination of clarity, stillness and acceptance to feed it and allow it to take root and grow into something. 

Without knowing that seed existed, I never ever in a million years could have envisioned that one day in the future I would be in Bali on my own journey of self discovery.

At 12.01 am on the morning of my 40th birthday in a villa in Seminyak Bali, that little seed grew its first bud.

I had purposely waited up that night, alone, whilst my family slept. 

I wanted to watch the clock tick over midnight and herald the dawning of my 40th birthday, a day I have anticipated and feared for quite some time.

I’m not sure what I was expecting would happen at 12.01am. 

Would I feel different in some way?

Would there be a precise moment that an epiphany would come to me through some sort of sign from the universe? 

Being the melodramatic drama queen that I am, I suppose I kind of expected that the sky would light up with a big electrical storm, complete with rain pelting down and lightening strikes to provide me with enough light to watch as my skin tightens and turns to stone before cracking and falling away to reveal a weathered old woman beneath.

I told you I can be melodramatic.

What did happen was …

Nothing. 

Nothing at all.

The sky remained calm and the thick muggy air remained quiet and perfectly still.

My skin did not suddenly age, nor did my mind and I absolutely did NOT feel any different to how I felt only moments earlier.

With almost a degree of disappointment and exhaustion from the unsatiated anticipation I  flicked off the light.
I closed my eyes and slept my first sleep as a forty year old woman, unaware of a little seed awakening and the long awaited epiphany that would greet me come morning.


To be continued.....