So it’s looking like Sweetie and I are going to take the leap and relocate. This seems like the best of all of our options, and for the most part, I’m rolling with it.

I mean, I could really use your good vibes, your thoughts, your prayers, your reiki. I am putting some effort into rolling with this. It’s taking some focus.

I just want to take a moment to talk about how to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty.

Friends, my life is about to *change*. Big change. And I don’t know what it’s going to look like… and that’s hard! It’s hard for me, and I know I’m not alone in this, when you either feel you need to make a big change and you don’t know what, or the change is happening and you don’t know what your life is going to look like after the shift.

For me, this is where faith comes in. There is so much I can’t control here. I can influence things as much as I can, get my resume together, make calls, network, focus on getting that job. That’s a positive thing. I can obsess about how difficult it is to find a place to rent when you have two cats – that’s not a positive thing, the worrying, because come on Kate, we only need *one* place to live.

I don’t think I’ve written about how we tried to buy a little cabin/trailer home over the summer. We tried, but we were unable to get reasonable financing. Now I see it’s just as well, because when we received our eviction notice, it threw a different light on our life here in Ucluelet / Tofino: Why are we fighting so hard to stay here? We’ve enjoyed this area for 10 years. I’m happy with my job and community, but Sweetie is quite limited here, and we have talked, really over the past 5 years, about relocating and starting over (again) so that she’d have some more options.

We decided to just embrace this push, and move to an area that has more opportunity for both of us.

But it’s going to be a *big* change! I would have loved to be able to stabilize our housing with this move, ie, be able to buy a condo in our next town. We’ve been doing everything we can to save money so that we can buy a place and have more control over our destiny – not to mention have something paid off by the time we maybe hopefully are able to retire. My 40th birthday is coming up next month! For a couple of weeks we’ve been optimistic, based on what our mortgage broker was telling us, but even though we have, what for us, for a lot of people, is a significant chunk of change saved for a down-payment – more than the 5% which is all we’re supposed to *have to* have for our first home purchase, this down-payment combined with my income just isn’t enough to buy anything. Partially this is because a significant portion of my income is from my psychic business, and anyone who is partially or fully self-employed has a tougher time getting a mortgage, hence the need for a bigger down-payment.

It’s frustrating too, because I’d like to start progress towards a university degree, but I can’t put thousands of dollars into tuition while our housing situation is still so unstable and costly. We’re putting everything we can towards that all-important down-payment, and it feels like we can’t move forward with other goals in life until we are paying a mortgage…

Which means we have to rent again, and no matter where we go we’ll be paying 50% more than we pay now, which is such a waste, but we just don’t have a choice. I really, really wanted to buy a home, for so many reasons.

Letting go of that want is a part of sitting with the discomfort of uncertainty. It’s not going to happen for us, not this year. Big breath. It’ll be okay. Hopefully, if we can find a rental that isn’t 50% more than what we pay now, and still be able to save towards a down-payment.

But there are so many unknowns. Until we know exactly what our income and expenses will be, there’s nothing for my brain to hold on to in terms of *what is going to happen*. Though it does make me chuckle to think that just last month I said to Sweetie, I have *never* been able to accurately predict what my life will be like five years in the future.

That’s my life cycle, my friends. I have a 10-ish year pattern between major life changes, and I have significant shifts every 5 years.

This is my Energy Spiral at work!

So far, Sweetie and I have been able to figure our way through these changes, and I do know that at the end of my life, I’ll be thinking about all the ways these changes showed me I was supported and loved.

That’s where I have faith. I have faith in myself, in Sweetie, in the people who have the ability to help us – that they’ll see we are worth helping, worth hiring, worth renting to… because we are worthy.

I think these big changes tend to tap on my fear of abandonment. It must be tied to some basic survival instinct, because it comes up when I’m feeling vulnerable.

And that’s where all these skills come in: the self-discipline, the self-regulation, the meditation, the focusing on just one thing at a time, the letting go of that which I can’t control or change.

Michelle Obama, in her book “Becoming” calls it “The Swerve”. Yeah, I’m swerving. Just keep looking at where you’re going, breathe through the g-force, and you’ll get through it.

Sitting with discomfort, I’ve learned, is a measured self-discipline. Act, rest, act again, lean into the swerve, focus on the destination and nothing else.

And breathe.