I have always had a bit of a thing with internet and privacy, especially around social media and Google. I am easily suspicious of a lot of things online and I’m sure I’m not the only one pondering questions like: what is connected to what really? Is this for real or fake? What information about me is being used in ways that I don’t know about? This is why I so far have been pretty hesitant about exposing myself online.

As I’m sure you have noticed by now, what I’m doing with this blog is the Exact Opposite of the above. In this blog everyone can read about me and my life in a pretty detailed way. Just a while ago this would have been totally unthinkable for me. As I write in the About me part of this blog I honestly never thought in a million years that I of all people would start a blog (Lennart: how cliché!) and write about living life while using myself and my experiences as examples.

So why on earth do I now all of a sudden choose to share myself in this personal way? It’s a direct result of having removed myself from a lot of the noise that was part of my life before I decided to take a timeout and move to Spain. Once I started to be quiet and really listen to myself, I sat down with my laptop and words just started to pour out of me. Completely effortless, they just came. So there I suddenly found myself, with a lot of words on a screen. I could have just kept them there but something inside me wondered if these words might be of service to anyone else. Could it be that what I write in some way can mean something to other people in their lives? Once I dealt with Lennart and his usual critical opinions, I decided to take the leap and publish my words.

I love the idea of helping each other by sharing ourselves and wish that more people would choose to do that in a honest and vulnerable way. If more people in their private and professional lives would dare to show their true self and live their own truth, I really believe that the world would be a different place!

Martha Beck writes in her book Finding your way in a wild new world:

Surrender to the way things want to happen next, even though this often involves a vast and terrifying loss of control.

So I decided to publish my words in this blog because that somehow felt like the thing that was next. I can assure you, vast and terrifying loss of control: check. Every time I publish a blog post, my heart is pounding fast and I feel a bit like throwing up. Up until now, this feeling has not gone away. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is my way of contributing something to our world that might inspire someone else and that feeling has proven to be stronger than my fear of loss of control and judgement from other people.

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer says something profound in his book The Shift:

Don’t die with the music still inside you

He reminds us that all we have to do is to show up, pay attention and then music comes. I am grateful for finally having slowed down enough in life to hear my own music and use it to write and share. Thank you for taking your time to listen to it!

If you are interested, you can watch a movie about The Shift from Wayne Dyer

Photo: Dayne Topkin – unsplash.com