A promise I made myself at the beginning of the year: More time for me.

I tend to take the time in the form of dog walking and working. Work means writing, blogging, developing a few new ideas, making plans regarding the guesthouse, and the overall chores related to the guesthouse, of course.

All my work is heavily influenced by my whereabouts, which brings culture, adaptation to the culture, living with compromises and momentary feelings of culture shock into the equation. I can’t run away from them. I can’t ‘just do my job’, because everything I do, reflects where I am, one way or another.

In order to do my job well, I try to go dog walking a lot – to get my head straight. In the woods and the fields it’s easier to remember who I am, what comes from my heart, how I feel about things, what I believe in, and what kind of imprint I want to leave.

A friend of ours told to me today we’ve become too serious, my husband and I, and that we try so hard – too hard, if I got it right. Not exactly flattering, nor inspiring. But perhaps very true. Although we enjoy our life, it’s full of uncertainties and questions, and most of all working our butts off trying to make a living with the guesthouse. Now, how to address this ‘problem’, I have no idea. How to be funny, laid-back, and relaxed, in a blink of an eye? How to ‘succeed’, but not try too hard, how to make it happen seemingly effortlessly? Right now, I really haven’t got the idea.

So today was one of those days I really needed to go walking. And it was a beautifully foggy late afternoon when I started to walk home from the guesthouse. I left my husband, our daughter, and my car there, and took along only the youngest of our dogs, Lotta. She was happy exploring the sides of the road, sniffing under the rocks in the woods, and running free on the field just before reaching our garden.

As for me, I was doing a lot of thinking. I had conversations in my head, arguments almost. I was comparing the past to the present, and trying to sneak a peek to the future, too. I asked myself: ‘Could we do this differently? Should we choose differently? What are we doing? Do we even know what we want?’ The answer to all of the above is: ‘We don’t know.’ For the moment we just don’t know.

During my walk through this beautiful – in the rough Balkan kind of way – remote, and rural village, I came to no conclutions. I only thought: ‘There’s no quick fix here’. There’s no easy route getting pass the culture shocks and tiredness and the uncertainty of ‘is this what we want’. Our Mt Rewild is giving us a lot, a life that is fulfilling and demanding and out of the norm – but it isn’t a walk in the park.

Today it was a walk at high altitude, in the fog, with piercing cold wind and strange dogs barking. And even at the end of it, stepping into my kitchen and putting the kettle on, stroking the cat, I’m not sure if I’d left my seriousness in the breeze.