It’s scary how many things I started counting in decades. Also scary, how much “damage” 2 well motivated humans and their machines can do over a decade. This isn’t the best picture to show everything we’ve created but it’s a nice before and after. For the fun story, it’s not actually taken from our land but I didn’t know where the boundaries were exactly at the time. And we acquired the parcel since :).
We’ve definitely entered a new phase in our adventure, it started around year 7 when things started taking shape and being nice. We’ve been more retrospective as we entered this new phase and started reaching anniversaries like this. It’s hard to discern fully the impact the decision had on our life trajectory, evidently though it’s been very far reaching. For those wondering, there hasn’t been a single moment of regret, far from it. We don’t need to practice gratitude, it’s here anytime we look out the window. Living in a nice environment is one thing, enjoying the fruits of years of shaping it gets to a level of contentment that I believe is buried deep in all of us.
The goal for us in trying the “back to the land” experience, was to avoid later regrets. It would likely fail, we would compromise heavily on the ideal scenario, we had even started doing so before finally finding our land, but we would get it out of our systems and be able look at each other in midlife knowing we tried. Turns out, it’s been a home run. There’s a lot more to say about why it worked and how it’s shaped us, but I’m afraid it might be too philosophical and maybe even boasting at times, see I’m quite proud of what we’ve done.