Finding Your Light Within

Thoughts From The Plane - Friday 9th January 2026

Water matters. I need to get back to it. I have to feel the connection on a daily basis. Sailing may not be the answer but then, what happens if it is not?

Is it acceptable to continue with a ‘normal’ life? To not pursue the true fate that has been ordained by my life force? That cannot be right - can it?

Life is for growing and evolving. It is ceaseless, never-ending, eternal.

What we do in this life may or may not echo through eternity, no one can ever know the answer to that but by golly, it has to be worth trying to live life to the fullest. To suck out the marrow as Thoreau wrote. To live and not, when I come to die, to find that I had not lived. That would be a hell - a hell of my own making.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau.

So, what is to be done about it all? I’ve been teaching for ten years and I’m now approaching my eleventh. It will be my eighth year at Opunake Primary. This is an adventure that I had ‘adventured the shit out of’. It’s time for another.

Why the hesitation then? Because life becomes comfortable, too much so. Easy life is what I have. I live next door to where I work, there is no commute. I know people in the community. My rent is cheap and I can save money. The sea is on my doorstep and that offers surfing opportunities. I can cycle to the beach in two minutes or less. There is a huge volcano that towers over all of the proceedings. Nature is all around.

But is nature truly all around? Most of it is farmland. Humanised. Desecrated. Unnatural.

I crave and yearn for the natural, that has always been in my soul. It is my core. It is my life force. I feel the need to reconnect with my life force.

Yes!!! That is it. I FEEL THE NEED TO RECONNECT WITH MY LIFE FORCE.

I need to get back to being the true me. And that is a life that is lived through positivity and on my terms because it is a life that I want - not a life that I need.

Time is precious and oh so short. Carpe Diem baby. All the way.

Because at the end of it all, what else is there? There is only life and there is only death. We are but a blink of a blink of an eye before we are gone. What is written does not decide what is yet to come. You must not judge the future on the past. Live in the now. Here. This moment. This precious moment of existence before the blackness of the void must descend and take me. 

I’ve seen death recently. It was not nice. A life lived fully was taken too early, much too early. I owe it to Zoe to continue to live fully and to do honour to her memory, as well as to my own.

This I pledge. Like I did before, twenty two years ago. I fulfilled that pledge, I reached that promise and now onto the next.

#thismoment #carpediem #thoreau #liveinthemoment #seizetheday #pledgetomyself #lifechoice