Your heart is flat-lining and, like a moth, you are gravitating straight towards the light. The life you were blessed with is coming to an end. Did you do everything you wanted to do? Did you accomplish your dreams? Did you fully live?
We need to backtrack a little, because none of us are dead yet. (Not physically at least.) Let’s rewind to today, wherever you are sat reading this. Who are you? How are you right now? And where? How did you get there? When you look at where you are currently headed, do you feel like you are moving in the right direction? Moving forwards?
I’m Adeena. I was born in South Africa and I went through all the usual motions and insecurities that life throws at us as we [pretend to] grow up. And just when I was beginning to start understanding my surrounds and building my “empire”, I decided to go on a short adventure. Somehow a three-month adventure spanned 14 years and took me around the world more than once before it spat me out in Lagos, Portugal.
I know I am meant to be here because somehow life/God/everything has kept magnetically dragging me here for the past five years. And, with it being the final frontier of Europe (“The End of the World,” as they call it), it’s a very bizarre place to randomly find myself in for the umpteenth time. (I will save the stories of storms and hitch-hikes gone wrong for another day). From my first breaths of Lagos air in 2018, I felt like I was home.
But I firmly believe we need to be moving forward. Which is part of the reason why I kept leaving Lagos. Moving forward to me was physically connecting lines on the map. It took a while to realise that I had to stop physically moving to give myself a chance to properly move forward. A chance to properly process emotions, challenges and all the crazy (mis)adventured that spanned my years on the road (and ocean). A chance to build community and start projects.
Sometimes “forward” needs a couple of steps back. Sometimes it needs leaps of faith. Sometimes it needs stepping out of our comfort zones or simply getting off the couch. It always needs support systems and friends. We need to be constantly learning and growing and building and moving and progressing. But for each of us that is a different journey. And somehow, we intrinsically know what the next step is to take.
There have been so many times in my life where I have hit a crossroad and simply sat down because it was too hard to choose a path. And other times where I felt like I was at my end. You know that sensation of not being able to breathe? Where you don’t want to do anything, because it is simply too hard. At times I have been fighting for survival. And there have been times where life has simply become mundane and routine and a series of motions. In retrospect, these were all vital moments in my life. They helped me move forward.
While grounding myself in one place has been difficult, it has led me to learn a lot very quickly. Firstly, it is okay to make mistakes, they are how we learn. Secondly, everyone has insecurities and nobody has it all figured out. And finally (although there are so many other things that I have learned too), you don’t have to be exploring the world to have adventures.
Today, as I’m sat at another one of life’s crossroads, I’m realizing that you don’t have to have it all figured out. But you do have to make decisions. And then move forward, even if it is only an inch or a millimeter at a time. When I do (in many many many years) finally get to the end of my life, I want to smile at the journey I’ve been through and look back and see all my dreams fulfilled.