When the winds blow

Still from a video shot by Luke. Baloiço de Soalhaes, near Marco de Canaveses

After the whirlwind of arrival and discovery, delight and anxiety in equal measure at the unfamiliar we encountered at every turn, and after a week sharing our new lives with close friends and our boy, Luke, we seem to have edged into a new phase, triggered by the strange experience of delivering our visitors back to Porto airport for their flights home, before turning around to drive back to ours. All coincided with the weather’s distinct shift from late summer heat to stormy autumn which hurried us inside from our now-customary evening drink on the roof terrace to games and food by the log-burner.

This mountain has already claimed a small piece of my heart, although its isolation and lack, therefore, of any real community around us that we can access means we know we’re not really getting a foothold in the place, and we are starting to think we won’t do here, however long we were to stay.

And yet the solitude and the very depth of the silence that surround us - when we head outside to have breakfast in the morning - wrap us in a peace that is truly restorative, and it’s blissful. After years of living busy, bustly, often stressful, draining lives, just feeling your lungs fill slowly with the mountain air feels like the greatest gift we could be given. Before we left the UK, an old, very good friend – the only one who was bold enough to hint at his scepticism at our decision to come here – said that the best advice he’d ever heard about retirement was to spend the first year doing nothing, making no major changes (beyond the obvious one of no longer working!) and letting time lead you slowly to how you really want to spend this part of your life. Although we’ve made this enormous change in moving here, the sensation of just sitting, gazing and being held by this place offers the kind of stillness and restoration that I think he implied. It certainly gives us space to reflect, with an expansiveness I don’t think either of us has really felt since we took a year out travelling nearly thirty years ago. But already, we are starting to think about ‘what next?’ as a point on a future-heading trajectory. After feeling like we’ve trodden water for years, keeping jobs going, earning to keep us all fed, clothed, housed, safe, warm, there’s a gentle sense finally of moving forward, opening out, into something multidimensional.

#newlifeinportugal #retiringoverseas