Bankrupt. It's something that only happens to other people. But in the last houror so, I'd become one. Both new identity and sentence. I felt very different.
The sun was setting as I strolled to my car.
There is was parked at the kerb like every other car. Except for one noticeable difference. Mine was the family sedan loaded to the roof with all my worldly belongings. But for pots and pans hanging out the windows it could well have been a gypsy caravan.
As I drove out of the city, with barely enough room for me to squeeze into the driver's seat, that's exactly how I felt. Like a gypsy.
As the suburban houses in rows gave way to thoroughbreds grazing on flat almost treeless plains, I was leaving everything familiar. Ahead of me lay the unknown. In my mind there was no tomorrow. And my past I was leaving behind me.
As I choked back the lump in my throat I realised I was literally homeless and unemployed.
Soon the flat grazing land gave way to gentle rolling hills with eucalypt forest broken occasionally by cleared land and small farms.
Ahead of me the sky was brilliant red as if beckoning me into the hills of the Great Dividing Range. The air became cooler and the trees of the bush taller and more majestic as they met in a canopy across the road in front of me.
I felt as if I had died and that was my life I had just departed.
As I imagine happens when we die, my whole life was passing before me as I drove along the quiet back roads of some of nature's most picturesque works of art.
The last few years seemed, in that moment, like a lifetime.
There was my freelance advertising business of over ten years. There was my second marriage. I was leaving behind my family, my two daughters from my earlier marriage and a brand new grand-daughter.
Selling up everything I owned, including my new two bedroom apartment in a leafy suburb by the bay, wasn't enough to save me. And so, now, I had no choice but to accept my fate.
I had failed.
I felt broken and defeated.
"If we procrastinate in ending something with which we are truly finished, life has a way of ending it for us." CAROL ADRIENNE
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Today Neil Smith is an author and blogger working from home in a quiet fishing village across the bay from Melbourne, Australia. He has authored 3 non-fiction books including 'The Mystery of Granny's Ghost'. Visit his book website at neilwjsmith.com and his 'Work From Home' blog at neilwjsmith.info.
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