Try Before You Buy

Try Before You Buy by Sue Courtney

In 2010 I was in Goa fulfilling several goals and also trialling living there to see if it would suit me long term. This had been a goal for some years and I was very fortunate to be in a position to try the life I thought I wanted to live before making any firm commitments. Trying a lifestyle or goal is vitally important, I have done it on several occasions as it can serve two purposes. Firstly it enables your visualising of accomplishing the goal to feel real as you can exactly place where doors are in a house or see the real view from the window in your mind’s eye, making the visualisation more realistic. You are in a position to really feel the goal and so make the effects of the visualisation much stronger. This was how it worked when I took the car of my dreams for a test drive. It confirmed my belief that I would love to own the car, which I now do.

Alternatively, if the goal turns out to be not what you want after all, you have the opportunity to make a new choice before it is too late. This was the case when I made an appointment to view a house that I particularly liked in Chichester, some years ago. I realised, very quickly, that I wouldn’t like to live in the house and so I was able to delete that goal from my list and make a new choice.

So, either way it is a useful tool to employ, if you possibly can. So I went to Goa to do just that. As the plane landed I removed the rose – coloured spectacles through which I had previously viewed the state and vowed to really get a true idea of how it would feel to live there. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, which was a wonderfully educational experience.

With each day and each new experience I asked myself

“Would this make me happy every day?”

Of course, in order to do this I had to spend a great deal of time figuring out what actually does make me happy. I have had to work out what I need to be present to make my life feel “good” and what I need to be absent to make my life feel “good”. These are not always easy or comfortable questions to ask.

 I have discovered a worryingly low boredom threshold, meaning that I am not able to spend very long at all sitting around doing nothing. I always suspected that I wasn’t very good at it, but I become twitchy and fidgety very quickly. I have also discovered that I am not prepared to “dress down” every day in t-shirt and skirt. I like to dress up and look my best, wearing nice clothes and shoes. Flip-flops and a bikini just don’t do it for me all the time. I have also noticed that I like to have the option to visit the theatre, the cinema of enjoy a meal in a smart restaurant when the fancy takes me (admittedly it doesn’t take me very often, but I need to have the option available, for when it does).

Clearly, I have changed. I am no longer the “closet hippie”. I need other things. In all honesty I don’t know whether I would ever have been able to sustain the look and the lifestyle for long, but the necessity to discover the truth of the situation has been very instructive. I am more realistic now, I think.

I was there during the Hindu festival of Holi. I had never experienced it before and knew nothing of its significance, but I am very glad that I experienced it while I was there. Holi is a festival of high spirits – large groups of brightly dressed Hindu women moved up and down the beach, singing and shouting whilst holding bags of powder paint. They were all covered in the colourful powder and looked as if they were ready to throw the colours over the tourists as sometimes happens. They didn’t, but a Rajastani woman came up to me and, dipping her thumb in her crisp packet of yellow powder paint, she placed a smudge of it over my “third eye”. I had been “Holi’d”! I gave her some money and thought no more about it. With the heat and sweat the paint changed colour from yellow to red and remained for about twenty four hours, surviving two showers.

That is when things really changed. I got real and honest and realised that not only would living there no longer work for me, but that nowhere other than England was going to do. After years of believing that “the grass was greener” in other countries and that I could be happier somewhere else I have reached something akin to enlightenment! It feels really good. I feel more at peace as I know that I no longer have to search for the right place to settle – I’m there already. I am reminded of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz as she mutters “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home....”.

I am so very lucky to have had the opportunity to discover this. If I hadn’t I would either have made a big mistake or spent the rest of my life disconsolately imagining that I could be happier somewhere else and bitterly wondering “What if..”. I feel a great weight has been lifted and I can now get on with my life.

As, I have already mentioned, I have discovered a very low boredom threshold and so I have managed to read a vast number of books while I have been here, as well as doing quite a lot of writing. Most of the books are not those I would normally entertain but I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed most of them – I’m still learning about myself and what I like! I romped through a five hundred page “chic lit” novel in two days but the biggest literary surprise has been an unusual novel “The Saddlebag” by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. I have found it compelling in a way I would never have believed. It is set in the mid nineteenth century and tells the tales of nine individuals as they travel the route between Mecca and Medina. The saddlebag of the title holds writings. As each traveller removes one from the bag and reads it they realise that it is strangely relevant to their life and questions they need to address. Fascinating. A sort of Middle Eastern “Canterbury Tales”.

So I wondered what message I would have discovered, rolled up and wrapped in silk, if I had found the saddlebag? The answer I received was startling. Apparently I would have received the instructions to plan more carefully, “conduct due diligence” more often and take a more measured approach to life. The answer came instantly and is so true.

So, if you are contemplating making changes in your life I urge you to “try before you buy” wherever possible and to really get to know what makes you happy before committing to a course of action. Alternatively you could just go to Goa and be “Holi’d”. It worked for me.
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