Bridget McNulty

Ask and it is given.

// August 18th, 2009 // Cape Town, Decisions, Life (and the living of it), travelling

At least, that’s what they say.

But I must admit, the last couple of weeks (possibly months) have been a difficult test of that… My man and I have been working full-time on getting this Round-the-World trip off the ground. We’ve written, designed and sent out hundreds of proposals (well, maybe not hundreds, but at least 30 or 40 which in real life is a lot of work). We’ve knocked on door after door after door, waiting for the magical one to open. We’ve thought as much out of the box as our brains would allow us, to come up with fresh solutions. It’s been hard work! Wonderful hard work, because we knew it was taking us to our dream of travelling around the world together, but on a day-to-day level it’s been pretty exhausting.

All this exhaustion reached a peak two weeks ago (today). It was the day before we were set to leave on our Joburg-Durban-Blue Train trip, and we had just found out that yet another company couldn’t help us out with sponsoring our flights. Up till then, each time someone had said no I hadn’t let it bother me – I just forged ahead and sent out the next proposal. But this time, it hit me. Hard. Because I had pretty much reached the end of my tether. I couldn’t think of anyone else who could help us out, and I couldn’t understand why people weren’t forthcoming when what we want to do – spread positive awareness about diabetes around the world – is such a great cause. I felt like we were offering delicious cupcakes to passers-by, and none of them wanted any.

I was feeling really awful about it, I must admit, but I remembered that whole thing about needing to let go and choose the downstream thought (remember I wrote about going downstream here?)

Now, those of you who have been reading for a while will know that letting go is not exactly my forte. In fact, I’m something of a control freak, so letting go is pretty painful for me to do. Still, I’d tried absolutely everything, and now it was time to hand it over to the Universe and say: Please help. I couldn’t have made it more clear what we needed to make the trip happen, so I had to let go and trust that it would come.

Did I mention that I find letting go of control extremely painful??

Anyhoo, a few hours after I made this decision, an email popped up in my inbox from a company I’d approached two weeks before and hadn’t heard back from, who now wanted to chat about our project. So exciting! Except we were leaving first thing the next morning and couldn’t meet with them till we returned… Nearly two weeks later.

The last two weeks have been full of uncertainty. While telling everyone that we were leaving on the 1st of September, we didn’t actually have any tickets (troublesome, that) and didn’t know if we’d be able to afford the whole trip unless the company in question (I’ll be writing about them later in the week, they deserve their own post!) sponsored at least a portion of our travels.

Back to real life yesterday, and within the first few hours of the day we heard that this magical company is happy to sponsor half our tickets, slicing our air ticket prices not only in half, but in a third. I cannot tell you how relieved I am! I actually felt shivery yesterday I was so relieved and happy!!

And, of course, it proves what all these books on Law of Attraction and the Art of Letting Go have been saying all along – there’s only so far you can go with action, then you have to let go and trust that what you have asked for will come to you. It might only come at the last minute (2 weeks before you leave, when you’ve already sold up and have nowhere to live after that date!) but it will come.

Phew.

Have you ever had an experience like this?