The honeymoon period

The first year in Ireland, was all about trust.

The first year in Ireland surprised me.
Not because it was hard as it was hard but, it surprised me because it just felt right.

I had no doubt.
I didn’t miss Malta.
I didn’t miss family in the way people expect you to.

That felt almost uncomfortable to admit.

So many things were unfamiliar. The weather. The pace. The quiet. Yet something in me stayed steady. I did not feel torn. I did not feel divided. I felt placed.

Have you ever felt that? Not excitement, not certainty, just a quiet sense of being where you are meant to be?

The list of things to do appeared one step at a time, without planning. They simply came. Even when my husband broke his ankle in seven places and we had our first real test of Ireland’s medical system, things fell into place

.

Trust, for me, did not arrive as excitement or relief. It arrived as a calm that did not need explaining. A sense of this is where I am meant to be, even when I could not articulate why.

People asked me, “Why did you come and live here?”
My answer was always simple.
Why not?

There were moments I wondered if I was supposed to feel more. More nostalgia. More grief. More longing. But those feelings never came, and eventually I stopped searching for them.

Belief does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it simply stays.

I believed I was in the right place. I believed I was where I was meant to be. Yes, there were challenges, especially while we were still fixing the house, but they became part of the journey. They gave us reasons to ask for help, to meet people, to accept kindness, to celebrate small wins.

And maybe that is what trust really looks like.

That first year taught me that trust is not always questioning, courage, or fear. Sometimes trust is the absence of doubt. The quiet decision to keep living forward.

Only later did I realise that trust does not live only in the mind. The body has its own language and its own limits.

And while my body was asking me to listen, my mind was beginning to understand something else. That if I wanted to go where I felt called next, I would have to step outside my comfort zone. AGAIN!

That is a story I am still finding the words for.