They say that if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen.
I suppose I wanted Scotland badly enough.
2018.
Our older boy is five. His little brother has just turned four.
Two enormous suitcases. The four of us standing at the Airport in Venice. And a one-way, non-refundable ticket to Edinburgh, Scotland.
Just like that, we were leaving our home land Slovenia.
Was it hard to say goodbye?
Yes. It was hard. Perhaps harder than I could ever have imagined.
Leaving my parents and my home. Leaving my sister and all the people who were part of her world. Saying goodbye to Pepa and Buba. There are some goodbyes you simply cannot prepare yourself for.
Knowing what I know now, would I make the same decision again? Would I choose the same path and go through it all over again? Honestly I don't know.
But there is one thing I do know for certain: if I hadn't taken that leap, if I hadn't packed up my life and moved to Scotland, I would have regretted it for the rest of my life. I would always have wondered what might have been, and what kind of life was waiting for me here. And now, all these years later, I know.
And what a life it has been.
Our journey has had its share of sunshine—and, because this is Scotland, more than its fair share of grey clouds and rain, too. The children took their first steps into school here. We bought our first real home—a 120-year-old flat in a Victorian house that became ours. We have taken a hundred and one trips across this beautiful country, discovering its corners, its roads, its wildness. And we have collected a thousand moments of standing still, simply because the view was too breathtaking to do anything else. There has been so much beauty.
But there has been pain, too. Covid came and brought with it its own kind of bitterness. And there have been difficult times, too—particularly when it came to my health. Some of those struggles began here, and their echoes are still with me today.
But that's life, isn't it? A little like a rollercoaster. Up. Down. And sometimes completely upside down. Those have been the moments that have tested me the most and taken the most from me. But strangely enough, they have also given me the most. They have stripped away the unnecessary things and left me with a much clearer understanding of what really matters.
Of what is worth holding on to.
Of what isn't.
So, why Scotland?
Because Scotland had been calling me since I was a child.
I can't really explain it. I just knew that, somehow, I had to come back to her.
Which is rather strange when you think about it, because I didn't actually set foot on Scottish soil until I was 38. Not once before that.
And yet, Scotland had always felt strangely familiar to me.
It was a calling I felt deep in my bones. Like a distant whisper coming from somewhere I could never quite reach. Something ancient and familiar, as though a part of me had always belonged here.
Sometimes I wondered how else I could explain that magnetic pull—the quiet, inexplicable feeling that something in this place had been calling me long before I ever arrived.
Maybe some places find us before we find them.
