Salt Spring experience the icing on the cake but what's next?

-chocolate ganache tart with coconut base - raw food from Luba at the Saturday Market

It's coming up to a year since I moved to Salt Spring Island. It's been a very busy and very enjoyable year. It was totally the right move at the right time. I've met new people, feel like I immersed myself in the community in a lot of different ways from selling my photos at the market to joining the beginner band, creating the photo meet-up group, and writing for The Driftwood as a contributor. It has been good. It has been intense.

I feel like for the past year my mind has been completely consumed and there has been very little down time here. In fact, I've been busier here than I was in the city in a more holistic way. I feel like my life here folds into daily existence in a much more integrated way if that makes any sense. The sense of community here is something that, as a single person, really make me feel more connected.

I've met Pauline who has been wonderful to me, I've really enjoyed having Karin as a friend and the more I get to know her the more I like her and I liked her a lot to begin with. I've enjoyed having many of my friends from Vancouver visit. I have a fantastic co-worker and my part-time job exposes me to a completely different side of Salt Spring from the creative and has also given me some food for thought about returning to school to do a Masters in Social Work so that I could get a better job; a more transferable job or perhaps I could work for myself as a result. I've also recently thought about doing a one-year course online related to career counselling. And, I've thought about paying down debt (which is why I'm moving) and saving money to go travelling.

So, in the last while I've been wondering what's next? It's wonderful to live here but I've been wondering if the financial sacrifice and the lack of intellectual challenge in my daily work life is going to be okay for the long term. I'm wondering what I could do differently here to bring in more money since I have not done a good job, as always, in trying to market myself to get more freelance writing work.

I have faith that the next move will unfold and I'll know when I'm ready in the same way I intuitively knew it was the right thing to move here and I would like to continue living here for another year but after that, I'm not sure. And, as I say that I realize it's completely ridiculous because none of us know what the next year will bring.

These are the kinds of things I'm thinking about as I come up to my one year anniversary here on what I still believe is one of the most beautiful places in the world that someone could live.

In a way, that is the problem. When you live somewhere so beautiful and yet it's a challenge to financially make it work and the options for suitable employment are so limitd where do you go from there?