Yesterday morning, my younger sister who lives in The Netherlands, asked me ( living in Portugal ) on the family app:
Vin, how much longer can you stay in your current place and what will be your next step?
FYI: I'm house sitting a friend's place, since mid December and can stay here until they move in. Meanwhile my own house has been for sale since November but I already left it around September.
I replied as follows:
Probably till the mid of April.
Not sure yet what I'll do afterward.
Camping till my house has been sold and not buying anything ( new ) until I'm crypto rich. Something like that.
And if it become possible, once again, I might travel some too.
Then my mom suggested:
You could still live in your house, right? I miss the view...
Here's the view she's talking about and this was taken on a rainy day and doesn't come close to the actual view:
I feel that she mainly misses that little tree, at the right. I shared a lot of pics of the sunset from there, usually including that tree.
My parents and siblings ( those in The Netherlands ) loved to receive those sunset snaps, but just that view alone wasn't enough for me to feel at home there. I often felt pretty alone and depression was lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to overpower me.
In Monte Frio ( Portuguese for cold mountain ) I often felt like this hermit crab:
A digital version of this piece, one of my personal favorites, is for sale in my NFT showroom gallery here
I responded to my mom's question - why I wouldn't go back to my house? - with:
I can't bear it there.
Recipe for depression.
Believe me, I tried.
I tried for two years to live in that beautiful mountain hamlet with an amazing view ( and feel at home there ) but it was already depressing enough before The Thing changed the world. Now it's 10x worse. The only restaurant closed down last September. There's hardly any people, they are all old and scared. If I'm in Monte Frio, I feel a strong urge to lock myself up in my house and that's not a healthy thing to do ( I love to spend time outdoor ). It's too big a challenge to feel good there, even though I love a good challenge.
I need more of a community and it seems like that is to be found around the place where I'm right now and where my twin sister is at.
No matter how much I need and cherish my alone time, I need a healthy balance between that and being social ( I love to talk and I'm single ) and I couldn't find that in Monte Frio. Not having transport - aside from my strong legs - didn't help much either.
Then, my twin sister, who I was about to visit ( she lives 5km away from the place I'm currently at and I had literally just closed the door behind me to walk to her place ) joined in on the group chat:
This is the house Vin is talking about ( and she threw in a link to the FOR SALE ad )
I just about knew that it was for sale but I didn't know much more than that.
Then things started to become exciting, gears started to turn and my future vision started to morph, once again.
My Dutch sister replied:
That looks good, Vin.
just as big as our house
( she has a husband and two kids and lives in a pretty big bungalow )
I laughed.
And my twin sister continued:
It's a very cool house with a fantastic view over the valley.
That's what I reckoned ( as it's placed on a hill above my current location and the vista is already pretty sweet from here.
I added ( semi jokingly ):
Funny enough I''m tending toward minimalism.
Perhaps this can become my second house.
( I meant to say that I would get myself a smaller place or a caravan some place else. This might become a summer house, source of passive income )
We have to dream big, right? And believe me, it's all possible ( and more realistically so, since I got into crypto currency ). It's all a matter of timing, perhaps some luck and ( growth ) mindset.
My younger sister, replied to my minimalist joke with the following words:
What has this house to do with minimalism?
This was countered by a joke of my twin sis ( we joke a lot in our family ):
( the minimalism refers to the fact ) that the sellers want to have at least 120k
This was a word play on the Dutch word minimal(ism). 'Minimaal' means at least.
I will talk some more about the money aspect later but let's say that this house is for sale for a price that is about 2.5 to 3 times higher than what I expect to sell my own house for and I don't have a lot of savings.
I replied to my younger sister that that wasn't what I meant. That it was a joke.
I guess I didn't even know what I was thinking myself, at that moment.
It intrigues me how fast things can change, almost as if it's meant to be.
and I responed with a "Hahaha" to my twin sister's joke.
Right at that moment, I was walking past my possible future house ( on the hill ), on my way to my twin sister's land, I snapped two pics of the house and shared them in the chat.
