“I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened, and I’m not afraid to look behind them.” ELIZABETH TAYLOR

“Barbara, what are your plans after Australia?”

The question was raised back in England, by a few dear friends seriously concerned about our future.

My answer was: “I don’t know!” I don’t know what will happen in a year’s time. I don’t know if I’ll want to stay down under. We were offered a chance to try a new life at a time where a wall (literally) was stopping our business to thrive. An unexpected door opened, we had to go and see what was behind it!

Our dream hasn’t changed since we started: to make a living out of Steven’s great talent. That was our goal in 2004 when we launched Steven Harkin Handbags at a London trade show; when we realised that we wouldn’t have much as a pension from the teaching jobs and other careers we hadn’t pursued for lack of passion or freedom.

Dreams and plans

Currently I am reading Barack Obama’s “Dreams from my father”.

He writes  about his granddad: “He is telling her [Barack’s grandmother] about the big cities, the endless highway, his imminent escape from the empty, dust-ridden plains, where big plans mean a job as a bank manager and entertainment means an ice-cream soda and a Soda matinee, where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you’re born just where you’ll die and who it is that’ll bury you. He won’t end up like that, my grandfather insists; he has dreams, he has plans; he will infect my grandmother with the great peripatetic itch that had brought both their forebears across the Atlantic and half of a continent so many years before.”

We both share this fear of a mediocre life. This has pushed us to take risks and embrace change.

One dream, many walls, one life

We have learnt the hard way that to be self-employed is extremely challenging: the money worries, the many hopes and consequent disappointments, the long hours in the workshop, shop or at the computer, while other people have time for weekend activities, real holidays every year…. Anyone who is an entrepreneur knows what I am talking about. All this in the name of independence.

We have no choice but to keep going and believing one day we will open the right door and we will achieve our goal because both for Steve and me, the world is too big to just stay in one place, life is too short for us to not try something new almost every day.

We feel the “fear” but move on, go on a new adventure; our imagination has no limit when planning our future; we have no choice but to believe we will succeed. It has been a long road, full of fallen trees or cul-de-sacs. Both being Aries, we fall but bounce back, carry our shining armour and spade to take new risks until we get what we want. We have learnt a lot from our debacles which we now call experiences.

Probably, many people would have given up long ago. Not us, no sir!

We dream, we try, we do, we repeat…

 “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” JOSEPH CAMPBELL

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