@LadiesofHive Community Contest #264 questions for the week are:

1️⃣ What’s one big decision you made recently that changed something in your life?
~ 𝐀𝐍𝐃 / 𝐎𝐑 ~
2️⃣ What dream did you achieve that your younger self would be proud of?

I am going to skip the first question, as I answered something almost similar for another contest, so it would be a repetition. Getting on to the second question, I am at an age where I can answer this very well and yes, I do have accomplishments to share with my younger self and be proud of.

There ae quite a few things that I have achieved and I am proud of but there are 2 major achievements of my life which I really feel very proud of and in my younger days they were a dream which I never imagined I would achieve them, and they only felt like a dream.

I always dreamt of a building a big house outside of the city. I had this one very specific location in mind, Lonavala, which is a hill station only at a distance of 100 kms from my city home. From my younger days I have always been visiting this place and very fond of it, it's surrounded by mountains and hills and tucked in nature full of greenery. Me and hubby when we got married, we both had this dream of building our home in Lonavala, nestled in nature, away from city and yet very close to home and easily reachable. In those days with the kind of money we earned, it was only a dream, we never imagined we could ever achieve it, because it was way beyond our league.

As life progressed and we both too progressed, things changed. Financially we were getting better, but still not in a position to achieve this dream. Then hubby got a job overseas, and things got better financially. For 6 years we saved almost every single penny, cutting down on our expenses. Our friends would say, now you are earning better so why are you cutting down on expenses. We could afford a fancy house here in foreign country, but we chose a very simple house in a ordinary decent area with less rent, that saved us lot of money. We saved and saved, and then one fine day we were prepared to build up our dream home. Which we did and our dream came true, we took some loan as well, which we paid off as soon as we can.

I cannot say it was my dream alone, it was my and hubby's common dream and we both achieved it. Whenever I look at my home, I feel so proud of myself. It's a very big accomplishment of our life. A lot of my own family people discouraged our idea, saying it was foolish to invest so much money in a property. But me and hubby are happy. It is our dream holiday home and we are enjoying it whenever we are in town. We do not stay there permanently, especially right now when we are out of India, so we thought of capitalizing on our investments and we are renting our holiday home on Airbnb for short stays. In that manner, we recover the ongoing maintenance cost and there are few good months where we even can make some profit.

My second dream accomplished has been the Everest Base Camp Trek. In my younger days I was a very weak and unhealthy girl. I was born with Asthma and for a long time had respiratory health issues. In the year 2000, when I was in my early 20s, I had watched this movie Vertical Limits, and I was very inspired by it. It was a movie of survival on K2 expedition. To be honest, it was my first time watching this kind of an environment, and from that onwards I had this feeling that I want to do one challenging mountain expedition in my life. I had no clue that time, which one and to what extent. I knew that while I had big dreams, I had lot of physical challenges, so I had to set some limits to my dream.

Over a period of time I kept coming across the expeditions of Everest Base Camp, after doing some research I came to an understanding that with good amount of preparation I could do an expedition till the base camp. On my 50th Birthday I finally achieved it and that too a solo journey. When I had started planning a couple of my friends were ready to join me, but as time came near, they dropped out. By then I was physically prepared and I knew if it was not now, it may never happen again. I decided to do it solo, and accomplish it, which I did.

As my younger self, both of these were just dreams and I never imagined I would ever achieve them. Today I am so proud of achieving them, they have been achieved very late in life and that also makes me realize that your dreams and goals are not dependent on age but on your own will power and dedication to achieve them.

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