Want it fully. Hold it loosely.

I had a birthday last week.

And birthdays do that thing, don’t they — they lift you up out of the day-to-day and let you see the whole year at once. Not the milestones. The shape of it. What it really felt like, day to day.

And when I look back on mine, the same quiet paradox keeps surfacing. The one I’ve built my whole life and work around, without always naming it:

Want it fully. Hold it loosely.

Open heart. Open hands.

Let me show you what I mean — because this year proved it to me three times over.

My parents were here for four months.

They arrived at the very start of the year, and stayed until spring. When I tell people that, they sometimes say “four months!” like it’s a lot.

Here’s how I hold it: I’ll take every single day I can get.

You know some of why. Last year we lost my niece Ashlie — and grief like that rewrites what you thought you knew about time.

It doesn’t make you cling harder. It makes you show up. Fully. For the ordinary hours, while they’re here.

So this year, my sister Dawn came too, and for a stretch we were all together — the whole of us, in one place. We even slipped away to New Zealand before my parents carried on home to Canada.

Nothing extraordinary happened. That was the whole point. Shared meals and shared dishes. Long talks. Family hikes, family games. Being in the same room.

Open heart: I love them completely. Open hands: I don’t grip the time, because gripping it only steals the joy from it.

I just… savor it. While it’s here.

And then — of all things — my cats came home.

If you’re newer here: Stormy and Snowball are my heart-cats, the two I raised from tiny rescue kittens in Noosa. And when I moved to Bali, I couldn’t take them. I searched everywhere, heartbroken, until a beautiful family appeared almost out of nowhere and adopted them.

I have a video of the day they surprised their two little girls — the girls burst into tears. That kind of home. I couldn’t have dreamed better for them.

So when I came back to Australia — after the floods, after everything shifted and coming home to Noosa became the new dream — I would never in a million years have asked for them back. They were loved. They were settled.

But life moved that family too. They’re off to France for the girls’ schooling. And one day they came to me and said the most generous, hardest thing: we think it’s best if they come back to you.

And just like that — my heart-cats came home. Stormy and Snowball are sleeping tangled up together on my bed as I write this, like they never left.

Here’s what stays with me: I loved them completely — and I still let them go with an open hand. And they came back.

If that sounds familiar, it might be because I wrote to you about the same shape once before — with Bali.

I wanted that dream with my whole heart. I bought Tree Moon Villa. I lived it fully.

And when life redirected me, I let it go fully too — because I had to live the dream all the way to release it all the way. No gripping, no one-foot-in-each-world, no yearning tugging at me.

And letting go wasn’t losing. It handed me clarity, a way home, and — it turns out — I learned I could create the soul of Bali here. Be all the way in one life, instead of split across two.

Same paradox. Every time.

You want it fully — the dream, the people, the love. And you hold it with an open hand.

Not because you’re detached. Because you’re the opposite of detached. You care so much that you refuse to strangle the joy out of it by clutching. You let it be free. And so often — not always, but so often — what’s truly yours finds its way to you. Or back to you.

I’ve come to notice that the things I’ve manifested most powerfully were never the ones I gripped. They were the ones I wanted wholeheartedly — and held loosest. Tree Moon. My homes. These two cats on my bed.

Big desire. Open hands. That’s the whole secret, as far as I can tell.

Here’s the deeper thing I’m only beginning to say out loud:

I think a life well-lived is almost always a paradox, held gently. Wanting and releasing. Being whole and still growing. Loving fiercely and letting free.

We’re taught it’s either/or. It isn’t. The most alive people I know have simply learned to hold both, to hold paradoxes.

(More on that soon — it’s becoming one of the truest things I know.)

But this week, on my birthday, it came down to something simple:

My people were here. My cats came home. And I got to be fully present for all of it — heart wide open, hands unclenched.

That’s the life. Right there.

Want it fully. Hold it loosely.

Is there something your heart wants fully right now — that you might be holding a little too tightly?

Sometimes the open hand is what lets it come. Share it in the comments below — I read every single one, and always respond. ♡

Lots of love,

Carmen xo

PS: I shared this reflection with my email community first — a few days before it appeared here. The email is where I write most personally, and where you’ll always hear things first. If that’s a room you’d like to be in, come join us. ↓

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