The Power of Re-Invention

It’s been a little while, has it not? Honestly, I needn’t ask. I know. This absence was both an active and an unintentional one simultaneously. At the beginning of the year, I came to this blog with an intention to write every week. As my schedule sped up (it always does), this became an unnatural and even slightly irrelevant duty.

I love this space. This is where Currently Loving is and will always reside. With that said, in-depth revelations do not occur daily. Sometimes, not even weekly. If this blog follows my personal development, then it ought to be said, that shit takes time.

It takes minor shifts. Minor shifts that become more significant developments.

These days, I’m happy to wait. I wait until revelations require more than a 300-word Instagram caption. I wait until they leave a small corner of my brain, and become a big part of my life.

Long story short, I am no longer pushing for some major development, some reason to write and to divulge on here every week. I’m focusing on daily Instagram content instead. It’s a place where I can learn and grow alongside you everyday. I can share where my thoughts bounce, before I detail exactly where they’ve landed.

All that said, I want the long-term connection, the ideas that last longer than a 10am coffee, to make home right here. And I want them to do so, both naturally and organically.

Am I done justifying myself? Perfect.

Let’s move onto where I’ve been, and uh, where I am now.

I recently took myself and my partner on a little Easter getaway to Sydney. It was the break I needed, and too, a perfect opportunity to reflect. I returned to my favourite custom design hotel, The Collectionist (you may remember I visited in the first week it opened, during Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Australia last year).

In its quiet, quaint location in Camperdown, I found room to rest as I did to break from routine. I found space to breathe, to drink tea. I even found the capacity to work. I worked creatively, thoughtfully, and without resentment. It was a public holiday, and yet here I was, re-experiencing a fondness and fascination for what I do everyday.

I wasn’t stressed. I wasn’t disappointed to be working.

I found myself in a new space, and with that, in a new and much preferred mindset.

It made me reflect on the power of reinvention. We tend to resist change, particularly when it comes to routine, to the way we are or to the habits we live by. With that said, it’s often when we give into it, that change acts to better all three.

I’ve come back — both to this blog and to the most inspiring hotel destination — to talk about reinventing yourself and your lifestyle. I don’t believe you have to reach a point of hatred for either, in order to crave their upheaval. Rather, we have to want three things: to grow, to be inspired and to progress.

I’ve learnt that my most inspired self often comes from reinvention. Here’s three ways I’ve learnt to provoke my own.

1. Move away. Or if not possible, plan a getaway.

Ditching old routines, behaviours and ways of being usually requires that we detach ourselves from the very structure that supports them. You know how they say, you become the people you spend the most time around? I’d argue the same happens with where you reside.

We fall into routines and behaviours, largely based on our environment. It’s difficult to do something outside of what we know, and even more so, within a space too homely or familiar. We find ourselves acting the same way as everyone else, or if not, acting the same way we always have. It’s just what we know.

To learn or to develop our lifestyle, so I believe, requires a bit of unlearning too. To start using your evening for progress, or even, for self-care, means unlearning the habit of going out, of drinking, of occupying your time with unwanted, but seemingly required “plans”. We’re detaching ourselves from old pressures here, in order to replace these with new desires. We’re drawing new maps for the people we want to be and for the lives we want to live.

When we move away (from home, comfort and normality), we’re forcing ourselves to re-start from ground-up. Some of our once-common routines won’t even have the ability to exist and to play out in new locations. Some of them will have to change their shape entirely. As we’re surrounded by new things, new ways of being, and even, by new priorities, our own are forced to undergo a natural shift.

I know what you’re thinking: we shouldn’t have to move cities or countries or homes every time we wish to reinvent our values. To amp our motivation. To drive a new direction.

This is where a getaway comes in.

When I visited Hotel Collectionist this past Easter, my perspective towards work changed entirely. And yet, my actual work didn’t at all. I was completing the same tasks I would in Melbourne. I was doing them in the same time-frame. I was also exploring, jumping on a boat to Manly, eating vegan burgers, drinking coffee and sitting on that beautiful patio outside my Rita Velour room.

I was doing so many other things, and yet, I was also completing work with an oddly fresh and astute mindset. And why?

Because sometimes, it takes a change in environment for us to realise that the way we thought, acted and behaved in our previous one, was completely unnecessary. Melbourne has become a place I associate with home and with work, and so too, it can be associated with increased stress, busyness and chaos.

As the birds chirped delightedly at 9am in Camperdown, I wondered why it took me travelling just under 900 km to look at life with far more clarity? Perhaps it was the essence of holiday mode. Perhaps it was the creative space in which I found myself. Either way, I liked it and I didn’t want to leave it in Sydney.

I wanted to bring my new-found sense of perspective. An understanding that life will go on, whether I stress or not. Better yet, a real connection with what truly mattered. I wanted to bring it all home to Melbourne with me. And on my return, I’d make it my priority to keep it here.

Had I not taken the opportunity to break from the norm. Had I spent it somewhere other, than the most inspired venue in Sydney. Perhaps I wouldn’t have come to such a resolute and rousing conclusion, regarding the change I wanted to see in my life. Or better yet, in my perspective towards it.

2. Surround yourself with new people.

Needless to say, the path towards re-invention is awfully hard when we confine our movements to the same space and within the same community of people. I don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with maintaining old friendships. With finding place for nostalgia in the present. Even, for re-shaping the way that nostalgia looks.

With that said, I think there are certain parts of us that we hide, quieten or even ignore, when we’re in the presence of the same people. When we consistently mix up the genre of whom we’re surrounded, we allow ourselves to explore new qualities in others — as much as we do, new qualities in ourselves.

We owe ourselves — our full, complete, real and natural selves — the freedom to come out in full capacity. We owe our qualities the comfort they need to expand and to be realised. And sometimes, this takes removing ourselves from familiar groups. Instead, we ought to throw ourselves in the depths of new ones.

As I’ve moved from Auckland to Wellington, and then, from Wellington to Melbourne, my qualities (in particular the ones that describe who I am) have changed immensely. The quantities by which they exist have undergone notable re-calibration.

I believe it’s the discomfort of a new home that begs us to find certainty within ourselves. Demanded by a foreign place is a very raw, authentic and timely answer of who we are and how we fit into it. This is also demanded by its people.

As I have fostered new connections, I have learnt most about what matters to me. Unseen aspects of my personality have flourished, as new people have asked to see them.

Perhaps we do become the three people with which we most surround ourselves. In order to change and to discover our true selves, I’d argue that every now and then, we have to diversify who those three people are.

3. Reassess and refocus the way you spend your time.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever read or heard, tells to us mirror the actions of the person we’d like to be, as opposed to the person we are. No doubt, this piece of advice can also relate itself to our lifestyle.

When we continue to live a life that aligns with who we are, we don’t progress. We run through the same motions, doing the same things, falling into the same habits.

I remember reflecting on my own affinity with productivity, with constantly working and progressing. I wondered why this continued to appear forefront on my mind and in my life, despite how my utmost priority, when I took the time to ask myself, was happiness.

I still have to double-check to this day: does the way I schedule my time align with who I want to be, and with the life I want to live? Does my day and its priorities represent those larger priorities I want to have in life?

If our days become our weeks and our weeks become our lives. Let’s not lose track of the way our values look across all three. Let’s align the way we spend an hour with the way we spend an eternity.

Surely, then, we’ll become the people we want to be.

We’ll implement the lives we want to live.

Kenzie xx

A special thanks to the gorgeous boutique destination that is, Hotel Collectionist. I will forever come back to find inspiration in your artisan rooms; in your energetic and warm ambience. The way you step out in the hotel industry, is the way I hope to step out in all that I do: with individuality, with confidence and with absolute light.

I owe you and Amber Road, the designer of this stunning Rita Velour room, for the inspired state I encompass(ed) during and post-visit. I can’t wait to return again soon.