NOTES FROM BECOMING
On discovering that a simpler life did not mean less pressure—only fewer zeros.
It was 2013. The afternoon was sunny and beautiful, and I was walking across the farm, as I still do when I am trying to figure something out.
That particular afternoon, I was trying to figure out the finances. The bakery was still finding its feet—and so were we.
New to the area, every week seemed to bring another supplier to find, another customer to win over, another recipe to refine, another delivery route to learn, another price to calculate.
We were building a business from scratch, and every day revealed something else we did not yet know.
At the same time, the farm was quietly introducing itself.
I had arrived with some idea that farm life might become Pinterest-perfect. There would be baskets of vegetables, freshly baked bread, happy animals grazing in green fields and perhaps a pair of attractive gumboots waiting neatly beside the door.
Instead, I spent much of that first year moving between delight, shock, horror and surprise.
Farms, it turned out, have rhythms of their own, and they do not wait for convenient moments.
We were learning the weather instead of the traffic.
Learning when to plant. When to cut the grass—and when not to. When to worry about fire, and when to worry about too much rain.
We were repairing fences, feeding animals before we fed ourselves, nursing whoever happened to be sick or injured that week, and going to fetch whoever had decided to take a walk through the neighbourhood or pay the neighbours a visit.
The bakery was a full-time job.
The farm was a full-time job.
We had never worked harder.
The days began before dawn and seldom seemed to end properly. Gus could not leave the ovens. I could not always leave home and the farm. There was dough to mix, bread and rusks to bake, orders to pack and deliveries to make, while the farm continued producing its own list of emergencies.
Something was always hungry.
Something was always loose.
Something was always making a noise it had not made the day before.
But it was a different kind of hard.
There was mud under my fingernails instead of printer toner on my hands.
The air smelled of freshly baked bread instead of air-conditioned offices.
Ringing telephones had been replaced by roosters and guinea fowl.
Our conversations were no longer about technology.
They were about weather.
About lambing.
About feed.
About what had broken that day.
The farm had no respect for office hours.
Neither, it turned out, did the animals.
I remember Angel rattling a bucket of mielies and watching the sheep come running from every corner of the field.
I remember driving into town with a newborn lamb asleep in her arms because we urgently needed milk replacer from the farmers’ co-op. Gus could not leave the baking, and I could not leave the assortment of babies, so I squeezed in the week’s grocery shopping with a little girl and a lamb in tow.
Lilianna slept in front of the fire, entirely convinced she was a dog.
Mud found the white couches.
It bore almost no resemblance to the life I had imagined.
And yet, somewhere among the ovens, the mud, the sick animals, the broken fences and the neighbours phoning to tell us who had arrived at their house, I began to realise that I did not want to be anywhere else.
In the city, work shaped much of our lives, and everything around it seemed to gather its own momentum—full of people, possibility and the sense that something was always happening. Workdays spilled into evenings, weekends gathered plans almost before they arrived. It was a full, stimulating life, but it required a certain pace—and a certain income—to keep it moving.
Restaurants had been part of the rhythm of working and social life. Meetings ran late. There was not always time to cook. There were professional clothes, weekend clothes, sporting clothes. Reliable, fast, comfortable cars. Long commutes. Weekends away. There were clients to prepare for, industries to understand, presentations to perfect and expectations to meet. And there was always somewhere to go, someone to see or another experience waiting.
Excellence was not something we occasionally reached for.
It was the minimum standard every day.
None of those things had felt extravagant.
They were simply the cost of sustaining our city life.
By the time we reached the farm, good food cooked in our own kitchen and eaten around our own table was all we wanted.
Standing on the beach with a fishing rod turned out to be every bit as satisfying as taking a boat out to sea.
Owning the village shop changed the way I looked at buying things. I began pausing before purchases I would once have made without thinking.
Vinegar and bicarbonate cleaned the house just as well as many of the expensive bottles I had faithfully bought for years.
One by one, things we had thought we needed fell away.
We did not feel deprived.
Mostly, we felt relieved.
Which brings me back to that walk.
I was crossing the farm, mentally adding up flour, milk, vegetables, animal feed and everything else we still needed.
The bakery account was tight.
The household account was tighter.
There were ingredients to buy, bills waiting and another week to get through. I was not used to counting a week this closely.
And then I realised that I only needed another thousand rand.
I stopped walking.
Relief flooded through me, and then came a giggle.
Yet, the stress was exactly where it had been a moment before.
Nothing had been “solved”.
But I did not need to find ten thousand rand.
I only needed to find one.
The pressure had not become less.
There was a business to build, a farm to learn, animals depending on us and very little margin for anything to go wrong.
I had not escaped pressure.
I had exchanged it for a life that felt more like mine.
I carried on walking.
The bakery still had to survive.
Tomorrow would still begin before dawn.
There were animals to feed, bread and rusks to bake, and bills to pay.
None of that had become easier.
But I had been measuring what this life required by the scale of the life we had left.
The number of zeros had changed.
A Small Invitation for This Week
Where does your life feel most like yours—and what are you willing to carry for it?
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