The Beginning.....

The Gentle Rebel started as a promise to myself. I wasn't lost and I wasn't looking to reinvent my life. Life was good. I'd spent decades building a business, bringing up our girls and mostly looking at whatever needed doing next. Then somewhere around my mid 50s I realised something had shifted. For the first time in a long time, I had enough experience, confidence and space to stop only looking ahead and give myself permission to look up.

So I started writing a manifesto, a map for the next season of my life. What did I want to keep? What could I let go of? What did I want to create, experience, learn and explore? I called it The Happy Hippy, made a playlist so I could feel it before I could explain it, and eventually found a better name, The Gentle Rebel. Gentle because I didn't want to blow up a life I loved. Rebel because I wanted to question some of the rules and assumptions I'd collected along the way. I didn't need a new life. I needed permission to edit this one.

Then I started sharing it and discovered other people were asking their own versions of the same questions. The Gentle Rebel is still my manifesto, something I'm trying to live rather than finish, but I'd love it to give others permission to look up too. Maybe we'll walk, travel, talk, make things and explore some of it together. Maybe you'll take one little idea and head off entirely on your own. Both would make me happy. The Gentle Rebel doesn't need followers. I'd much rather it created more Gentle Rebels.