What would it feel like to open your wallet and just empty the entire contents into a mini skip? Suppose you had just finished a time of incredibly hard work, looking forward to the fruits of your labour; maybe you'd just been to the ATM and your wallet was full of cash. And then suddenly cash had no value; the contents of your wallet worth nothing after all that hard work. How long would you hang onto it?
It was a day coming for 9 months. I had been deliberately avoiding it, paying monthly storage on pallets of goods I would never use again. But the thought itself was painful enough, let alone the action that would inevitably follow. I had saved and stored $50,000 worth of ONE SEED packaging after we closed in August 2025, hoping there was some way to make use of it. It was painful to think of throwing away that much money and hard work in one fell swoop. But more that that, what I wasn't yet prepared for was the act of completely letting go of what had been.
And so, month by month I continued to pay storage fees on something that was no longer serving me, and I could not take into my future. And each month I wrote myself a note to reconcile it, and make the final decision. It wasn't until May 2026 that I was finally able to surrender the last chapter, and make the call to dispose of the last of it.
This was more than the end of a 9 month journey of letting go. This one started back in 2022, when we brought in a major retail partner, invested a tonne of money and time, moved into a large warehouse, hired more team, put in new systems, scaled up production, and spent over a hundred thousand dollars in packaging in a matter of a few months. Just in packaging alone.
I was preparing for the future. Ready to go. Ready to execute well. I was financially, physically and emotionally invested. Everything was on the line. I truly believed it would work beautifully, and we were on the edge of something incredible. I felt like we were being rewarded for over a decade of hard work, sacrifice, strong values and integrity. And I was excited about what was to come.
It's now been over 3 years since that era began. And it finished almost as quickly as it started. I was left just a year later with debt that was hard to carry, a team that was larger than what we needed, a warehouse that was virtually unused, and a lot of surplus stock. Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth.
Ultimately, the end of ONE SEED in 2025 was the surrender of a future I thought belonged to me. And this final chapter of throwing away the last $50k of packaging was my final act of surrender.
I had to give up what was weighing me down, even though I tried for a while to convince myself it was somehow still going to serving me to hold on. The surrender of the last threads of what had been felt scary for a long time, and ultimately the decision was simultaneously painful and completely freeing - to let go of what was in order to make space for what is to come.
