Meet Nicole Thomson. She’s a graphic designer who grew up in South Africa and then moved to Australia to live and work.

I should be saying Gooday’ mate! But I haven’t got there yet. I’m too South African by heart, so Hello it is! I’ve known Tam since the first day of grade one, on which I went to her house to play Barbies! She is fabulous and we have been through plenty together. From shows, to choir, to band. After growing up in Port Elizabeth, several bouts of travel and studying graphic design, I decided I wanted to see the world from another angle. I moved to Perth, Australia, to see what adventures lay ahead. There have been good times and challenging times, as well as three magical months in Bali in between. But what has remained is the building of the chapters of my story. We all have a story to tell. Be they good or bad chapters, they’re all chapters that strengthen and challenge us to become the people we are destined to be. We learn from each other’s stories, are guided by them, and make our own destinies from those stories. We all have the power to tell our own story, so go out there and start writing yours. Each one has a dark chapter and a chapter full of light, but at the end of the day it’s your own. We are all unique, we are all different and we are all destined for greatness.

Aeterna Non Caduca: Strive for the everlasting and not the passing things of life. That’s the tattoo I got, whilst living in Bali for three months after quitting my job in Australia. I decided life was about more than spending three hours a day in traffic, going to a dull, blue-painted office that had saddened stained carpets and a not-so-welcoming wafting smell of an old library mixed with your grandmother’s house! I think it sums up so superbly the thing we’ve all forgotten the most. As humans, we so easily tend to get caught up in the day-to-day hum of our lives, allowing the bitchy girl at work to get under our skin, or the guy who still hasn’t asked you to be his girlfriend after 3 months of ‘sleep overs’. We obsess over the conundrums and incredible velocity of every day life instead of realising the importance and the beauty of what we can create as eternal. As we know, nothing is really eternal and we all face the ever pirouetting circle of life. But we can choose what we hold as eternity. Is it our memories, our families, our friends or the mesmerizing world that surrounds us? What ever it is for you, choose to strive more to embrace it, treasure it and immerse yourself in it. Although we are not always – or ever – in positions to quit our jobs and escape to exotic islands, we still have every opportunity to stop for a minute, take a deep breath and realize that there is more that surrounds us. There is more happiness, joy and magic in the eternal than in the things that we forget. So I challenge you from now on, to Aeterna Non Caduca – Strive for the everlasting and not the passing things of life!