CulturallyOurs Sonia Nicolson Iceland Travel Blogger and Artist

Sonia Nicolson-Guðrúnarson Describes The Icelandic Way Of Life

11.20.18
CulturallyOurs Sonia Nicolson Iceland Travel Blogger and Artist
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“Life is a series of chapters each with its own season. We need to experience all of them to truly live a life with living.”

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sonia Nicolson-Guðrúnarson, an architect, artist and entrepreneur from Iceland recently. Our discussion was so fascinating in that Sonia used her life experiences to take me along a mental journey from Scotland to Japan to Malaysia and India and finally to Iceland. As an avid traveler, I love exploring new places and learning new things. And Sonia’s philosophy of looking at life as a series of chapters in a book gave me a fresh perspective to travel.

Sonia encourages everyone to use any opportunity they get to see the world and learn from it. People, places, culture and diversity all have this quality to teach us so many things that are far beyond what we learn in the classroom. Sonia certainly has used this approach to live her life as one big adventure. She navigated architectural studies, academia, enterpreurship and most recently motherhood with such ease and grace. When the doors to a career in architecture closed temporarily, she used creativity and an outside the box approach to land a gig in India that helped her transition into academia.

CulturallyOurs Sonia Nicolson sketching Icelandic landscapes in Iceland

Sonia has this calm grace about her that is so apparent in the entire interview and not to mention that fascinating Scottish brogue.

Even though Sonia has lived and worked all over the world she never experienced culture shock. She says that even though culture shock is very normal, having a relaxed attitude about it is the way to go. The more you fight cultural issues or just culture shock in general, the more challenging it can become. But if you just relax into it and let it take over you, then you really do get rewarded. And it’s fascinating how the people you meet, the opportunities that come along and the diversity of the things around you teach you so much about life in general. And throwing yourself into the actual culture is like throwing yourself into the deep end – you will learn to swim.

Sonia looks at life as a series of chapters – each having its own time, place and learning that helps us move along onto the next chapter in the book of life. Currently her life’s chapter is in Iceland as a mom, entrepreneur, artist and wife to a Viking. She casually throws in northern lights, rugged landcapes and geyers as part of her everyday and you cannot help but get the feeling of wanting to travel to Iceland to see it all for yourself.

CulturallyOurs Sonia Nicolson Northern Lights in Iceland

I cannot wait for you to dig in and go on a virtual travel adventure with Sonia in this episode of CulturallyOurs.

If you want to learn more about Sonia or her beautiful designs, go to her website and Instagram @layoutlines.

{Photo credit : Sonia Nicolson of Layoutlines}

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