Choosing to Travel

Why do I keep hearing stories about people that seemingly drop everything they’re doing to live their dream life?

Couple sells everything to sail the world.

Man quits his job to start a Hop farm.

Woman quits her fancy 6 figure marketing job in Manhattan to scoop ice cream in the Caribbean.

The list goes on.

Every time that I hear one of these stories I think to myself, what’s stopping me? Leeann and I constantly talk about where we aren’t. Fernweh if you will. We are such a great team, yet we work apart. Our talents are multifaceted, but we have singularly titled occupations. It goes one step beyond trying to fit a round peg in a square hole – try fitting all the pegs in that hole. There’s so many steps we can be taking, inumerous places we want to go, countless experiences to share in order to fulfill our goal of a meaningful existence.

So why do we wait?

The topic of money seems like a giant 600 lb gorilla sitting in the room waiting to tear us limb from limb. But somehow, in all of these aforementioned stories of ordinary people embarking on great adventures, money is rarely mentioned. These people are not extraordinarily rich. They, like us, likely work regular jobs, have student loans, and carry the usual expenses. How are they able to do such things? We don’t want to be those people that sit by and say “that’s great for them, wish we could do that, but money.” But money what? Today I heard a story of a British man living in South Africa who owns a shooting and game range. Forty years ago, him and five friends bought two Land Rovers and drove overland from London to Johannesburg (why does every great African story adventure start with “drove overland to JoBurg?“) By the time they made it to their destination, they had but 2 Rand between the six of them.

What holds people back?

I’m beginning to notice a trend. It’s not the money that is the issue. It’s the fear that it invokes. Money is surrounded by myriad what-if’s. The money issue always works itself out in these stories. The passion, the hard work, and the seeking of something more supersedes any issues of having enough money. Maybe I’m naive here. Perhaps I only hear of the few success stories, when there are countless other failures. But that doesn’t scare me. I’m more afraid to not try than to try and fail. There’s always jobs at home…

I think that we are on the cusp of fully convincing ourselves that we can do it. Yes, we are afraid. But that fear can drive us. What’s most important is that the passion is there. No longer will we long to be those people with the amazing travel Instagram, the blog that pays their wandering lifestyles. We will, we are, taking the steps to make these dreams a reality. We have no idea what we will end up doing. We have several ideas, many goals, and lots of dreams. There are some bucket list things if you will. But we certainly aren’t going to be able to check any of them off through inaction. We will take that leap of faith and know that we will face both success and failure, but ultimately success.

-Max