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We Quit our Jobs to Travel. What Do We Hope to Achieve?

sailawayblog
Oct 11, 2015
4 min read

This week, Ben and I celebrated three years of marriage.

But year of marriage will be different from ones we celebrated in the past. Aboard Wanderlust, sailing through the tropics as first-time boat owners and newby sailors, we'll face new, once-in-a-lifetime challenges, totally unlike our lives in Kansas City. We're excited, and a little nervous to grow together on this journey, in just about 250 square feet of our live-aboard sailboat.

Here’s a few things Ben and I hope to achieve while sailing through our next year of marriage.

Grow in our marriage

There is no doubt that this year, the 'person we married' will morph into someone completely new and different. We couldn’t be more excited to get to know them! We know there will be no shortage of “thick and thin” on this journey!

Learn new skills

While having a lot of fun, we hope to pick up new skills. First on the agenda is learning to sail (duh) followed by wherever our hearts lead us.

I’m interested in learning Portuguese. I’d like to finally take the time to learn how to meditate, and manage my own yoga practice. I wouldn’t mind looking into a sommelier class, or working at a winery or brewery. I honestly would love to be a dog walker on the side!

Ben has already been working with a local Key West shipwright. He’ll learn intricate teak woodworking and metalwork skills. He’s learned how to lobster dive and, soon, wants to learn to spearfish.

Even Ruca is picking up new skills, as she recently learned to jump out of the dinghy!

The real beauty is that we don’t yet know our interests if we haven’t encountered them. Hopefully, we will fall in love with every new experience we encounter, and turn each into a treasured skill on our personal resumes.

Explore the world

You guys, Wanderlust is a real thing, and it is a problem! Once you get a taste for it, you’re a goner. We’ve been dying to get back to the Caribbean since the moment we first set our feet in the snow-white sand years ago.

We’re ready to go back, but not as vacationers. We want to become part of it, to live it daily without hurrying. We want to turn strangers into friends, eat exotic food and brag about not getting sick (or otherwise not mention it), try the local booze and swim at every beach we can find. We want to do these things while we’re young(ish), enthusiastic, and passionate. We want to make memories together that are so good, we’ll tell them to our grandkids as bedtime stories, and they’ll think we made them up.

Also important is to remember that to want to explore the world is not to discredit our home. When traveling, we tend to become even fonder of our homes as we reminisce about them with affection. We already miss Midwestern kindness, a good fish fry in the Ozarks, Royals games, and sharing my birthday with Ben’s mom on the Plaza. As we get farther from home, the prouder we are to say that we hail from the home port of Kansas City, Missouri.

Reset the expectations for our lives

As children, our society and culture define what success means. For me as a kid, the definition of success was some business person wearing a suit and tie, someone who went to college, someone who had nice cars and a big house. Those were the types of people we admired, so that’s the dream we followed. We went to college, we got the job with the good benefits, and we bought the car and the house. We were, and still are, proud of ourselves for accomplishing these things.

However about five years into our careers, Ben and I started to feel a lack of satisfaction, and dismay about going to the office. Working long weeks, on conference calls or burying our faces in Excel, we were tired, unhealthy, and could feel our days passing us by. We were starting to question just how “successful” we were.

What’s more, we knew what was next on the agenda. Society had already defined our next step, and it told us, "Now just do this same job every day for another forty years because it is safe. You'll get promoted, maybe make a few extra thousand and work a few extra hours. Maybe when you're sixty, you can retire and do a little traveling.”

Society said, "It is a good job if it pays well, and you've got benefits. Even if you spend most of your waking hours dedicated to this job. Even if the job is so stressful it brings you to tears. As long as it pays well, it is a good job and you're a success."

There was a tipping point sometime about a year ago, when Ben and I sat down together and asked ourselves an important question. "Are we doing this right?" The answer was no.

Ben and I suddenly felt like we had cheated ourselves. Although we were proud of our accomplishments, we realized, we had been so busy enthusiastically pursuing the path society depicted for us, that we never stopped to make a personal choice about how we wanted to fill our days. We wanted to end the cycle immediately, and make certain our life choices were intentional from that point on, which is why we started planning our life-changing sailing adventure.

So, probably the biggest goal of this journey is to redefine our expectations for our lives. We are taking this time, reserving it, to open our minds and our hearts, and LISTEN for once, to discover our own definition of a meaningful and successful life.