Our Story |
Sometimes life provides us with a sign post that leads us in a new direction. This is the story of how a shift in our circumstances opened the possibility to a new way of thriving. |
When Deb decided to return to school full time to re-train in a new career, it meant drastically changing our lifestyle as we downsized to a one income household. We consolidated our debt, cancelled subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and cable TV. We sold both of our cars to get out of our leases, stopped eating out, going to movie theatres and severely curbed our personal shopping. At first, we experienced growing pains of having to "give up" comforts we'd come to enjoy. But as we began to live more simply we began to feel more free. Our perspective began to change and we discovered that the less "stuff" we had the more abundant other areas of our lives became when we started living with more gratitude.
As our thoughts and perceptions began to expand it became obvious that many of our interests and desires in life centred around world travel. But life was busy. How could we incorporate what we loved into our life as it was today? Even when we had the best intentions to include more of what we wanted to do it was difficult to get off the hamster wheel long enough to ever be consistent. We always figured we'd work, we'd save, we'd wait until retirement to chase our dreams.
As our thoughts and perceptions began to expand it became obvious that many of our interests and desires in life centred around world travel. But life was busy. How could we incorporate what we loved into our life as it was today? Even when we had the best intentions to include more of what we wanted to do it was difficult to get off the hamster wheel long enough to ever be consistent. We always figured we'd work, we'd save, we'd wait until retirement to chase our dreams.
We realized that nothing was stopping us except ourselves"
Somewhere between our busy lives and weekend morning coffee discussions we paused long enough to realize that life is short. Afterall, there's no guarantee. And that lead to a serious discussion about trading our traditional plans of the future for the chance to pursue living the life we imagined sooner. In the beginning the idea was just fantasy. Why in the world would we want to give up our careers and our security? As many can attest to, the pull from society is strong. There is overwhelming pressure to follow the normal path and we followed that theory and did all the "right things" for many years. We can truthfully say that we weren’t entirely dissatisfied with our lives. We both enjoyed our careers, had friends and family around us, a home that we loved and good plans for the future. But at the end of the day something still nagged at us. Something felt incomplete and it stood between ourselves and real happiness.
On a sunny afternoon while walking in the rocky mountains of Alberta a turning point was reached as our ideas shifted from fantasy to reality and we began hatching a plan. We started making real decisions that we stuck to and it infused us with energy. By the end of our walk that afternoon we knew we were ready to leave behind our traditional lives in order to travel the world. It would mean giving up everything we owned to be free of burdens which meant selling our house and all our possessions.
After much preparation in 2009 we finally took the leap and began to live this life that we love so much. House sitting, volunteering, working in Canada and abroad fill our lives and the opportunity to travel has provided the spring board to grow immensely. We see and do things which are amazing and sometimes challenging. We've learned about our world and about the diversity of the human race. We have met people and pets whom we will cherish and some who have become life long friends. Travelling has done much more than we ever imagined. It’s taken an interest in travel and turned it into a passion and lifestyle. There is a big world out there and our plan is to experience as much as we can, while we can!
We don't know what the future holds or even our next steps. But the time to slow down and settle down is definitely not now...This life is too good!
On a sunny afternoon while walking in the rocky mountains of Alberta a turning point was reached as our ideas shifted from fantasy to reality and we began hatching a plan. We started making real decisions that we stuck to and it infused us with energy. By the end of our walk that afternoon we knew we were ready to leave behind our traditional lives in order to travel the world. It would mean giving up everything we owned to be free of burdens which meant selling our house and all our possessions.
After much preparation in 2009 we finally took the leap and began to live this life that we love so much. House sitting, volunteering, working in Canada and abroad fill our lives and the opportunity to travel has provided the spring board to grow immensely. We see and do things which are amazing and sometimes challenging. We've learned about our world and about the diversity of the human race. We have met people and pets whom we will cherish and some who have become life long friends. Travelling has done much more than we ever imagined. It’s taken an interest in travel and turned it into a passion and lifestyle. There is a big world out there and our plan is to experience as much as we can, while we can!
We don't know what the future holds or even our next steps. But the time to slow down and settle down is definitely not now...This life is too good!