It has been a long two weeks! We've managed to sell most of our furniture, pack up the storage unit and get our travel supplies. It was a bit of a cluster....as it seems to go with us, but we made it to the airport.
The packed storage unit.
Feeling excited on our way to the airport!
First stop.....Puerto RIco!
Ahhhh.
And the adventure begins......
7/21/2014
‘That’s life.’ This is a favorite quote that one of my dearest friends and I overused after learning it in high school Spanish. I think its meaning has been replaced with, ‘It is what it is.’ To me it simply means that you can’t always plan life and you just have to roll with it. You can have an idea of how things should go, you can create a path to follow, but you need to be prepared for road bumps and detours.
Our plan to travel abroad for a year had plenty of those. Michael and I first thought of this gap year away with children over 8 years ago. We figured I’d take a leave of absence from teaching and I’d home school the children. We’d travel around the world, visit friends that live abroad, and see wonders of the world. We’d rent out our house for the year. It would be an amazing experience and we’d return to our former lives refreshed with plenty of stories about our adventure.
Except it didn’t happen that way. My leave wasn’t approved, so we had to start to think differently if we wanted this to happen. After many lengthy conversations and long walks analyzing various options and their possible outcomes, we decided to sell our house. We’d sell most of our furniture and put only what we would like to keep in a storage unit. This would give us more time to travel slowly. By putting the house on the market in February, we figured we had plenty of time to sell our home. We ‘decluttered’ and got ready for showings. It started out slow as this was the worst winter in Chicago in a very long time. The temperatures dropped to record lows and school was cancelled for four days. That hadn’t happened in all my years of teaching. It took a long time for spring to arrive….when people become more interested in purchasing homes.
Eventually, we got an offer on our house. It was not even close to what we wanted, so we declined. As May approached, we worried that we had little time to make this all work. I started doing yoga. This really helped me because it allowed me to escape the stress of the ending school year and the house sale. During yoga, the instructor encouraged us to choose an intention before we started our practice for that day. My intention was to let go of the house. But as I continued with my yoga practice, my intentions evolved. Next, my intention was to sell the house to a kind family. As my practice continued, I eventually realized, it wasn’t about the house or the buyer at all. It was about what is best for my family and what would allow us to accomplish our dream.
During all of this uncertainty, a good friend of mine said that maybe the issues in our way of moving forward were the universe’s way of telling us that the trip shouldn’t happen- at least not on this scale. I love that I have friends that are willing to tell me what I don’t always want to hear. (I’ve had enough of the friends that would encourage me to ‘call that guy who didn’t call you’ as if that’s ever a good idea.) She reminded me of this religious type story of a woman trapped in her house during a massive flood. You may have heard this one where the woman prayed to God to save her. People offered to help her escape, but she refused saying God would help her. Soon a man came by on a boat, offering to transport her to safety, but again she refused. Finally, the woman ends up on the roof of her home as the flood waters have gotten so high. A helicopter flies by and the pilot announces that he can retrieve her from her house and save her from this flood. The woman refuses and perishes. As she meets God she asks why He didn’t save her. He replied that he had sent people, a boat and a helicopter.
As I continued with my yoga, I felt that the original house purchase offer that came up again and again, was not something in the way of our trip, but in fact it was our way out. This was our boat and the helicopter. The answer doesn’t always look like what you want it to look like. Maybe fear or our so-called standards got in the way. In any case, we got past it, accepted the offer and moved on.
Everything else fell into place. Of course, we had a shortened timeline and we frantically sold furniture, packed and moved, but we were happy to do it all. The drama is over. I'm quite sure there will be more. After all, that's life.
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”
-Thoreau
