It’s my Birthday

In a society obsessed with youth I am loving 40.

What is not to love? I have way more financial freedom than in my 20s when I had just a few bucks to my name. The kids still need constant snuggles and hand holding, but are independent enough to make for great everyday companions. They play outside by themselves, read books, make breakfast, wash dishes and pack and carry their own backpacks. Both are curious and share my sense of humor, so somehow we never run out of things to talk or giggle about.

To top it off I am enjoying almost two years away from the grind of the everyday.

Can a mild workaholic (me) survive without working for that long? I was sure that without my work I will shrivel and die. I insisted on dragging a laptop with us so I can keep on working. ‘I don’t want to forget drafting’ was my excuse to diligently respond to each work email and to use that laptop a lot during our first year on the road. I did a small house renovation that paid for our stolen passports in Cambodia, then designed the first model house for a housing development and a few commercial upfits. With time though the desire to keep up with whatever little work I had back home started fading away. These days I barely check my work email. In the course of 15 months I have developed the ability to indulge in the moment without feeling the gilt of not being productive.

Besides ceasing to identify myself with my work I haven’t changed from the person who embarked on this journey not that long ago. I am still crazy about fruits and vegetables and can’t sleep in a room that doesn’t have at least one operable window:) I still explore unknown places by walking myself exhausted and poking my head in every spot that catches my attention and beg my family all the time for back massages.

Those steady quirks of mine aside, traveling for a while has changed me in some subtle ways.

I have less fear

I have to admit I left on the trip with a clenched heart. I have never traveled outside USA and Europe and didn’t know what to expect. In our modern age of news saturation we are bombarded all the time with real life stories about how dangerous the world we live in is and how one should avoid pretty much leaving the house in order to be safe. When kids are involved the fear triples. It touches on food safety, crime, accidents, diseases and weather disasters to name a few.

Taking the kids out of school for that long? How would they catch up? Hiking for a month in Nepal with children? Are you planning on going over the Throng La Pass with them? You don’t have a guide and a porter? What if something goes wrong? India with kids in this heat? You will cook them alive?! You are going to Africa with them? What about Ebola and all those wild animals?

Well, here is my report back after roaming the world for a while and mind you, we haven’t always followed the safest of paths ~

For the most part people everywhere are kind, giving and lovely. They are excited to meet us and are proud to share the best of themselves and their home places. Along the way we have been gifted food, shelter, laughter and conversations from complete strangers, often, without even speaking the same language.

To be clear, I am not saying that awful things do not happen in this world of ours. Sadly, they do, all the time, but I have stopped projecting dreadful news onto my own life ahead. Instead, I have learned to hone my intuition, avoid seedy areas and take the best decision given the circumstances. The rest I leave to fate. Luckily, we haven’t been involved in any accidents even though we have jumped on and off all kinds of things with wheels, some bloody scary. I do still fear reckless drivers, bad roads and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, but really, back home the messy reality of life carries the same potential dangers.

In Argentina our friend Xavier said to me, There are no bad people, just poor people. Because of poverty some get desperate. Remembering that makes it very easy to forgive petty crime incidents and honestly, stolen passports and a phone hardly even entitles us to complain.

We have never experienced food poisoning, just mild upset stomach a few times. This usually lasted a day or two, and god knows we have mainly eaten street food and have drunk water from the sink in many counties. As far as the children are concerned, they have proven to be more resilient travelers than Kuba and I. Both take every day as it comes and don’t sweat the minor inconveniences along the way.

With time I also lost my fear about what will happen when we return back home and face the reality of having to make a living again. Putting our business to sleep for that long was a hard decision, and for a while I avoided dwelling on the consequences. Nowadays I think about the future with excitement and I believe that everything will fall into place when we come back. In that sense travel has made me more confident, more willing to take risks and resilient to challenges.

I stopped equating time with money

For most of my adult life those two words have been inseparable. I remember a time when the whole concept of time = $ felt strange, but slowly I got used to it and lived and worked accordingly. It didn’t help that I was an immigrant, having to justify to myself the time away from the motherland with professional success and material independence.

In perspective I feel that this way of thinking cages us to the constraint of the dollar sign and all one can buy with it, freedom being excluded from the choices at hand. Clearly, when one’s life is governed by this equation, unplugging for a year becomes unaffordable, out of question really. It also robs us humans from the ability to be generous, creative and free to pursue a calling or a dream.

Strangely though, I noticed that except in Japan, nowhere else people put time and money in the same bracket, as a matter of fact, I witnessed the other extreme. In most cultures, for most people, time had no value whatsoever. It was worthless and disposable.

Once back home, finding a middle ground is going to be a challenge I have to take on in other to feel happy. Hopefully my new skills of living with less will come in handy.

I can live with less

Our whole family can live with less. For more than a year we miss nothing that we can’t carry on our backs. The kids usually beg for wire, cloth or yarn, and ice cream of course. Often, we do need to stock on paper, notebooks and pencils, but that is pretty much it. We had to replace two pairs of shoes (feet grow:) and a pair of pants that were getting too short, but for the most part we wear the exact same outfits we left home with. Simplifying our possessions feels to me like a brain cleanse. It weeds out the unimportant leaving only the essential.

Travel changed my perspective on life

Cook-top, fridge, hot water, oven, clean bed, healthy food… After living for so long out of a backpack I really appreciate all those basic amenities that I used to take for granted. Before the trip I complained often about the chores in my fancy kitchen. I am typing this post in Coroico, Bolivia in the kitchen of our friend John and every time I enter the room, which has a table with four chairs, a basic gas cook top, a sink and no fridge, I give thanks. Same goes for the bucket of warm water for a shower and the clean airy bedroom with windows on all four sides looking on to the jungle. The house is not luxurious, but is the closest to home, thus priceless.

It has been an immensely enriching to experience life outside of what I used to know. With time my heart swelled to include families in India, Japan, Laos, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bolivia, Nepal, Indonesia, South Africa… What stands out for me from all those encounters is the feeling of oneness I experienced over and over. No matter how different we all are, at our core we are all extremely alike. We are all linked not only by similar dreams and aspirations, but also by the common home we all share – a connection that binds us stronger than most want to admit.

I got cured from the anxiety of missing out on things

When we started on our journey I felt like we had to see everything we have heard or read about. These days I don’t care any more about sights. I get more enjoyment from connecting with people along the way than checking off famous travel destination. I am better at letting go and leaving life to lead us.

I am more at peace with myself

Before I used to look at a situation or a problem from many angles, justify all decisions and then doubt everything all over again. I embarked on the trip with an exhausting arsenal of questions and what ifs. Somewhere along the way I lost most of them. I still go through the occasional phase of doubt but it doesn’t happen often. These days I feel more comfortable in my skin even in places that are out of my comfort zone and when things don’t go as planned.

Life doesn’t have to be perfect. In reality nothing is ever perfect.

As a parent I give the kids more freedom

Our life on the road is a complete opposite to life back home, where every minute was scheduled and busy. The kids didn’t have any free time to waste and I felt like I had to jam their days with activities. While traveling we are having a lot of free time and I am loving it! Boredom is good for the creative spirit – B discovered that he loves to tinker and he has been creating amazing art pieces. R has been making outfits for the dolls from the clothes we tear up as we go and together they wrote and illustrated a book. They both got motivated by themselves to learn Spanish and at this point they are blabbering better and Kuba and I. I, myself, enjoy parenting way more.

I have also gotten better at enjoying life

At the end life is all about seizing the moment, isn’t it? We have no way of predicting how much time we are allotted on this beautiful Earth and living every moment to the fullest is the only thing that makes sense to me.

Here is what slow traveling with my family made me realize ~ I don’t want to live my life in the constrictions of ambitions, routine and conformity. I want to give more. I want to love more. I want to fight for what I am passionate about. I want to continue to saturate my days with the flavors of life, the laughter of new friends and the new unfamiliar tastes and sounds of tomorrow.

Call me greedy and you will be probably right. At 41 I have developed an insatiable appetite for life and I am afraid that I have affected our children with it:)

~M