I’ll admit it. I live a charmed life. Or, as a good friend of mine once lovingly told me, I live a life where “rainbows and unicorns tend to shoot out of my ass.” 

I once did a past-life regression for fun (don’t knock it till you try it!) and asked my higher-self why things in my life generally worked out pretty good. The answer was that I’d lived several very difficult lives before this one, and chose for this life to be easy so that I could focus on other things I needed to work on. 

I don’t know that I necessarily believe in reincarnation (I’m not a person that needs to believe in anything like that one way or another), but this explanation was as good as any as to why things in my life are the way that they are (you know…unicorns and rainbows).  

Sometimes I feel guilty about it, especially when I think of several of my closest friends who seem to have the exact opposite dynamic in their life. Where they can never seem to catch a break or get ahead…going from one bad and stressful thing to another. On and on and on. 

(Side note: I want to acknowledge that my life certainly isn’t perfect. I have my share of stress, difficulties and tragedies…but on balance it is pretty darn spectacular!)

Back in the pre-COVID days, I met my dear friend Julia for coffee to catch up. When she arrived I was busy tapping away on my computer. “Whatcha working on?” she asked. “Oh, just booking a few nights in a safari lodge in Kenya. Glenn and I found some super cheap plane tickets, so on a lark we spontaneously decided to take a trip to Africa!”

Who says that? Who does that? 

Apparently I do. It’s not the first time Glenn and I have done something like that. We once saw an advertisement for a half-marathon in Croatia and joked with each other “we should go do that, haha.” The next think you know, we’d purchased plane tickets to Croatia. 

That coffee date with Julia was transformational.

You see, I was telling her about how Glenn and I had just made the decision to quit our jobs…and not get new ones for a least a year. That’s right, we’re done working (for now).

It was a decision that was a longtime in the making. As you know from reading this blog, we love traveling and adventuring to new and distant lands and our growing wanderlust is further cemented with each trip we take. 

For years we’ve been working to save and invest money, downsize our lives and do the other things the YouTubes say to do to “retire early” in the hopes of being able to make our dream of long-term travel a reality someday. We even built a tiny house in our backyard we eventually plan to move into so we can travel while renting out our big house as a source of income. 

As you may recall, this time last year Glenn was setting off to walk the Camino de Santiago, a 500+ mile long ancient pilgrimage across Spain. He returned a changed man. I’m not exactly sure what words he would use to describe the impact that experience had on him, but from my perspective he came back with deep clarity about what matters most in life…and working in a cubicle everyday wasn’t on the list.

Add to that the fact that we’ve had several close friends, including some lifelong childhood friends, that have had their lives completely upended by major health issues including some losing their lives to cancer. With each instance, the somber reality that the same thing could happen to us at any moment became evermore present.

This ramped up our urgency to find a way to make our dream of living our best life a reality sooner than the “maybe in 5 to 7 years” we had been working towards. 

We visited an amazing financial adviser, Hsin-Cheng, to get ourselves organized and help us find a way to turn our “someday” into “today.” She did a financial plan for us that showed what money we had put away for retirement and how much more income we needed to earn/save before we could leave our jobs and set off into the world for adventure. 

Hsin-Cheng showed us the results of our financial plan in one of our subsequent meetings with her. “You see this red bit of the graph,” she said, “that means you have to work that many more years before you have enough money to quit your jobs.” 

Then she said the words that changed our life…

“…But you don’t have to work those years right now. You could take a break from working by dipping into your savings, then go back and work those remaining years later.” That realization blew our mind and opened up a path forward for us that we were eager to take. 

Which brings me back to my coffee date with Julia. 

I was telling her about how excited I was about what we were going to do, but also how guilty and embarrassed I felt about it. About how making the decision to quit my job was actually easier than making the decision about how to tell people about it.

I told Julia that I wasn’t sure I’d feel comfortable keeping this blog going. About how nauseatingly charmed my life must seem to many people. That I was concerned that writing about quitting my job and the adventures to follow would come across as entitled, conceited or boastful.

I told her about how I didn’t want to bring up emotions for folks that might look at my situation and think “must be nice” and resent me for it because they didn’t feel they could do something similar. I am a people pleaser with a deep need to be liked and this whole situation felt like I was pushing up against a barrier of what would be tolerated by others. I felt like I was about to “jump the shark,” as they say. 

Julia listened patiently.

She then asked me a series of probing questions about why I write this blog and what impact I thought or hoped it had on those that read it.

I told her that I write this blog for myself. It’s sort of like a personal journal that I use to record my thoughts and experiences…I just happen to open it up for others to read. I write it to help me remember the details of where I’ve been, what I’ve experienced and how I felt about it.

I wasn’t sure what to say in response to her question about the impact I thought it might have on others. I told her that I thought some people read it because they liked living vicariously through me. That I may do things and go places they don’t necessarily want to, but that they like the idea that they know someone that is out there doing and seeing those things. They like seeing an article about walking with polar bears or sleeping in a glass pod on a side of a cliff and thinking “hey, I know someone that did that!”

Here I was, sitting over now empty coffee cups with my dear friend who had just told me about all of the terribly stressful and difficult things going on in her life for her, her family and her friends — including some very real life or death sorts of things — and I had the nerve to be complaining about how my life was working out too perfectly and that I just couldn’t handle it. 

This was exactly the sort of dynamic I was worried about. That I would be flitting around in the world, and on my blog, in a happy delirium of the endless possibilities while others struggled through the numerous challenges life kept throwing their way.

This concern has been heightened all the more for me given the devastating economic and health impacts of the pandemic burning out of control here in the U.S., and the fact that Black and Brown folks in our communities continue to be placed in a position where they have to keep fighting for their lives and racial justice.  

She looked me dead in the eye and said “You bring me joy. Your boldness brings me joy. Whether you are quitting your job to live the life of your dreams, or you’re sleeping in a tent next to wild lions, knowing you are doing those things bring me joy. The vulnerability and authenticity with which you write about those things on your blog brings me joy.”

She asked me if I had ever heard the poem “Let Your Light Shine” by Marianne Williamson. I hadn’t, so she proceeded to pull it up on her phone and read it aloud to me.

I sat there bawling. Julia sharing those words with me was exactly what I needed to hear.

She helped me see that I could be…that I should be…unapologetic about the rainbows and unicorns shooting out of my ass because they bring joy and meaning to others, including herself. Her words and wisdom, as is always the case in my precious conversations with Julia, were such a gift. 

A few days later I was talking with my friend John who is spending his COVID-19 lockdown time in New Zealand. With travel restrictions lifting slightly he was able to relocate from Auckland to Wellington. I decided to look at a map to try to remember where I had gone during a similar drive and found the name of a tiny little town, with a big name, in the middle of nowhere that sounded familiar. 

I clicked on the town of Whangamomona on the map, then on the images that sometimes come up in the map app, to try to jog my memory about if I had been there before. (Turns out I had — Glenn and I had done an awesome rail-bike tour out of that town!)

In clicking through the images people had posted on Google Maps I came across a photo where the “Let Your Light Shine” poem had been painted on the side of a building in Whangamomona. Coincidence? 

Technically, something like that happening (where you stumble upon some obscure piece of information⁠—often an unfamiliar word or name⁠—and soon afterwards encounter the same subject again, often repeatedly) is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, but I just like to think of it as a nice sign from the universe that I’m on the right track and that sharing my life with you all on this blog…unicorns, rainbows, warts and all…is meant to be. 

So, stay tuned for more blog posts about what comes next for Glenn and I. We honestly don’t know what we are going to do at this point. We had planned to hop on that spontaneous cheap-ticketed plane to Kenya in a couple of weeks, but that clearly isn’t happening. We’ll have to explore a bit closer to home for now.

Regardless of where we end up, we’re off into the great unknown and I’m glad you’re along for the ride! 

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