One Giant Step…Is All It Takes

How did we manage a decision as big as this? Like most decisions, it is an evolution of thoughts and ideas that converged into the end result.

As I said here, Jason and I have talked on and off about moving away somewhere.  New Year’s Eve this past year saw me making the first New Year’s Resolution I’ve made in a long time - I resolved to look into what it would take to move somewhere…anywhere.  I felt it was time to ‘walk the talk’.

Slowly, I started finding websites about working overseas, researching working visas, thinking about where we could relocate to.  Years ago, fresh out of school, I had found a book called Living and Working Overseas.  It provides all kinds of information, advice and references for research - I recommend it as a starting point for anyone thinking of moving overseas. I looked the book up again to get the updated copy.

If you find the book on Amazon.ca, as we did, and you look down the page, you’ll find the ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ section - it is this that was our undoing.

Amazon was having a shipping special that week and, if we spent just a few more dollars, we could have free shipping of our item.  Jason, who was the one doing the ordering, noted that there was a book in the ‘Customers Who Bought This Item’ section that looked interesting.  He added the second book to our order, thus saving us the shipping, and changed the course of our plans.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts came with the original book order.  We dutifully thumbed through the Living and Working Overseas book and continued to bookmark sites and resources that would help with our hopeful relocation.  Then J picked up the travel book and read it’s small volume quickly.  He didn’t say much.  I picked it up and devoured it.  

The book is a mixture of travel philosophy, how-to and inspiration. For me, the seed was sown, and given it was spring-time, the conditions were ripe for rapid growth. We had been spinning our wheels with the re-location idea for a few months and the ideas just weren’t ’sticking’.  We hadn’t talked about it but neither of us seemed wholly committed to the plan.  Traveling around the world somehow made more sense to me.  A chance to try other places out, see if we could manage somewhere else, anywhere else.

I told Jason of my idea one day in the car on the way to some event or other and was surprised that he didn’t immediately jump on my bandwagon.  Had he not been in my head with all my planning for the last few weeks?  We didn’t discuss it much for a couple of weeks - each mulling the idea over.  When the time came to discuss it again the discussion wasn’t about whether we would do it or not, but when and how - we both knew that this idea was going to stick - the decision had been made.