The Travels of a Wild Woman

For most of my life I’ve been a traveler.  At the age of eight my family moved from rural Alaska to Hawaii, and for the rest of my youth we moved houses every year or two without fail.  New schools, new houses, new friends was a big part of my upbringing. My parents had a big influence on how I processed that newness. They always were excited about the next big opportunity.  The nicer house, the new location, the new idea. We rode those opportunities like waves, and when one failed we always had new ones to replace them with. As far as friends, I kept many as penpals telling them of my wild adventures.  My parents taught me I was given a chance to reinvent myself everytime I started a new school. I used this to really assess who I was and who I wanted to be.

Everything about being in new places excited me.  I loved being in Hawaii where the schools were so diverse, and I love observing the multi-cultural dynamics, learning about new histories and cultures, and engaging in new adventures.  I was a traveler before I know what that was.

When I was 14, I took a trip to Japan with one other girl my age.  We each lived with separate host families for 6 weeks and my life was violently shaken upside down.  We had tofu and whole baked fish for breakfast. We took two trains, a bus, and walked for 45 minutes each way in the humid heat in heavy long uniforms.  I was thrown into a world where I could not read the writing nor speak the language, and I had to learn how to get creative quickly. This experience rocked my life in a real way, and ever since I was obsessed with the challenge of international travel.  I loved being uncomfortable and figuring it out. It was the beginning of the next 15 years of my life as a world traveller.

Many of my travels I have taken with travel buddies, but many others I have been solo.  I savor each experience, and think back to every experience like one think backs to a good meal.  Traveling is one of the times I feel most alive. It is when you have to trust people more than normal, see things done in different ways, see the world and its many diverse relationships interpreted in differently.  

When traveling solo I like to get up with the sun and walk around new cities.  I love seeing a city in its sleeping state. I feel like I am experiencing something special, that not everyone gets to see.  I love to watch a city wake up. I love partaking in the morning beverage and breakfast of choice of a particular area. Fried bread and cafe con leche or hot tea and fruit or tofu and a whole fish, let me watch the sunrise…  I love learning new languages and seeing the ingenuity at every level of humanity. I love the raw approaches to business and the true connectedness that still exists in many corners of the world.

Travel, for me, puts me into alignment.  It is a challenging game if discovery that turns all my senses on.  Does travel do this for you? Do you have any wild travel stories you would like to share?  I would love to hear them!

When you get sick of making excuses...

For 6 years, I’ve had this vision of the life I wanted to live.  I’ve dreamed of living in a tropical climate, sun-kissed hair, eating healthy, colorful food, and spending time in the ocean daily.  I dreamed of sailboats and fishing. I dreamed of having a family in this environment, my children running around naked like sea gypsies- tan, happy, healthy, and strong from a life near the ocean. 

For 6 years I have found every excuse in the book of why I couldn’t just go and live this life.  I made an excuse that I needed way more money to survive in that environment. I even went to the point of saying I needed 7 streams of passive income before I could possibly settle down in paradise!  I have been working around the clock, in big, big cities in urban areas for 6 years and dreaming of being warm and healthy. At one point I had saved quite a bit of money, but instead of going and investing that money in a beautiful tropical location, I decided I needed to be even MORE prepared and invested it into my parent’s business and went to work for them...hundreds of miles from the sea in the dessert.  I sat at a desk for 10 hours a day hunched over my computer drinking coffee and staring out the window into corn fields. I spent many days looking at my instagram of beautiful beach babes and would look online at bikinis that would someday fit and I would someday wear. If you know me, this didn’t used to be me. I was always the go-getter, that went after what she wanted. What the heck happened?

I slowly began to ask myself questions that ultimately made me really question my behavior.

Why was this dream so difficult to accomplish? 

Why was it more comfortable just working and working for a goal, but never making the jump?

How did I get this way?  How is the fear of “making it” keeping me from even trying?  As I get older, I feel like these strange fears easily creep in without even consciously letting them in.  If I’ve never had difficulty finding work, why am I so worried about having everything perfect before I move to the sea?

The egg began to open.  I came to the realization that I’d been dancing around my goals because I was afraid of failure.  I was afraid that if I actually moved to the tropics, and I didn’t make it-- then what?? What would people think of me?  For some reason I felt ok with doing these things in my early 20s. No one took me too seriously. But in my 30s? I felt this overwhelming pressure that I had to really “make it.”  There was this unstated pressure that play time was over.

And you know what, I didn’t consciously agree with that.  I was unconsciously making decisions that brought me farther from the beach than I had ever been.

It was then that I decided to make some rapid decisions to get myself closer to my goals.  The rapid decisions built momentum. I decided I’d rather be dancing closer to my goals, even with the potential of failure,  then wait until I was perfect or the situation was perfect. You know it’s the right thing when things start feeling good again.  When the flow starts to happen. I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to my dreams.

Stay tuned for this beach babe to make some dreams become reality.

Has this happened to you?  Do you ever feel the pressure to “make it”, and so you leave your dreams for “later”?  I want to hear about it!