I run through the world, thinking about tomorrow
Say your dream is to travel. See places you didn't know exist or places you've only seen in pictures and television. Say you spend 17 years, together with your spouse, making moves to achive that dream. When you start out, maybe you realize that you need to pick between realizing this dream or having children, like all your friends seem to be doing and what society is pressuring you to do.
And then you realize that you need a certain amount of money to do the thing and what kind of work or job opportunities need to come along in order to have that money. You move states a few times. Switch careers. Leave your social networks and start over and over and over, all the while getting older and knowing in your heart that you don't like very many people and forging strong friendships is only getting harder with time.
You drive a 2005 Mini Cooper instead of upgrading your car. You pay off 100K in debt for the first six years of your marriage. Every good decision promising you that you're a little bit closer. Every setback feeling like the end of the world.
No one really considers what it really costs to do the thing you dream about.
Vida and I are leaving tomorrow for our fabled 12-18 month world tour, the first leg starting in Valladolid, Mexico, and making our way south to Buenos Aires. We're 44 and 42, once again leaving Santa Barbara, a place we both love, saying goodbye to our adopted family and friends, to explore the world. Waking up in new places and adapting to new routines and trying to figure out how we don't get lonely. We're not one of these couples who only need each other. Zoom is probably going to be our friend here. And I'll need to get comfortable with change, a thing that I am not comfortable with historically.
Zach you don't sound excited.
I am! I promise you that I am. But it's important to also talk about all the hard parts, not just the parts people put on Instagram. I'm going to miss my job and my people and yes, it's going to be amazing and wonderful and I hope to grow immensely from the whole experience. But I can be sad too. I can miss the comforts of home and making dinner in my beautiful kitchen and going for walks with Patrick on Thursday nights. All of this is valid, right? To be a little scared of the unknown? I'm not the largest fan of new beginnings. I don't like the ends of things either.
But late tomorrow evening, we'll be past all that. The new thing will have started. We will have started. And there's so much to experience, memories that I will be grateful for when I'm 80. If I live to 80.
Pitter patter, let's get at'r.
By the way, you can follow our travels on https://instagram.com/teamzida.
