Someday-Things [#13]

Some people are confused by everything we’re doing. Some are inspired. Some are indifferent. Some are terrified — sorry, Mom. Most we’ve come across are at least curious on some level about the wheres or hows or whats or whys of the Boat Dream.

• Where did it come from?
• How will it work?
• Where are we going?
• What are we thinking?

And many have asked, “Why now?”

Our simplest answer to that one has a lot to do with Someday-Things.

We all have a Someday-Thing: a Bucket List trip, a When-I-Get-Older, a Once-I’ve-Saved-Enough, a When-I-Retire, a Someday-I’ll… Even if we’re living our very best life, odds are solid, there’s at least something we’re waiting to do until there’s a “better” time.

Sailing around the world — immersive travel and hands-on education with and for our kids while sailing our home around the globe — is our Someday-Thing.

Like most, we’ve endured our share of days (and weeks and a handful of years) that seemed unreasonably long — like we’d never get to the end of that crap chapter no matter how fast we could turn each page.

But most of the time, it feels like we’re writing our story faster than we can read and enjoy it.

We look around and wonder how we arrived at our 40s from our 20s without blinking twice. Did we forget to be 30? When did our babies grow facial hair? When did we even have babies?

It’s clear that we’re clipping along through a lovely little chapter where someone’s middle-aged parents are fighting to be the protagonists, but who are these people? Us? Surely not.

Not when we can’t remember reading anything past the pages when those now-halfway-to-old people were 24 and awesome.

So there’s that — the banality of it all.

At 40ish, I don’t think there’s a way to cash out, buy a boat, and prepare to sail around the world without being a bit of a mid-life-crisis cliché. (Though we’d argue in circles of platitudes that this is far more than that.)

John and I could have waited to do this. We could’ve convinced ourselves it would be better/easier/cheaper/safer to wait and travel this path without the boys. We could’ve planned to live out this fantasy as retired 70-year-olds. We could’ve saved more money, planned longer, done more research, prepared more, prepared better. We could’ve started next year or in two years, or 20. We could’ve kept resting on Someday.

But “could’ve” quickly becomes a scene-stealer in one of those tired chapters that drags on indefinitely.

Eager to avoid that time bandit, we decided to reframe our questions:

• Do we have enough money?
• Have we planned and prepared enough?
• Is taking the boys nonnegotiable?
• Is there a way we can make this work?

With that, our not-yets became yeses. Granted, we defined enough as loosely as possible, but Someday-Things can’t become Right-Now-Things without a pile of yeses. Our not-yets were keeping our Someday-Thing a Someday-Thing.

There could very well be a better time to do what we’re doing. But what if there’s not?

What if our Someday could — and should — be Right Now? We finally gathered enough yeses to find out.