Life in transition
Our beginnings of the life nomadic
Every voyage starts somewhere. So it seems fitting to start this substack voyage by going back to where our real-life story started and how it led me and my wife to where we are now.
People, as a species, were nomadic for much longer than they were stationary. Being in motion and exploring is in our genes. That’s what propelled human development. At least, that’s how I see this.
So I feel it was just natural, that when we were 26, my wife and I, and our little son, packed and left our home country in search of something new. It was driven largely by the desire to experience something different, something new, see the world, and find new opportunities. We moved a lot for about 5 years but eventually settled in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. We called it home.
Years passed, a second son showed up, kids grew, and careers evolved.
Eventually, the voyaging fever came back. Now, free of obligations towards our kids, we could go. We chose to travel by sailboat, probably the slowest and most challenging way. But also one that puts us close to nature and lets us appreciate the world from a completely different perspective. 2 years ago, we again packed and left the life we had behind and started a new life nomadic.
Today, I am writing this from the cabin of our sailboat, sitting in Barra de Navidad, Mexico. We are about a week away from sailing out of here on what will be the second largest phase of our voyage - exploring Central America from Mexico down to Panama. It will be a lot of new experiences for us. We are both excited and apprehensive about it, as it is normal before doing something new and unknown. But we are committed and will do our best to succeed. Over the last few years, my wife and I learned to ride the emotional rollercoaster that comes with this lifestyle. So far, every season brought something new, and every season has been full of transition. We gain something, and we give something. It teaches us a lot - appreciation of the moment, cherrinshing the friends we have and new people we meet. It teaches us that life is full of constant change and transition.
This brings memories of the huge transition we went through when our journey started two years ago. Below is a post originally written for our blog at the time of one of the most significant transitions in our lives. This was written in August of 2021.
The months of July and August have been the time of the transitions. It has been an amazing and, at the same time, a hard-to-comprehend experience.
The whole process of preparing for our extended cruise has accelerated in the final months. During that time, we have sometimes operated as if on autopilot, just checking off one task after another and pushing forward to meet our timeline. We have methodically dismantled 20 years of our life in the Pacific Northwest, disentangled ourselves from our possessions, obligations, and routines, and embarked on a new and unknown life. It has been exhilarating and scary at the same time, and it is still hard to describe.
In those final months, we have accomplished an extraordinary set of tasks:
Completed some still outstanding boat projects, including the full rigging replacement (finished in July), solar panel installation, and a long list of smaller ones.
Finished selling, donating, or throwing away our possessions. This went from a methodical and thoughtful process that started many months ago, to an in-a-minute decision making - do we need it or not?
Quit work.
Packed two containers of furniture and belongings and shipped those to our older son, in Michigan.
Flew with our dog to Michigan to leave her there. It was a great visit and a chance to catch a breath for us.
Packed our younger son, and drove a U-Haul truck with his possessions and the three of us to Tuscon, AZ. He has been accepted to the University of Arizona, and the school year there starts in the second half of August. It was a 3-day trip in a rattling truck driving through a desert sometimes covered in smoke from many fires in California and Oregon. Something we hope we never have to do again.
Moved the remainder of our possessions to a storage unit and emptied the house. We managed to fit into a 75 sq ft unit, and we started with a 5-bedroom, 3300 sq ft house. We are proud of ourselves :)
Moved to the boat. August 14th was the last night we slept in our house. We still went there a few times after that, but we switched to living on the boat and visiting the house.
Started the process of selling the house.
Sold 2 cars, the last one a day before the departure.
The most incredible of all this was the fact that we moved to the boat on August 15th, Sunday, just as we wrote on a whiteboard in our kitchen a long while ago, when we just started dreaming of this journey. Having a deadline gives you focus, and it definitely worked for us.
In two short months, we transitioned from a full family, living in a suburb house, going to work and school, and living what is essentially described as "normal life", to the two of us living on a boat, with no house and no car, and both our kids half a continent away. The physical transition took 2 months, but the mental one will for sure take a bit longer. Despite the fact that we wanted this change and planned it for some time and prepared for it, there is nothing that can prepare you for the actual amount of all those changes on all different levels when they happen in such a short amount of time.
The most difficult part was saying goodbyes. We had all of our friends, some alone, some in groups, come over and say bye to us. It was great to see them all and hear their encouragement and best wishes, and it was super hard to see that we are leaving them behind and that, for the foreseeable future, we will not be meeting them as often as we would like and that our lives and their lives are taking now very different courses.
In those hard moments, it helped us to think that nothing sits still. Our lives would evolve anyway, friends would perhaps move at some point, and changes would happen even if we stayed put. And we were ready for a change for some time now, and with the pandemic, we realized that we wanted it more than ever. We were set on a new course into the unknown.