What if it was right in front of you?
They say fish discover water last...
Have you ever been so close to something you looked right passed it? Like holding your hand up to your face, spreading your fingers wide, and looking right through them. It’s so close you can’t see it.
During coffee with a friend, where we tend to “solve all the problems of the world,” I realized my entire life has involved travel.
As a military brat, I’ve packed and unpacked since I was six months old.
I moved 13 times before going to college, spent twenty years in the Navy, and took a train across country to get to my wedding.
I’ve seen almost every country in the pacific rim, shopped the Christmas markets in Germany, managed to get myself to the Caribbean more often than I can count, and drove across country with my daughter - twice - just because it was an adventure.
I’ve cruised through the Panama Canal and by the fjords in Norway, explored private islands in the pacific, and seen Tasmanian Devils in Hobart, Australia.
And I’m currently wrapping up a six-month adventure with my husband cruising the Inter-coastal Waterway on our North Pacific 450 trawler - Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Bar Harbor, Maine and back.
Travel isn’t something I “do” - travel is part of who I am. It’s part of the fabric.
I seek it, fold my life around it, and am either traveling or planning the next trip.
Travel for me is a necessary part of living a first class life.
Living a first class life is the ultimate adventure.
Implied in the question I ask every stranger, “How has your day been?” is an underlying curiosity about whether they are doing what they were created to do.
Are they truly, deeply happy?
Does what they currently do bring them joy?
How long are they willing to “wait for the right time” to start living like there’s no tomorrow?
Retiring from the Navy, I knew my non-negotiables going forward had to include being there for my family, not working for anyone else, and the freedom to travel at will.
Understanding what you want your life to look like includes charting out work you love that will fit into that design so you can love what you do and earn what you’re worth.
It means designing your life around your work, not the other way around.
And it means saying, “no” to opportunities in conflict with that design.
Easy? Nope.
Worth it? Absolutely.
Are you living by accident?
Consider how you got where you are today - did you just fall into your life and work because that is what circumstances allowed?
Did you follow the path of least resistance, go with the flow, and never stop to ask if you were meant for something completely different?
Or have you always known you were meant to say or do or be something distinct but have kept it hidden away because it somehow doesn’t “fit?”
Your life should make you feel alive.
Instead of working fifty weeks of the year so you can go on vacation to escape your real life, why not define what your first class life looks like and then design work that fits into that life?
Kind of like packing your essentials first then seeing what will tuck in around them.
Start with defining your non-negotiables and see where it goes from there.
I’d love to hear your ideas on this - leave me a comment and tell me what you think.
Take charge! - Ann