I have just re-read the previous blog and it all sounds way too easy. I had an idea, I shared it with my wife, she didn't like it, we had several months of major discussions, then she did like it, so we made a plan, we did some research and voilà we were going to be living on our yacht in The Med.
However life is not just about ideas, logistics and plans. Life is also about human emotions, and one emotion in particular that woke me up at 3am for months is FEAR! I once read that fear can be looked at in two ways. It can be either Forget Everything And Run - or - Face Everything And Rise. As a Sagittarian I chose the second description.
Let me tell you a bit more about what I would be woken up by at 3am.
There are at least 2 little voices inside my head. One is the wise one, that says things like "You should take an umbrella, it's going to rain." And the other is the one that second guesses my decisions and makes me unsure. It was always the second one that woke me up at 3am saying things like "Are you sure you've made the right decision?" "You do realise that you're giving up everything that you've worked for." "How are you going to know for sure if the boat you buy is the right one?" "What happens if your idea fails?" "How are you going to support yourself and your wife?"
My usual remedy for being terrorised by myself at 3am was to get up and watch YouTube videos of other people who had successfully done what we were proposing to do. I watched as people experienced various ups and downs, setbacks and triumphs, and realised they were just ordinary people like I was - and if they could do it, I could do it. But it was still very scary and it went on for weeks.
As well as all the 3am doubts and fear there was also the small hurdle of the fact that neither myself nor my wife had ever done any sailing before! When my wife Aannsha pointed this out, I had casually replied that "We didn't know how to drive a car until we took lessons." I guess a future blog will reveal how casually I should or should not have made that statement.
There were daytime fears too. Actually these were more like major stresses than fears:
The stress of renovating our home and doing all the work ourselves to save money. (In the end the renovations took us three and a half months). The stress of not knowing how long it would take to sell our house once it was ready for market. The stress of watching our credit card debt grow knowing that if we didn't sell it was going to take a long time to pay down. The stress of deciding what to do with all of our furniture, our belongings and our sentimental possessions. The stress of shutting down my business and dealing with accountants and the tax office. The stress of shutting down multiple bank accounts and making sure that we didn't forget about some direct debit payment. I could go on, because there are lots of examples, but I hope that you're beginning to see that there were a hundred and one large, medium and small details that all had to be addressed and they all had to be dealt with in the correct order at just the right time.
One of the biggest day time stresses was knowing that we'd have to say goodbye to our 19 year old son Luke. We asked him several times if he wanted to come with us but he'd always said no, explaining that he had his own plan, his own direction and that he wanted to follow his path. Talking with Aannsha about it, neither of us could clearly envisage how that moment of goodbye at the airport would be. I'm even getting teary-eyed right now just writing about it. I know it's going to be the toughest part of this whole journey.
Selling the house turned out to be one of the easiest parts. We put in the effort, did the renovations diligently with
the expert help from our good friend Gordon, and had 'Dan the man' as our real estate agent. Our house was listed on a Saturday in October, the following Saturday we had an open house and quite a lot of people came to look. By Monday we had a 35 day contract in place at a price that was well beyond our initial expectations.
The dream - the plan, was in motion, there was no turning back now and surprisingly, once we had a sale contract on the house, the little voice just stopped waking me up at 3am. I figure that it gave up because there was nothing it or I could do now that the house was sold, except move forward and make a list - a BIG list - of things that had to be done in a relatively short time frame. Our planned departure from Australia, the country that had been my home for the last 20 years was 18th December 2017, my 55th birthday.
Follow A B Sea on No Foreign Land