The Beginning (Part One)

Welcome to our blog! We’re taking a year out from our regular work back in the UK and travelling around Latin America.

I’m beginning this story a little late… we are now one month (5 weeks in fact) into our journey. We landed in Costa Rica early evening on the 4^th January with two very tired children after a very long flight. That could be a neat point at which to begin the story and it’s certainly the beginning of a chapter but before we got to that we had the whole chapter before of ‘Packing Up Our Lives’ which was an enlightening and revealing experience itself and also deserves telling.

I’d like to begin the story even further back – tracing this particular journey back to its very roots; or at least to where in my mind the seed first landed…

Several years ago when our eldest daughter Zia was only a year or so old we went away for a holiday in Menorca. A beautiful sunny spot in the Mediterranean. Both Rachael and I are fond of the warm weather and find the long cold winters hard going. For me at least this is partly to do with the fact that we (and I mean we in a more general sense) seem to live our lives out of sync with the seasons. Winter in Europe feels like a time to read, stay warm, cook, eat well, see friends and family and imagine and plan ahead for the coming year. We do still practice this in at least a small fragment around the Christmas holidays and it always feels right at the time but my feeling was always that it needed to be much more of the time. In the Winter I would happily hanker down and gather my resources and in the Spring and Summer conversely I would happily go with the flow and work according to my much higher energy levels. However, tethered to the clock and the 40 hour working week regardless of season I always found myself feeling out of kilter in the Winter months. Perhaps this underlying cultural practice was the water that helped this particular seed to germinate?

Over next few years both myself and Rachael would feel this yearly discomfort and as Summer came to a close we would attempt to prolong it with a trip to Spain. We would flirt with the idea of relocating. By the third year we had established a pattern: we would plan our trip with the intention of getting away and having time and space to reimagine our lives and consider what we wanted to do and where we wanted to be. However… once we got away it would feel stressed and pressured to try and squeeze such big decisions into such a small container. A week or a fortnight simply wasn’t enough time to make those kinds of choices and not wanting to ruin our break we would abandon the plan and set about trying to enjoy the short trip away.

Finally, after a couple of years of repeating this process we were able to observe and recognise both the process and the problem. One morning we managed to get a little bit of time to ourselves and grab a coffee whilst leaving the children with Rachael’s parents so that we could discuss what we wanted to do. Having recognised this first problem, that of trying to fit big decisions into too small a container we concluded that we needed to create a bigger container and from there we settled upon the idea of having a year away. The idea was that if we had a whole year away from our usual surroundings, routine, schedule, etc that we would actually have enough time to fully relax and be able to make the big decisions we felt were needed without feeling so time pressured.

I can’t remember now the exact order in which things happened but I do recall that around the same time we had both been listening to various podcasts and in one of them we had heard our friend Joe Brewer. We both really liked the way that Joe was framing and describing some of our planetary predicaments as being a result of cultural practices… somewhere along the line we also heard that he had recently made a move with his family to Costa Rica. These things all happened in a bit of a cluster and I don’t know now which came first but I do know that it was these various things conspiring which first had us make contact with Joe and it has certainly been an ongoing influence in getting us to where we are now. The small irony in this story is that although we got in touch with Joe shortly after hearing about his Costa Rican adventures that he had in fact already left the country and moved to Barichara in Colombia!

It’s worth noting at this point in our tale that armed with our plans to create a year shaped container for our decision making process we were blissfully ignorant of the approach of any global pandemic lurking around the corner. It was probably still early 2019 and we set about beginning to plan and save with the overly optimistic view that we would probably set our plan in motion within a year or so! Both fortunately and unfortunately this was not to be the case…