Moment

Canal House in Strassbourg, France, 2004

    I don't remember the moment we first talked of a round-the-world journey. Sometime last spring we had this crazy idea: what if we took a year to travel around the world, experiencing different cultures, visiting friends, and seeing places that are significant to our faith as Orthodox Christians? This idea, instead of fading away like so many others, took root and began to grow. Over the last several months it's become the topic of much discussion, dreaming, and planning. We've been excited to find blogs, websites and even books written by families who've done similar things. We've gotten guide books from the library, printed out maps and colored in the countries we'd like to visit, and begun to make contacts in different places. Our kids talk about it with excitement. We've connected with and been encouraged by other traveling families and also received a lot of support from our friends and family. 

    Erik and I never intended to settle down in the United States and raise our family here. In fact, if you'd have told me ten years ago that I'd own a home in the suburbs and be driving a mini-van I'm sure I would have told you that was someone else's life, not mine. But one thing after another happened to keep us here. In our first year of marriage we had a baby and Erik had cancer; just a couple little reasons why we started putting down roots instead of stretching our wings. More babies joined us, we moved a couple more times, and ten years later here we are. Still. It's been good, and I'm grateful for this time; I don't regret being here at all. 


    We've always known, since before we got married, that we wanted to live a different sort of life; the surprising part is that we've been settled so long. I cannnot point to a moment where we knew we wanted to do something different; rather this is a culmination of many years of dreaming, hoping, and knowing that one day we would be going. While we've always planned to leave "someday", we also let ourselves get pretty settled. After our trip to Mexico last winter we came home knowing that it was time to start taking some serious steps toward launching out. Still unsure of exactly where we wanted to land, we came up with the idea of traveling slowly, stopping long enough to get a feel for places, and knowing that when the time is right we'll know where we're to land. 


    As I watch things unfold in our country, I feel more and more sure that this is the right decision for our family. Both Erik and I have spent time in many different countries, and we've been able to travel a fair bit with our kids as well. For me, I feel there is something alive, a part of me that awakens, when I travel. We've always been amazed at how well our kids travel, at how adaptable and uninhibited they are. We desire to expose them to places, to people, to ways of doing things that are different than what they know. We want them to learn firsthand as much as possible. We admire the way relationships take precedence over possessions in many of the places we've visited. As much as we attempt to instill this in our children, we find we're fighting an uphill battle against a culture that plagues them with marketing and that actively seeks to tear families apart. We realize we must fight to pull our family together, and for us we feel the best way to do that is to radically simplify our lives and launch into a different sort of life.

     It is a thousand little moments that have led us to this one; this one where we're ready to leave behind what is familiar and embrace a path somewhat uncertain. In a way, it's as if we've been preparing, or being prepared for this, for a lifetime. In looking back over my life, I'm often struck by how one thing leads to another, and the way not taken shapes our story too. Each moment we are offered a choice and it is all of those moments that make up a lifetime. I'm excited to see what is in store as we seek to live every moment to the fullest, to choose the things that are important and to see where the wind blows us. 




     This post was part of a group writing project of Families on the Move. You can read about the moment other families knew they wanted to change their life here:

• Living Outside of the Box: The Moments That Added Up
• Bohemian Mom: First Moment we Decided to Change our Life
• Worldschool Adventures: The Moment of Inspiration in Hoi An Vietnam
• Livin' on the Road: Whose Idea Was It? 
• Tripping Mom: The Moment I Decided to Live Abroad, Just Me and My Child
• The Great Family Escape: Capturing the Moment
• Family on Bikes: One Moment in Time: A Lifetime of Adventures
• Family Trek: The Moment we Knew we Were Made for More
• Raising Miro on the Road of LIfe: 'The Moment' is all there is
• New Life on the Road: It Only Takes a Moment