Embracing Our Current Emptiness

Do you ever feel a bit empty and not fully understand why? I think that’s been us this week. The thing with travelling is it leaves you a lot of time with your own thoughts. The long buses, or the time swinging in a hammock or lying on a beach. Maybe those last two seem super relaxing, they probably are when you are on holiday, but for me it’s changed this week. It’s officially moved from Summer holiday territory, to long term travel. All my colleagues at home are back to work, all Philly’s Uni friends have moved onto their next thing, and we are here, swinging on hammocks and drinking beer on the beach. Excuse me while I verbal diarrhoea my live thoughts here as I’m sure things will change as the weeks and months go by. However, right now we are having a lot of long talks and a lot of reflecting. I presume a lot of people who enter into long term travel experience similar things. I mean I could probably wait till we come out on the other side and have lovely dialogue about finding ourselves or some crap, but maybe people need to hear about people losing themselves as well.

I think for me the struggle is losing a sense of purpose, I feel a little aimless at the moment, and I am the type of person that needs a purpose, to be working towards something. I remember after Uni I missed that feeling of constantly having something on my mind, ya know, even when you were binge watching Scrubs, at the back of your mind you knew there was some work or assignment or revision you had to do. I remember telling my brother in law I thought I wanted to do teaching, and he said I would always be bringing work home, i would always have marking to do and planning, and I would never have a free evening or weekend again. He said teaching would consume my entire life, and for some reason that made me want to do it even more lol. I can’t switch off, I need to have something to do. Philly jokes even teaching wasn’t enough for me, I had to become a youth leader and have youth to worry about on the weekends and call throughout the week, and join the tennis committee so I had those emails and meetings to worry about. I personally need to be involved, I need a purpose, I need to be useful and here I have none of that.

It should be freeing, but it’s less peaceful freeing and more like wtf am I doing freeing. Perhaps this is the beginning of the “finding yourself” people talk about when you long term travel. When you don’t have the busyness of every day to distract you, where you are just confronted with the constant dialogue of your own mind. Don’t get me wrong, we are having lots of fun, but there is a lot of time between the fun where we are both questioning everything in our lives lol. What am I doing? What is important to me? Why are we here? What makes us happy? We appreciate now some of the things that made us happy back in London. Number one: Vegan food options – everywhere! London is so easy for us to eat out, any type of cuisine we want at any time is only a tube ride away. We miss that A LOT. We miss our local climbing centre @Stronghold we love you. We were climbing almost 4 times a week, now we’ve climbed 4 times in a month. I miss tennis, he misses playing music & drums, I miss Church, he misses time alone and we both miss seeing my awesome nieces all the time and our idiot cat.

Being away definitely makes you think about the things you value in life, the things that matter. Turns out food matters to us more than we both realised lol, the days we’ve had a kitchen and a veggie market have been amazing, I’ve really loved experimenting making some yum vegan food. I’ve also realised that plastic waste bothers me a lot more than I thought it did, as well as waste in general and the affect us humans and our consumerist ways are having on the Earth. Philly is realising how much he truly loves bouldering and that it brings him real peace, it’s something he wants to focus on more when we get back. More than ever, we are both realising that things brings us no real joy at all. We don’t miss our clothes, our stuff, our apartment or even our comfort, we miss a purpose.

I would encourage everyone to take time out from the busyness of their life to try and reflect a bit more. Even though it’s difficult here constantly doing it, I reckon trying to do it a bit in everyday life is probably really good for mental health. Also, if anyone else out there is trying something new and like us are wondering what the frig you are doing, I would say persevere! Embrace feeling lost, because only when you are lost can you be truly found (or some similar cliche). Well, we hope so anyway!

Philly & Keely

The choices that brought us to South America

So here we are on our final day in Quito, Ecuador writing about the choices that brought us here. It all started two summers ago, we were travelling through Asia with our friends Damian and Georgia. They were heading to Canada next and then planning to do a South America trip. We joked about maybe joining them in S.A. for a few weeks in summer 2019. After that trip many months passed without thinking about S.A. Over a year later from initial convo we see them again and we talk about this potential trip. We say we will try come for up to 6 weeks, then Georgia joked 6 months, we all laughed and then looked at each other and said, maybe we could do six months??

This began a long process of discussions between the two of us about how feasible this was and what it would mean for our lives. The more we talked the more ludicrous it seemed. Philly would be graduating Uni summer 2019 (mature student beasting his Creative Musicianship degree), he was worried about the risk of leaving the music scene for 6 months as soon as he graduated. As for me, I had started a new job which I really loved and didn’t want to leave, the thought of having to start all over again at another school when we came back was soul destroying. We had our rental apartment, where we were signed into lease which still has 7 months left on it this summer. There was also the fact that we had literally no savings at that point to pay for 6 months travelling, as well as the responsibility of our awesome cat, Gus.

So based on all that, when we talked about it, it seemed like all logic pointed to this being a terrible idea. We would almost talk ourselves out of it or let other peoples opinions sway us in what we should do: “you should focus on your career”, “you should wait another year”, “you should have at least X amount of money”, “you shouldn’t leave London music scene", “you should be settling down”, “you should be moving back to Ireland”, “you should be having kids”, “you shouldn’t go it’s too dangerous... too foolish... too expensive”. However, none of the logical advice seemed to land with us. We realised that choosing not to go meant we were buying into societies view of success, the things we were afraid of losing were irrelevant in the grand scheme of life to us. So similarly to when we moved to Australia and when we moved to London, we made a decision based on what felt right in our gut, not from a list of pros and cons defined by those around us. Sometimes its easy to stay in your current chapter of life because its safe and comfortable and familiar. The safe decision for us would have been to laugh off our friends comment and stay in London, but we never want to make a decision to stay out of fear or comfort, in every chapter of our lives we always want to pursue joy, in all it’s scary uncertainty.

I personally find it really difficult to watch people around me make decisions based on fear, Philly thinks i get too emotionally invested in peoples life decisions and struggle not to get involved. It’s true I get upset when people don’t make the life decisions I think they should, but in my defence, it’s only when I know they are lying to themselves. People can make whatever life decisions they want, but don’t lie to yourself about why you are making them. Watching people hold onto toxic relationships because they are afraid they will get someone worse or no one at all, or people staying in a job that makes them miserable because of financial security, or buying a house because its the next logical life step even though they don’t want to settle just hurts me. If you are staying in a relationship because of fear of the unknown without them, that’s the wrong reason to be in one. If you are staying in a job you hate because its safe, you need to decide which is more important to you, the security of money or pursuing something you truly love. Then again, I haven't lived your life, I dont know what history people are making their decisions based on, so really what right do I have to assume I know what's best. Maybe I do care too much, but if you ask yourself why you are making a choice and the answer is fear, is it the right choice? Only you can judge that.

Everyone has something that will bring them joy, something that drives them. For some people it’s money, for some it’s family, or having a nice home to make your own, or career success, a loving relationship, adventure, travel, whatever it is. I’m not here telling everyone they should travel more, because that wouldn't bring everyone joy, but I just want people to stop allowing fear to dictate their life choices, if we did we would still be in our home town in our lovely little house 8 years later. For us we just have to take life one chapter at a time. Don’t get me wrong, its frigging scary sometimes, not knowing what you are doing next can be overwhelming, like what is Philly doing when we get back, what’s our living situation going to be as we are effectively homeless after a couple weeks.? Or many other unkowns we have waiting for us. (I’m super lucky that my school are allowing me to come back after S.A. so that’s one less thing to worry about) However, the fear of what would come on the other side was not enough to define our decision.

Philly’s key question in life is “what’s the alternative?” I reckon we should all ask ourselves that in the face of fear. Maybe instead of thinking about all the things that might happen if you make the bold decision, you should think about what will happen if you don’t. For example: are you too afraid to leave that job? So your alternative is to stay there and work a job you hate, 9-5 for the next forty/fifty years, taking a few weeks holiday to keep you alive? Living for the weekend and your holidays, that’s the life you are choosing for yourself? As I’ve said before, we need to be aware that not deciding is a decision in itself, you are deciding to settle for what you have.

Look, we are completely out of our depth, we know barely any Spanish, we have no concrete plans and we definitely do not have enough money, but we are absolutely pumped! We chose to lean into the fear and step into the unknown because what was the alternative? Ask yourself, what’s yours?

Philly & Keely

Never pursue societies view of success, pursue joy.