Today we said goodbye to my Mum and Dad; Ness bid farewell to her parents over the last week. Just some friends and siblings to go over the next few days before we leave on Tuesday.
Saying goodbye to our friends and family has been an interesting experience in itself. The first thing we keep telling ourselves and others is that we are only going for a year, not forever. Though to our neice Halle, our soon to be born nephew, and a few others, a year may be a long time, but for most of us it will probably go very quickly. We are sad to miss some big events in people’s lives, but we need to keep reminding ourselves and others that we will actually be back very soon. As we embark on something we have aspired to for years, it is very easy for us to get into the mentality that we are done with work and real life, but the reality is that we will be back to this life and our loved ones very soon. We have taken to saying ‘see you soon’ rather than goodbye.
Nonetheless, the prospect of an absence does cause some reflection. Not that we didn’t know already, but we find ourselves truly seeing how much the people around mean to us, how lucky we are to have such wonderful people in our lives, and that we mean quite a lot to them too. We reflect on what we will miss, and what it special to us. Above all else in the long picture of life, the most special thing to us are the people around us.
In 3 days we leave the UK and our life of routine, control, stability, into a completely different lifestyle. We enter a world where we have a strange juxtaposition of having less control but with complete freedom, barely any possessions but everything we need. Even having emptied our house and said our goodbyes, it feels totally abstract. I still can’t imagine what my life will feel like in 3 days time.
Having answered ‘what’s the plan‘, the most common question now is what we are we looking forward to the most. This is a difficult question as it goes into expectations, a dangerous subject when putting many years of savings into something as open as travelling the world. For myself at least, I have hopes… hopes of climbing great rock in beautiful places, hopes of seeing new landscapes and experiencing different cultures, but I have tried to avoid expectations. From the little travelling I have done, the theme throughout has been that the best parts were not those I expected, but rather the chance events, the welcoming stranger, the person or experience who taught me something about myself or the world. I think what I’m looking forward to the most are the people… the new people to meet, and the person I have chosen to travel with through the world.
I suppose that, if I were to have a point to this post, it would be that in a week of goodbyes, I see that where we come from and where we are going to, it is all about the people.
