It’s official.
Sometime in August 2014, I’ll be packing up my family onto about 200 square feet of fibreglass and sailing to the Caribbean for a year long exploration of pirates, tropical islands and ourselves.
Taking a year to do this has been a dream of ours for a while now. But there is a big difference between dreaming and doing. Thinking back though, the decision to do this was such a tiny thing, just the firing of a handful of synapses in my brain.
When you have a dream, whether it be running your first marathon, starting a business, or sailing to distant shores, it’s all too easy to find 101 reasons why you can’t do it. Perhaps what stops many of us is fear. I can certainly relate to that. Fear of crossing the atlantic, fear of coming back to no job, fear of the challenge of cramming my three boys into such a small space for so long. All it takes us to launch us a path towards a goal is just such a seemingly simple change in our mindset.
In your head you have to go from, “I can never do that”, to “I am going to do that.”
It’s really such a simple thing, yet for some reason it’s so hard to do. But once that shift is made, all the reasons you couldn’t do something suddenly become just problems you have to tackle along the way.
Our problems were many:
- We had no boat
- We knew little about sailing
- We had regular jobs
- We couldn’t afford it
Once we made the decision though, we started to plan and bite off these problems slowly, but surely. We found out boat, an old 1974 Tartan 41, and started working to build our sailing experience. Going offshore will still be a huge step for us, but now I know that all I need to do to make that happen is to make that tiny synapse fire in my brain, and cast off the ropes at dock and keep on going out of the harbour.
If you have a dream, I hope this might inspire you to pursue it. Make that decision to DO it and everything will follow. Maybe you can leave a comment below and share what it is!
You can follow us as we prepare for our journey, and share our experiences at www.sailingwithkids.net