What the heck am I feeling?

by Pedro Flores (Portugal)

A leap into the unknown Portugal

For a person living the so called “normal” life, the daunting 9-5 or the grid, traveling is something exciting that requires minimum planning, low risks and small effort. The amount of traveling in a year is actually quite limited so one must make the most out of it and play safe when decision making is necessary. That´s me… a 38 year old guy who studied Marketing and always worked full time in big companies. Though my passion for traveling has been always there, the circumstances of my work life did not allow me to be very adventurous in terms of expanding my travel goals and my ambitions have been pushed back in detriment of my career. So when it comes to holidays, I´ve been doing a lot but definitely not enough! Well… this is about to change and I will explain you why! It all started in 2017, my corporate job was flourishing but still I felt that I was not living my life in the way I wanted to be happy. A lot of introspective moments were driving me crazy and my will to quit everything, pack my stuff, hit the road without a defined destination was growing every day and I felt I was craving the feeling of ultimate freedom. Then the last drop spilled the water… one day, during my lunch time at the office, I received a phone call from my doctor saying I should leave the office immediately as I was severally sick with a dangerous and contagious disease. 45 minutes after, I was in the hospital sitting in front of a doctor who was telling me that she was not sure if I was going to survive this one. “What? Is that it? I came to this world to study, then work and now I will depart to the other side so much earlier than expected and with still so much to do?” The next couple of months were at home trying to recover and reflecting a lot about the purpose of life (who never did that?) The idea of being free and explore the world was growing and I promised myself if I would recover I was going forward with my dream of touring around the world for one year. And here I am…this year, me and my wife got a sabbatical year from our companies and we are taking action. We bought a one way ticket to South America and sold all our stuff to pursue this crazy dream! We cant afford to take the risk of regretting in 10 years that we could have done it but we didn’t. The funny part is that we are having a lot of mixed feelings as I believe its normal…in one hand there is happiness and excitement and on the other hand there is fear and anxiety! In the end of the day, we are doing what we wanted so badly so I will just take all of this confusion as part of the process! Truth is, I rather look back at my life and say "I can´t believe I did that" instead of saying "I wish I did that!" that is my motto. Just go...and if I fear...I will go frightened. We don´t know what is going to happen and how things will develop but we definitely have to do it despite of what is ahead of us is totally unknown. But we need to go just to find out right?