The Power of Now
When you get down to it, life is a series of moments strung together by the happy fact that you’re still alive and well. Nobody knows when it’s going to end, and most of the time, nobody really thinks about that kind of morbid stuff anyway. We just get on with our daily lives, in our routines, and trundle along. I don’t honestly think that there is anything wrong with this, either, as the songs, posters and inspirational speakers who exhort us to “live every day as if it were your last” are frankly bonkers. As a wise woman once said - ain’t nobody got time for that. That being said, sometimes your daily life or your routines cease to serve you and it becomes more of a drain than a trundle. As you may have already seen (in our first blog post), that’s exactly what has happened to us and we have decided to peace out of adult life for a year and go travelling around NZ in our camper van.
But why NOW? Why would we choose this very moment to do it? Honestly, it’s because I think there’s a real power in the now. It’s immediate, it’s here and you can no longer kick the can down the road. It’s incredibly easy to decide you’ll do something “one day”, but when will that day actually come? I’ve wanted to live and travel in a camper van ever since I became aware that this was a thing you were legally allowed to do here in New Zealand, but I always thought it would be something we would do when we retired. But why wait?
There’s always going to be a reason you can think up for not doing something life-changing, and I think that’s mainly because doing something life-changing is scary, especially when you are merrily biffing out the safety net of a well-paying job. But what if you could do it. One of the main reasons I kept coming up with for not doing this now was the fear of letting other people down. I’m a people-pleaser from way back, so this is pretty much always my number one concern. But it turns out that far more people in my life think that this is an excellent idea than those who disagree with it. In fact, only one person has said they don’t think it’s a good idea - ONE - so it turns out my fear was totally unfounded. With that, the walls sort of fell away and there was this magical moment where Dan and I looked at each other and thought “Holy shit, we could actually do this!” And so we are. As my Grandad Lee was fond of saying - you’ve got to look out for number one, because there’s ain’t no other bugger who will. Or words to that effect. Turns out, he was onto something.
Honestly, the only reason we haven’t packed up and shot the gap sooner is because I want to take my new Year 10 ESOL programme to its logical conclusion and see my form class babies through to the end of the year. As much as I have been burned out this year, the kids are the reason I keep getting out of bed in the morning, so I owe it to them to start what I finished. Also, it gives me more time to see my carefully planted garden actually flower before I leave, because damn it, I bought $100 of dahlia tubers and I want to see the results!
In any case, I wanted to share my thoughts on now. Now is an excellent time to start something, finish something or to make a change - however small. It may be confronting, but trust me it feels good once you start taking action.
