Choosing Time Over Certainty

If you’ve read Why We Left, you’ll already know how this all unfolded. This is more about why we wanted to do it in the first place.

We’ve talked about doing a trip like this for years. Long before kids, it was always there in the background. Work hard, save, and at some point go and see more of the world properly. Not just a holiday, but something bigger.

Like most people, we just kept pushing it out. There was always a reason. Timing, work, money, trying to get everything lined up so it made sense. Then life fills the gaps and before you know it, years have gone by and you’re still talking about it.

Having kids didn’t make that idea go away. It made it stronger. Because now it wasn’t just about what we wanted to do, it was about what kind of life we were showing them. What they grow up thinking is normal. Whether life is something you just follow, or something you can actually shape.

For us, a lot of it came back to time. We didn’t want to spend the best years of our lives waiting for a version of the future that isn’t guaranteed. Work your whole life, build everything up, and then hope that when you finally get there, you’ve still got the health, the energy, and the time to actually do it.

There’s no guarantee of that. You don’t know what’s going to happen next year, let alone in twenty or thirty years. Things change, plans fall over, life throws things at you that you never saw coming.

We didn’t want to hang everything on “one day”. We wanted to do it now. While we’re young enough to enjoy it properly, while the kids are still young enough to be part of it, and while we actually have the choice to make it happen.

And a big part of that, for us, is the stories. We want a life filled with stories and memories. The kind you can sit around and talk about years later. The random moments, the stuff that goes wrong, the places you didn’t expect to love, the days that don’t go to plan but end up being the ones you remember most.

The kind of stories we can tell our kids when they’re older. The ones they’ll tell as well. The ones we’ll be talking about with our grandkids one day, or with people we meet along the way.

Kia and I both love telling a good story. Always have. And we realised we’d rather be out there creating those stories now, while we’re living it, instead of waiting until later and hoping we get the chance.

Early last year, 2025, it stopped being something we talked about and started feeling like something we’d regret not doing.

So, it came down to a pretty simple choice. Stick with what’s predictable. Keep building, keep waiting, keep telling ourselves we’ll do it later. Or take the time now, while we have it.

We chose now.