“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
I’d like you to think that I’ve read Moby Dick, but I haven’t. I remember skipping that one in High School and somehow still doing well on the test. This quote alone makes me want to go read it though. I too share this itch. Call it a travel bug, wanderlust, antiestablishmentarianism, nonconformism, or simply weird, I know this itch. Life to me is not about staying put, planting roots and watching time pass. No offense to those who dream of nothing else, but I am restless and always have been.
As for me, I am [blessed] with an everlasting itch for things remote. I want to go to new places and see new things. This world is too small and time is too short to settle where I am. This itch is shared in our family, as we were finishing our time at university, we walked in to join the peace corps and go to Africa for a couple years before figuring out life with a job. We we filling out the paperwork and it came out that we weren’t both US citizens… Who knew that only citizens could participate in the peace corps? We learned the hard way! But instead we ended up starting our family and getting that job and buying a house. We’ve been itching ever since! Though much of that time we were in survival mode and dealing with milk feeding schedules and nap times and diapers and a lot of it is a blur.
Now that the kids are a bit more grown and we can all communicate with words most of the time and sleep through the night we’ve had time to reflect and realize that those dreams didn’t need to die with our family life. We heard of families that lived in RVs and traveled a lot. Families who did homeschool and used extended road trips as educational opportunities. We remembered our own international experiences and the transformative experiences of living within other cultures and languages. We heard of people who worked from home remotely and were location independent. We could see ourselves in those scenarios and constructed possible ways to combine it all and make it happen for us. We even took a test 6 week road trip one summer and had such a blast we knew that was the life for us. It took a little while to arrange all the pieces, but we experienced the home school, inquired after remote jobs in my field and let our dream wheels begin spinning faster.
We’re excited that after years of dreaming and then more years of planning and arranging, we’re 1 month away from pulling out and beginning our journey.
I have a small collection of a few inspiring quotes I like to keep in mind to harness my itch for enrichment, enjoy:
