HOW TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LEAVE
I bought the flight ticket for the day after of my 30ies. It was calculated until the last detail, at least until that moment.
I still remember the anxiety and the tension I’ve got a moment before to push the button “Confirm” on the Airway’s website. A cramp stomach and thousands questions had risen in a few second, until I got action.
That gesture finalised an agonising, slow, ruminating, dreaming and sometimes disregarded choice. It was not just a button, it was a conscious change of life, with all its good and bad sides.
It was a farewell to “that” Matteo I’ve always known and a good luck for the new one. A radical shedding that lasted for years, and still. A leap into the unknown.
What did bring me to make it real? What did bring me to stop talking and to get to work? Moreover, how to sail that unknown sea without getting terrified and giving up at half way?
I’ll try to resume it in here:
#1 The strong belief on the place where you are living it’s not your home.
For example, we cannot say Rome it’s a horrible place were to stay, but even if I was born there, I never felt satisfied. Since the school time I’ve always drew sea, palm trees, white beaches, desert islands and I didn’t want anything else than dreaming Hawaiian shirt, peaceful smiles and flip flops on my feet.
Well ok, ok. Who does not wish it? Right, right.
But I didn’t just wish it, I really wanted it. It was not a superficial thought. I seriously didn’t handle anymore my city, the fancy clubs full of elegant people filled by emptiness, the big broken roads, the graffitis on the old walls, the tolls, the glasses of wine to drink to feel part of something I was part of, the rudeness, the bad manners, the nihilism, the self-pity, the expensive cost of living, the nice cars to pay with debts and all the rest.
These negative thoughts were just killing any other of the incredible beauties of my city and the unnumbered benefits on living in there. Even if I was so lucky to get born in a wonderful place, one of those half of the world is jealous of, I felt I was in the wrong one.
I’ve got the confirm of all of it the first day I woke up in Bali, in a middle of a chaotic hell, near a couple of eating cows, while the neighbours were kindly greetings a moment before to knee on the ground burning a stick of incense. It was a picture of peace and reality. I didn’t really get why yet, but on that moment I felt at home, for the first time.
#2 Living an emotional wreck.
Maybe it should be the first point of the list? Maybe it should be out from this list? There is not an universal answer, but in my opinion a dramatic event can accelerate and consolidate a big choice like this.
For what it concerned me, heading to the East was not my first attempt. Years before I tried to move my life on Canary Islands, where I lived for a year. I left Italy with a full serenity, but life brought me back with plenty of indecisions.
Those indecisions got transformed into monsters that dragged me down to the bottom of my life. Paranoid, drowned into negative thoughts, perpetually disappointed by my self choices, confused, and idiot as only a man without self-love can be.
Well, that bottom of my life helped me not only to try again to follow my dreams and to move to Bali, but it helped me also to stay in there, even when hard and tough time arrived. I didn’t want to back, stop, nothing could matter more that this milestone!
#3 Cut away the past
Ouch. Here we really hit a nerve. Mine too. This point must me extremely clear to everyone is thinking to prepare the luggage and chase the dreams.
Unless you are planning to move with all your largest components of your family, all your friends and acquaintances, you will leave alone.
Farther your home will be, farther you will live from your comfort zone. You will be not present anymore to the Sunday breakfasts, to the birthday of your nephew, to the birthday of your best friend, to the graduation of your cousin, or to cheer up your friend when he breaks with the girlfriend.
Month by month, year by year, you will still feel part of it in every of your thoughts, even if your presence in there will have a consistence similar to a ghost, until disappearing.
What it must be clear so, it’s that you will account the people that really matter on your right hand, and whatever you thought it was normal and obvious, it will be revealed as temporary.
Are you ready to lose a part of yourself to find another one? Are you ready to lose a part of your belonging to find another one? Are you ready to fight alone? Yes?
Good! Take a breathe and prepare yourself, you are part of the crew!
#4 Be ready to lose the battles and to rise again.
The dreams of glory are part of the initial plans, of the first steps, of the first adventures, basically of the beginning. It’s all an explosion of positive emotions while everything seems just splendid.
After that, usually, the reality comes without kindness. Questions and doubts rise: What will I do? Did I take the right choice? How will it be? And so on…
In the middle of these contrasts, these existential matters and unbalancing feelings, you must be as rational as possible. Dreams come true! Always! With a cost.
Persistence and willpower.
Dreams come true only if you are still lucid and conscious that you could fall down, and from there you can rise up again and again. With the skinned knees, exactly as well as when you were kid and after a huge crying you just keep playing. From there you just rise and keep walking whistling and smiling. Life goes on, and you will enjoy it at your best.
#5 Have a plan and be ready to change it.
The last suggestion. The last but not the less important. Plan!
Get your head on it, write down any possibility and possible variable, schedule anything seems to be conceivable.
Before to leave for Bali I’ve planned to reach an economical quota. I’ve worked hard and saved money avoiding any superficial costs I did it. That quota I’ve reached was perfect to support me a year without working, giving me the time to think, rest, enjoy and to create new plans after my arrival in Indonesia. I had scheduled ranges of time that I’ve respected categorically. I didn’t have any idea of how I would build up a new life in there, but I’ve created a solid structure to help myself effectively at the right time.
Plans will push your dream up, will strength your courage and determination, from the beginning till the decisional phases.
Basically the life could be just a big game, do your best and see you around!
Matteo & Milia
About the Autors: Matteo, digital nomad. Milia, pharmacist. Happily married, living in Bali, often traveling around.
