We were standing in the kitchen at the end of April last year. Almost on the edge of strength after a year of battling with house problems that have brought to light much more than just insurance, costs, labor shortages and other necessities that undeniably carry more than just practical and logical solutions.
One week before leaving for Croatia, we received an offer to travel for the next 10 months. The decision to rent a house, to leave everything we had been working on until then, came as relief and course all at the same time . None of us knew what we were agreeing to and how far our decision would take us.
But it was a decision we had to make.
For ourselves, for everything we dreamed, what we felt and what we hoped for.
It's been 8 months since then. Eight months since I re-examined my beliefs and fears through tears in conversation with my therapist.
Today I could almost laugh at my insecurities, but I won’t because I know they were legitimate to me from 8 months ago.
I am sitting in a house in the Dominican Republic where we have been living for 2 months. The idea of home has long since become questionable, disintegrated and dissected into the smallest parts.
There is a home, but I will write about it on another occasion.
There is also this place where we move slowly, traveling in and out of ourselves finding some new parts and integrating all that new into ourselves.
We live in community with other people, adults and children, in constant interaction, in giving, receiving, taking away and losing.
We live differently than we could have imagined, and yet just the way we need to at the moment.
We chose DR because of the restrictions we could navigate, because of the sun and the heat that doesn’t just come from the climate. We met friends, people who touched our hearts, who showed us some new worlds.
It's hard to live in a community sometimes, but again having kids playing almost all day, door-to-door friends you can always find when you need them and a little piece of your own space where you can hide when you need it is more than enough for us.
We learned practical things: language, new cultures, navigating an island that is not the most developed, in a new currency, in costs and ways to save money.
We have learned more than practical things: that we are made for traveling, that our children are adaptable, that everything we have invested in recent years in ourselves and in the development of our children has indescribably great benefits.
The past 8 months have flown by like in one day. The decision to return to Denmark on March 1 has long been a thing of the past. Our journey is not over: neither this physical nor personal.
People often ask us how we could have chosen life in suitcases especially when they know where we come from and how we lived before. They often associate life in suitcases with a lack of stability.
I don’t have a good answer to that, i.e. I don’t know if it’s good enough. But for me, the only answer that makes sense: stability doesn’t come from addresses, houses, things we know, and rituals we perform every day. Of course, all of the above can play a role in a sense of stability in one's own life, not to mention the notion of economics, but stability is not physical in nature.
Stability for us is the change that life brings every day, stability is the feeling that you are exactly where you need to be in the present moment, stability is not anticipating what is coming, nor regretting what has passed. Stability is in us when we feel we have ourselves in every moment of life.
We have stability by traveling, living with a little material, but a lot in everything else we have now.
I see stability in the eyes of our children, I feel it when I put them to sleep, when we sit together connected by the deep threads of everything we have given ourselves in recent years: work on ourselves, freedom and time to be.
I do not expect or wish anything more.
Missing is an integral part of life: when we are in Denmark we miss family in Croatia, when we are in Croatia we miss what we love in Denmark, now that we are far from both we have days when nostalgia outgrows the joy of travel, but without it we couldn’t appreciate neither what we have left nor what we have now.
More than nostalgia what fills us is peace, the togetherness of the five of us and the strong bonds we build with each other, everything else is a bonus: and there are so many of them that I will leave it for another post.
I bring about the practical side of traveling with children in one of the following texts.
Until next reading…
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