I hope you all find my stories and insights into the worlds of travel, finance, career breaks and any other topic for which I have the balls to claim to be an expert, useful, inspiring and/or entertaining.
My new office
For me, this particular journey started around my mid-twenties and like many of my peers – at least I hope like many of my peers – I wasn’t entirely convinced that my life was heading down the path of fulfillment. After some careful consideration and a plethora of planning sessions, I made the decision to quit my job, pack up my belongings and spend a year traveling around the world to fulfill my childhood dreams of exploration as well as to gain a better perspective on the kind of life I really want to lead going forward. The rough sketch of my travel plan will take me from South America to Africa and then on to Asia. However, given the freedom I have in making life choices, I wouldn’t be surprised if this plan radically changes along the way. Time will tell!
And it seems time has told! I’m writing this second paragraph almost a year after I first posted this “About Me” page. I had considered re-writing the page entirely, but ultimately decided to keep it here as a reminder of the mindset I had when I started the journey. I knew even then that this journey would make some radical changes and I’m writing now to share my update.
At some point in the beginning of my travels, I had decided that this career break was no casual fling and I decided to commit to working to make this traveling lifestyle, a sustainable one. I would accomplish this by pursuing writing projects, temporary jobs to replenish my income, and volunteering positions. I’ve tried and failed with a couple of options such as a hotel job in Spain and a Kickstarter project. I’ve now quite serendipitously fell into a job with a start-up in Colorado that turned out to be a perfect fit for me. So now time will tell how that turns out!
Now there may be the unanswered question of how I ended up in Colorado. I’ll let the post do most of the explaining, but in short, it seems serendipity has been the theme of my life lately and I was fortunate enough to meet a man who shares my philosophies on travel and life, and who’s brazen enough to leave the traditional life behind to take on the world with me. As a result, I decided to do all of that cliché “follow your heart” silliness and move out to Colorado to build our relationship and I haven’t regretted this decision yet! Now in my less transient lifestyle, I will be both working and scheming on the next phase of my travels to take place in June 2013, The Mongol Rally!
The Significance of ‘Globally Misguided’
I chose this specific title for my travel blog to pay homage to one of the most inspirational songs that has shaped the person I am today, ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’. At the time the song came out, I was a bit naïve about life (which is probably an understatement seeing as how I was still in high school) and while I understood the underlying meaning of looking within yourself for strength and pursuing a life that appeals to you, it wasn’t until I embarked on this trip that I would understand the implications for my own life.
After moving on from college to the corporate world it seemed all too obvious that the definition of a ‘good life’ was getting married in your 20’s, climbing the corporate ladder, having babies, buying a house and so on – a clear path that most people you knew followed. For me, I was on the bandwagon for a short while until I hit some snafus along the way – the boyfriend dumped me and that ladder had some booby traps – that stopped me in my tracks long enough to force me to think a little bit harder about what I really wanted to do with my life. As I started writing out my thoughts – travel in South America, study Italian, fall in love, eat an entire pomegranate in under 15 minutes – the common theme I noticed what that I was focusing on experiences and not on achieving certain milestones such as marriage. While I don’t have anything against doing any of these things, I have come to disagree with the Generally Accepted Principles of Society (GAPS – coincidence, I think not!), specifically, the importance society places on achieving these milestones as opposed to the experiences that both lead up to and follow them. With that in mind, my new path in life centers around the experiences I want to have and letting all of those expectations others have fall as they may.
In conclusion, I’ve felt like I was basically misguided as I followed the standard ‘American Dream’ path, but now that I’ve flushed that away and started with a clean palette, I’ve run into some critics who think that now I really am misguided. And what this basically tells me is simply that everyone can agree on the title of this blog!
“But deep in my heart the answer, it was in me.
And I made up my mind to define my own destiny.” – Lauryn Hill
