The Quiet Beginning of a Different Life: The Inner Journey Behind Our Outer Journey

I write a lot about our travels and how they affect us. For me, sharing our journey is about more than simply telling people where Carla and I are or what we happen to be doing. My hope is that something in it may resonate with you. Maybe it opens you to a place you had never thought of visiting before. Maybe it opens you to a different way of seeing your life. Or maybe it simply puts words to something you have already been feeling and, in that way, offers a little comfort or kinship.

Whatever the reason, I am always grateful that you are here and that you take the time to read about our wanderings. That means more to me than I can say.

I have written a great deal about what happens to us on the road, about the beauty we encounter, the reflections travel stirs within me, and the way this life continues to shape and deepen us. What I have written less about is how we got here in the first place. How did Carla and I arrive at a life that, at least from the outside, probably looks unusual to many people? How did we come to the point where selling our house, parting with most of our possessions, reducing our lives to two carry-on bags, and stepping away from the more conventional script for people in their sixties and seventies felt not reckless, but right? 

That story feels worth telling because while the life we live now may look like the story, it is really the outward expression of something deeper. Long before there were flights to Europe and month-long stays in places we might one day call home, something else was happening inside us. There were questions. There were longings. There was a growing sense that the life we were living and the life we wanted were not necessarily the same thing.

Let me say right from the start that I am not an advocate for leaving everything behind and traveling the world as Carla and I have done. This life works for us, most of the time, but I do not see it as some superior way to live. It is simply our way. What I do believe in very strongly, though, is the adventure of living authentically. I believe in listening for that inner voice that knows when something fits and when it does not, even if what it is asking of you looks very different from what culture has prescribed, from what your peers are doing, or even from what you yourself once imagined your life would look like.

Culture is always handing us scripts. It tells us how we should live at certain ages, what should matter most by now, and what kind of life is sensible, respectable, or mature. Especially as we get older, it becomes easy to confuse that script with truth. It becomes easy to think that because a life is conventional, it must therefore be right.

I think the truest life is the one that genuinely fits the person living it. Finding that fit is not always simple. It takes honesty. It takes courage. It takes a willingness to disappoint expectations, both other people’s and sometimes even our own. It asks us to admit what no longer feels alive and what may look fine on paper but does not feel true in the soul. And then, harder still, it asks us to trust what does feel true, even when it is unfamiliar, inconvenient, or hard for other people to understand.

To me, that is the real adventure. Not travel, necessarily, and not selling your belongings or changing continents. Those are simply outer expressions. The deeper adventure is allowing yourself to live in a way that feels true to who you are. Because in the end, what matters most is not whether our choices look impressive or sensible to others. What matters is whether they are true.

If we do not listen to that inner voice, the years have a way of accumulating around us. Life keeps moving. Outwardly, everything may look fine. But inwardly, there can remain that restless ache, that lingering question that never quite goes away: what if?

Those may be two of the most haunting words in the human experience. What if I had listened? What if I had trusted myself? What if I had been braver? What if I had allowed myself the life I really wanted instead of the life I thought I was supposed to want?

And that, more than anything, is what I hope this piece is about. It is about paying attention to your life while you are still living it. It is about noticing what is calling you, what no longer fits, and what part of you is waiting to be honored.

Like a lot of meaningful changes, this one did not begin with some dramatic event. There was no crisis, no sweeping master plan, and no big announcement that we were about to reinvent our lives. It began in a much quieter way, which is often how the biggest changes in life begin.

Carla and I were sitting on the sofa one evening, relaxing and talking, when, somewhere in that ordinary moment, a different future quietly opened.

I mentioned something I had been thinking about more and more in the weeks leading up to that evening. I had begun wondering what life might look like when I retired, or at least when I cut back from work.

At the time, my work was in marketing in the organic foods industry for a large national company. In many ways, I truly loved what I did. I spent so much of my time writing, creating, and helping shape things in an industry I believed in. That mattered to me. It is hard to overstate how much more meaningful work feels when what you are giving your energy to lines up with your values.

So this was not the story of someone trapped in a job he hated and dreaming only of escape. My work had been fulfilling. It had given me purpose. It had given me creative outlets. In many ways, it had been a very good fit for a long time.

But it was also a high-profile position, and with that came a pace and level of pressure that could be exhausting. I worked a lot. Too much, really. As I moved further into my sixties, the idea of continuing to show up to that kind of schedule, day after day and year after year, became less and less appealing. 

It was not that I had lost interest in purpose. I do not think I ever will. It has always mattered to me to feel engaged, to feel that I am creating something, expressing something, and offering something. That remains true now through my photography and writing, and I suspect it always will in some form. But the idea of showing up every day to a job, even one I largely enjoyed, was beginning to feel like something whose time in my life was slowly coming to a close.

Because I am a few years older than Carla, I had arrived at that place a little earlier than she had. I was already beginning to think seriously about what the next chapter might look like. One thing had become increasingly clear to me, and that was that I really did not have much interest in remaining in the United States for the rest of my life.

This was before Trump came onto the scene, though I will admit that in the years since, he has only made expatriation feel even more understandable. But even before that, something in me was already looking elsewhere. I could not yet say exactly where I wanted to be, but I was becoming more and more certain about where I did not.

So that evening on the sofa, I finally said out loud what had been quietly building inside me. I said to Carla, “I don’t think I want to continue living in the U.S.”

I felt like I had just dropped a bomb on her, so while she was recovering from the blast, I got up to pour her a glass of wine. I was bracing for something along the lines of, “What in the world are you talking about?” or “Have you completely lost your mind?” But before I could even make it to the kitchen, Carla answered.

“Sure.”

And not only did she say yes, but the tone of her voice was enthusiastic. There was no hesitation, no resistance, and no need to be convinced. I had expected uncertainty, maybe confusion, maybe even pushback. Instead, what I got was immediate openness.

From that moment on, Carla was in.

It was as if some part of this had already been living inside both of us, even if we had not yet fully named it. Once the idea was spoken aloud, it landed not as some shocking new concept, but almost as a recognition. It felt as though this had somehow already been our plan, and we were only then becoming aware of it.

At first, I assumed we would probably find a place in Mexico. That seemed like the most likely direction. It felt accessible, plausible, and like a realistic first picture of a life outside the United States.

But Carla had spent a lot of time in Europe and loved it. I had never been. Once we began to seriously consider it together, something clicked for both of us. The more we talked about Europe, the more right it began to feel. So we decided to explore it in order to discover where we might want to settle.

For us, Europe kept speaking the language of home, that subtle but unmistakable feeling that says, “I can imagine a life here.” So now we spend five or six months of the year traveling around Europe. We enjoy the travel itself immensely. We continue to be nourished by it, challenged by it, inspired by it. We are still learning. We are still being surprised. We are still being changed by the experience.

But alongside all of that, there is another layer now. We are not simply traveling for the joy of travel, though that remains very real. We are also paying attention. We are noticing what fits. We are watching for where our hearts settle. We are trying to understand not just where we enjoy being, but where we may ultimately want to live. 

That is what has made this chapter both exciting and complicated. We truly do love this life of adventure. We love the movement, the discovery, the changing landscapes, the beauty, the stories, and the sense of being open to whatever comes next. But we can also feel, more and more, another longing beginning to rise. We can feel ourselves being drawn toward settling down.

That shift has been gradual, but it feels real. It may still be a year or two before we ultimately settle somewhere. Then again, it could happen in the next few months. At this point, we honestly do not know. That uncertainty is part of what makes this chapter what it is. There is still listening. There is still a kind of waiting, not passive waiting, but attentive waiting. It is the kind that comes when you know something is taking shape, but you also know you cannot force it before its time.

While we still enjoy the life of travel, even with all of its challenges, I would say that settling down now has a little more momentum than continuing indefinitely as we are. We can feel that. We can sense that another chapter is beginning to lean toward us.

But even that future settling down does not feel like the end of adventure. In many ways, it feels like the next adventure. One of the reasons we want to live in Europe is because it is such a wonderful base for continuing to explore the world. Our travels would not end. They would simply change shape. There is something very appealing to us now about the idea of having a home base, a place to return to, a place to know more deeply, while still remaining connected to the wider adventure of travel.

To us, that feels less like an ending than an evolution.

So here we are, still traveling, exploring, wandering, and learning, still very much in motion, and yet also feeling this shift. We feel a quiet but steady movement toward home. Even as we have loved the adventure of travel, we also find ourselves looking forward to the adventure of settling somewhere new and all the richness that will bring.

And when I look back on it, I find it amazing that so much of this life really began with one quiet question asked on a sofa and one simple, wholehearted answer: “Yes.”