OK. This is happening. We are taking the leap of leaving our beautiful comfortable life in San Francisco, our good jobs, nice apartment in a great neighborhood, our amazing group of friends and trading it in for the adventure.

About 2.5 years ago we started to play around with the idea of traveling around the world and thinking how we could and would want to make that happen. It’s been sort of a long term dream that we put out there but we were not really sure it would actually happen. One day we actually set a start date for the trip and started saving up some cash. The date was March 2017 and even though it has shifted a couple months, we are en route for the adventure.

Ever since we got together, we have always enjoyed travelling a lot but we would find ourselves having limited amount of time in places and following guides that would stress us out with so much to see and do. So for this trip, the idea was to create enough time and mental space for the experience to unfold on its own, surrendering the need to see everything and to plan all of our stay. I’m so glad that we are both still on the same page and ready to take this leap together into the unknown. We have now both quit our jobs and have our first way ticket to Rio de Janeiro on May 17th.

 I just finished reading “A field guide to getting lost” by Rebecca Solnit (currently my favorite author) and she elaborates so well this idea or concept of leaving what is comfortable and familiar to take the risk of moving into unknown territory. I’m hoping that with this trip we will take both an internal and external journey, discovering the different landscapes and cultures and exploring ourselves in a journey of personal growth.

I just turned 30 and I believe it’s a good time for me to create space for myself to really ponder on what it is I want to spend my time and energy on this planet for the limited time of existence that we’ve got.
In her book, Solnit describes the space of the unknown as the places marked in old maps as terra incognita, those hidden places that can only be discovered moving into the uncomfortable, the new, the foreign and distant until they become known. This process of transformation of our perception is both internal and external and inevitably brings growth and makes us leave the person we are to become someone else. This is always scary and takes a lot of courage to leave behind what we know and put ourselves in the vulnerable space of not knowing.

But how beautiful and rewarding it is to let go of control, of planning, of knowing all the next steps in our trip or in our lives, to free ourselves from the mental security of having everything in place, of having answers to all the questions and allowing the mistery, disovering new places and cultures and doing it while still young, with the energy to accept change as a constant, to not settle, to keep an open mind and heart for the transformation that is about to unfold. To surrender fully to life and letting the experience be without having to constantly create it.

So from this comes the name of our trip and blog: off to the unkown. I hope you can follow us in this journey and we inspire you along the way.

Sarah

“To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery” — Rebecca Solnit

“Live always at the edge of mystery” — J. Robert Oppenheimer