dreaming big

I saw a girlfriend this weekend who's actively pursuing her dreams. She wants to own her own restaurant. She has been tweaking her business plan for years, worked in the industry, knows the ins and outs of the financial side as well as the front of house. She's ready to do this. I asked her about her timeline; I think I still expected it to be a pipe dream - maybe 5 years or 10 years down the road. She said six months. She's my age, mid-late 20s.

Two different social media acquaintances blogged in the past week about chasing their dreams. One dreams of being a writer, the other an artist. They're dropping their day jobs, bidding see you laters to their friends, and running into the unknown for the chance to say, at the very least, "I tried."

I've been so inspired hearing these stories. And at the core of my inspiration has been unease (doesn't inspiration always feel slightly uncomfortable?). What would I risk everything to do? To achieve? To be?

It infuriated me that I don't have a career answer. I don't. I don't know for what I would give up everything to do with my life. Write? Be a travel writer? I don't have a perfect answer for a dream career path. But if I could risk it all, I do know that I'd move somewhere abroad again - not as a tourist but as a local.

I know that I'd rent someplace small, and I'd eat like a local and live like one for a month, to start. I don't know the details, but I know that I'm at the start of something. At the start of figuring out a dream that I can chase, that I've wanted to chase since I set my feet back down on American soil. I've wanted to live abroad again since I came back from it.

Where would I live for short or long-term? Nepal, Italy, somewhere in Central or South America immediately come to mind. I'd live nearly anywhere.

I've been so inspired lately that all I can think about is that it's time. It's time to stop wanting and stop daydreaming and to start acting again. I'm happiest when I'm uncomfortable, uncertain, passionate, excited. Now that this idea has planted itself in my head as real, a thing that if I put my mind to it, I can make happen, it's not going away. It's only going to get bigger.

I don't know how I would earn a living for a lifetime in my dream world, but I do know that I wake up with thoughts of countrysides I've never seen, trails leading me into the unknown, food I can't pronounce. I dream in cities I've never seen. It's time to see one of them, to live in one of them again.

A month living in another country. I want to do that this year.