Opportunities

The text is about opportunities. There’s a statement that says: “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.” written by Benjamin Disraeli. But what does that mean? When we started to plan the trip (however it does not seem like that), we reflected in the number of opportunities we would have to give up: give up a steady job, classes we were recording, teaching materials that we made, a comfortable life and relatively safe of an academic career. Hard, right? We worked sometimes for eighteen hours straight in a day (recording in the morning and afternoon and teaching classes at night) and always appeared a free course or another, travelling to teach in some other city and, after all, we are still in flower age. And what do we take to decide it was time to stop?
These same wonderful job opportunities we had. We started to put in the balance the pros and cons of going out to mid-30s, considered the peak age for work (and it really was just us). But even so we decided to drop everything. In our case some factors set out above (a degenerative disease of Michael), a loss that we took with moving to an apartment that delayed two years and so on … But mainly reflect the following: I can slow down life and seek something that give me more pleasure and completeness (for travel and show these trips) to 40 or 50 years?
People, come on, you can travel 100 years old, but every year the responsibilities and limitations increase. In our case, we chose not to have children, but even so, every year that passes, the pain and the number of medicines increase and we get more demanding and boring. Really!
Since 2004, when we started to travel and went to New Zealand, we have stayed in each “hellhole” that neither ourselves believe that we got and the current question is: we would support that? To make an economic backpacking, we will look at some things, but much of what we have is no longer possible.
Every day that passes is harder to drop everything, you have to think at all, who will receive the letters, as are the accounts, pets … also think of our parents and we note that the time was now, as they are healthy and they’ll be nothing but missing us!
I guarantee that also goes through the minds of the people if we do not care about our relatives, friends, pets. The answer is YES to all options, and we do not want to look back and think, we could have risked, we could have gone! We do care and the technology will greatly help us to kill a bit of nostalgia, but you need to let this opportunity to stay with family get a little back and need breaking this world.
In other missed opportunities and some found, we had already changed the corporate life, both working in multinational and exchanged by the academic life. At first, everyone thought madness and we suffered this same transition. But now we see how to give up some things or take a step back provided other opportunities.
The teaching career is not limited by age, it is not competitive as it is in the corporate world and it is full of possibilities, so in the professional field it was not that hard.
I, Tatiane, took an unpaid year at the job, made possible by the relationship with my company and the higher purpose of the trip: to know next to Michael as much as possible in the world before dystrophy gets him from walking normally. Michael, in turn, was already retired from Brazilian Air Force precisely because of their health problems. Also taught classes, but with the advance of symptoms, no longer will work when we are back.
At this point, our profile just differ a little bit, but yes, we had career, and we worked hard but we (with adjustments) will return to work. I can not say we were workaholics (despite intense hours worked). It’s been a long time we are in a much more relaxing profile in the BE was already much more than the HAVE, then it had no more way: it was rounding the world in the head and now we know that we will not regret that!