Louisa Simpson

My future travel plans are in all honesty in very early gestation. But, if I do decide to hit ‘Go’ on them, would hopefully happen very quickly…

It is no secret on here that since being made redundant two years ago, things have not been easy financially for me and my family. Very far from it. In those two years, we have hung onto our home desperately but now the time has come to admit that it’s just too much. For me, it has become more like a prison than a home, I suspect the same is true for my husband and because it is ancient, my son has never really liked it because he is convinced it is haunted. And it is but that’s another story. And as others who had read my previous blogs will know, I have questioned the necessity of surrounding ourselves with ‘stuff’. Can we offload the house? Yes, but we will not get any money back, basically, a fact which demands a rethink about how we do this thing called life.

In 2019, I attended a local Mind, Body and Spirit event which I had found out about by following an urge to travel home from work via a different route along which I had seen the event advertised. It felt like a sign, and to some extent it was. I was at that time coming to the early realisation that I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life, professionally, and in the early stages of a serious spiritual shift. While I was there, I got chatting to a medium. He said two things to me that I disregarded at the time but which have come back to me repeatedly over the years. One was that I was afraid of money and until I addressed that, I would never truly prosper. Turns out that is utterly true. And the second was that I would pack all my stuff up into a motor home with my family and go off travelling where I would truly find myself. At the time, I utterly rejected this because of, basically, my social conditioning. I had a son at school! I had responsibilities, a job, a home, parents…the list went on. Oh, how mindsets change!

So, what does all of this mean for travel plans? Well, I woke up this morning, fresh from accepting the reality of our housing situation, feeling more free than I have done in the longest time. Happy, actually. And as I lay in bed looking around me, I thought – we could sell a lot of this stuff, and store the rest. Then invest what money we do have into a motor home and go travelling. My husband and I have often talked about doing the Scotland 500 – if we get everything sorted quickly, we can do that before it closes and catch up with friends along the way which would be a lovely way to spend the rest of the summer. It would be something completely different and maybe even exciting for our son – who could be off his PC for a while. Then, I thought, we could drive to southern Europe for the autumn and winter. I love Greece, for example, but don’t like the heat it now experiences in the summer months so going ‘out of season’ and having an authentic experience there really speaks to me. Spend six months in southern Europe in the relative warmth, also catching up with friends along the way. Then come home to, I don’t know, explore the English coast until we can re-enter Europe again to do the northern half (I feel really drawn to Denmark for some reason). At this point all I can say is – aarrgghh Brexit! Without it, we could roam Europe for as long as we wanted. But that’s another story.

What would we do for money? What would we do about our son’s education? What would I do about my medication? All of those questions are admittedly running through my mind. We could offset some of the money issues by money that will be coming to us in October. And I want to be a digital nomad, I want to earn money from my writing so it could be the kick up the backside I need to turn my writing into something more. Perhaps I could do a Salt Path type of turn but perhaps with more honesty, and less of a book more of a blog (that could obviously turn into a book) because I am drawn to the whole premise of being a nomad as the book talks about. I am close to finishing the third book of my trilogy, and I have an idea for a non-fiction book I can also write along the way. Promote what we are doing via social media. As with everything, if you focus on it enough it can happen.

As for my son’s education…I’ve been thinking a lot about that already. Because the truth is, I have started to question what my education has done for me. I am a historian by background, educated to Masters degree level, I have professional qualifications in marketing, leadership and coaching, I have good results from school etc. etc. but where is any of that getting me post-50? Because it absolutely is a truism that as a woman of a certain age, you become invisible unless you shout. Very, very loudly to be heard over the younger women and the men – no shade on either group, it’s just a truth. I have decided to shout, but to shout in a way that I enjoy rather than in a way that just pays the bills. To do any of my jobs (except the heritage job), I did not pull on my schooling. I didn’t. I learned as I went along. Yes the ‘training’ of an education helped that ability to learn, but we can all learn. We don’t have to sit in a school to do it.

My son is not the kind of child who learns by rote, and that is the only system currently offered by mainstream schooling. A 12 year old who will sit down with me on a very early Sunday morning and talk about listening to his soul and hearing what it has to say, yearning to understand what it wants him to do is not a child that happily sits and is talked at for eight hours a day for him to regurgitate the information in a test. He admits that in class his mind wanders to consider bigger things – such as ‘why do I have to learn about a lightbulb in science when I want to learn about how the universe works?’ a child, in essence, who wants to learn about astrophysics, not physics by rote. A child who wants to explore Japan because he knows his affinity with the country which he has had since a young child, is at a soul-deep level. A child who is not necessarily on the spectrum (though I suspect mild ADHD), but who thinks strategically and when observed with his friends is very definitely a leader. A child whose insight into the characters of others is rapier sharp and who isn’t afraid to stand up for himself and what he believes in. A child who, in mainstream schooling, is in danger of being even more of a square peg in a round hole than I was. And a child who would absolutely thrive on learning through lived experience, not by being stuck in a series of rooms having dry subjects taught drily to him for eight hours a day. A child whose mental health I am desperate to protect and who is, quite clearly to me, a spiritual rainbow child.

In time, and with more money behind us, I would love to explore Asia – as you would expect, Japan has to be high on our list as it is also a place of fascination for my husband. I would love to do Canada as well, Australia and New Zealand for sure. Yes, definitely America but…not at the moment. Maybe in four years or so. And perhaps swap out the motorhome for a boat at some point. But all the while, being together as a family, meeting new people, experiencing the world, seeing behind the veil of life, indulging in my writing passion, supporting our son in his education, and watching my husband finally relax. We can take our dog with us to Europe, friends and family can come visit us where we are and we will return home to England for periods. As for the medication, where there is a will there is a way. Always.

So, yes, those are my travel plans. Something I thought about doing six months ago but was still in the ‘hang onto home’ mode in my subconscious. Because what all of this boils down to is seeing life through a different lens, without the shackles of societal expectations. And doing it the way you want to.