Careering Around

I've found a part of the BBC website that teaches you languages.  Having time on my hands I have started to learn Spanish.  This is in case I find myself up the Amazon later in the year.  At the moment I could only cope with emergencies that require the urgent ordering of coffee with milk and a slice of toast.  I hope that by lesson ten I might be able to articulate, 'Help, there is a crocodile and it looks hungry!'.

The adventure is a possibility because, in the depths of the work intranet, I found a page excitingly entitled, 'Career Breaks'.  I blew the cobwebs off and realised it was possible to have the gap year I never had.  I started dreaming of, well, of somewhere I haven't been and was therefore rather tricky to dream about. The worrying bit was, that while the title of the webpage suggests there is a career to be continued on return from circumnavigating the world on a raft or whatever, in reality this isn't the case.  I have to effectively resign and hope something suitable will come up when I get back.

'Live life adventurously' has been rattling around in my head, and having seen other, inspirational people leading alternative lifestyles, decided it was now or never.

After hours of searching around on the internet, interviews, phone calls, letters and e-mails, I now have three months booked being a volunteer in California, three months volunteering in Scotland, and the possibility of three months working for a charity in Malawi as well as the possibility of going up the Amazon on a boat taking medical advice to remote communities.  It all seems a far cry from my safe, suburban life where everything is quite cosy and comfortably predictable.  I realised comfortably predictable isn't the life I want to lead yet.  Maybe in ten years time that will be fine, but not now.

The travelling and meeting new people and having adventures isn't the scary part.  The scary part will be packing up my house to rent out, and being effectively of no fixed abode for a year.  

I will have to get rid of as many material possessions as possible.  Having moved house twice in the last twelve months, I have already rid myself of truck loads of stuff.  I will soon have to go through everything again to ascertain whether I need or like it enough to a) pay for it to be stored, or b) clamber up into the attic with it.  It will be very interesting to see what survives the cull.