Pre-departure limbo.

We knew transitioning from being employees to entrepreneurs and living on our boat would come with its dose of stresses, and right now, we are in the middle of it.We plan to leave mid-May, which is two months away. Right now, in Sweden, it is too cold to start doing work on the boat. It is also too early to begin the process of renting out our apartment, and too early to start getting rid of our leasing car.

If it's hard to do anything right now, we know the next two months will be packed with all kind of preparations ahead of our voyage.

This decision I made lately doesn’t make the planning less heavy, but both Ryan and I know that it will pay off in the long run (and I wouldn’t miss this opportunity anyways!)

The stress itself doesn’t come from the amount of preparation. It's rather the type of stress you would feel ahead of a big life change. As the deadline gets closer, you can’t avoid rumbling the “what ifs”:

• What if we don’t enjoy cruising?
• What if we run out of money?
• What if we can’t find clients for our businesses?
• What if we wreck the boat?
• What if the World comes to an end....?

You know what I mean :)When we first made our plan, we considered doing sailing as a sort of sabbatical. The plan evolved into us combining life on our boat with running location independent businesses.This is us changing lifestyle, and going into the uncharted waters of living on our boat, sailing the world, and working at the same time. This is a life experiment, a blank sheet onto which we will redraw our lives.

In the grand scheme of things, all those stresses aren’t any big deal. If the money runs out, we can get jobs. If the lifestyle doesn’t work for us, we can go back or move onto something else.

Right now, we do have some money saved up in our bank accounts and some clients for our businesses. We will have no problems taking ourselves until next year, when it is time to look back, assess and make decisions.

We just have to trust that we are doing what we want to do, worked really hard for the last three years, and that everything happens for the best.

I think this is all sound and healthy stress. The kind of stress that means “it’s getting real!”.  I want to believe that anyone who made that kind of a life change went through this.

I like that we are making things happen. And I know that even if our plan doesn't work, even if we run out of money, if our business plans don’t work out the way we wanted, we will make something good out of it.

In the end, it's more about what kind of people we are than what we do.

I can’t predict what will happen out there, once we are cruising. I can't say for sure that we are going to love it (pretty sure we will though). I can't forecast our incoming business, and I can't say how long we will be able to finance our lifestyle.

What I do know, is who we are and what we stand for. I know that we are going to give anything it takes to create the life that we want.

Whatever happens, I can trust that we will make the most out of it. And that kind of relieves the stress of pre-departure limbo I guess :)