We Died and Went to Heaven

January 1, 2017 La Paz, Mexico, Lynette:
Finally some time to sit down and write my thoughts. As 2017 begins I feel so excited for all the new adventures we will experience this year. This last year will go down as the year we were murdered. Yes, that is the word I mean to use. You see murder is taking the life of someone. The lives Tim and I were living a year ago are dead, they were taken away. We can’t bring either one back. Our deaths have been painful. For both of us, we have been struggling with our confidence to get back on the horse and try again. To be able to believe we are good enough at what we each spent years building. We have both decided that we will not allow ourselves to return to the environments we’ve left. Speaking for myself, I most likely will not ever be in a traditional classroom again. The public education world is one where the teacher holds all responsibility for a student to learn prior to college, and soon this may be how the professors will be viewed. For me that is not a healthy view, as all participants need to hold a piece of the responsibility, the school, the teacher, the student and the parent(s).

When we first died in June we decided to stick to the plans to celebrate our 30 years of marriage. We planned and saved for this over a two year period. We could have easily said, “We need that money to live on.” Too many other times in our marriage we did this. Not this time! We chose to invest in our marriage and each other. Since that 40-day celebration & sabbatical we have been in a process of creating a new life individually and together. We have become students of adventure! 

Many times the cliche “I’ve died and gone to heaven” is used as we attempt to explain how wonderful a situation is. Would you feel this way about living out a life dream? I know from our blog, many might think we are living this glamorous life full of fun. So far it has been tough like a funeral as we grieve what was taken or lost, and conduct a wake to celebrate our past lives that have set us up to live differently in this new adventure before us. December was the first month we decided to focus on letting go, looking forward, mending our wounds, and coming out of our grief and heaviness. We needed some time and space before looking back. 

The last day of 2016 I felt like I woke up on the right side of the bed! Things felt so light and right! I felt ready to embrace heaven. Of course this isn’t the literal heaven, but this life we are living in the middle of is made of our dreams. Tim has dreamed of a life at sea since he was a teenager and we are preparing for it. I have dreamed of seeing the world and learning about different cultures since I was a child. To me it doesn’t matter how we do that. We are plunging forward into learning Spanish and experiencing the culture here. The challenge will be to linger long enough to gain some fluency with conversing and yet avoid becoming stuck here as it is a lot like paradise.

Our daughter gave us a card that says: “If you want something you never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.” This is now the story of our lives as we embrace new adventures in our dreamland.

Happy New Year! 
Tim & Lynette