The Dream...

The dream was fairly simple...live a financially simplistic, semi-self sustaining lifestyle as a live aboard cruiser sailing the tropics of the world. Pretty straight forward and yet extremely difficult to implement after an entire lifetime living "inside the box" with a home, my own business and three, although now grown, children.

A tiny seed of that dream was planted nearly 35 years ago when I spent a year living aboard the original Liahona, my father's custom built Westsail 42' yawl rig.  All told we spent about 15 months or so aboard.  Three months in the Sea of Cortez between my junior and senior year in high school and then after graduation sailing from southern California down the Pacific coastline of Mexico and Central America, through the Panama canal and then northward through the inland side of the Caribbean.  Our trip coming to a conclusion in Galveston Texas some 13 months after our departure.

The memories of that trip, the people, the places and experiences have quietly lived on inside my soul for all of these years but college, marriage, children, a career and life in general had all successfully joined forces to repress the yearning to return to the sea.  However, repress they did, extinquish they did not. Enter the catalysts.  Divorce, children graduating and moving on with their own lives and me sitting at my desk day after day wondering what might lie ahead in my journey through life.

The mind wanders, it wonders, it dreams, it schemes.  Repressed memories return.  Dreaming morphs into planning. Close friends and family see only dreams, to them impossible dreams, but I see possibilities and realities. Soon my mind can think of nothing else and before I know it I am totally consumed with how I can put together this seemingly impossible, intricate puzzle to unplug myself from society's pulls and demands and return to the sea living a simple yet extremely fulfilled life.

A life void of cell phones with their constant ringing and notification tones of incoming texts, emails, calls, pictures, Facebook comments, Snap Chats, Tweets...and the list goes on.   A life void of cable TV, movie theaters, the internet, car payments and insurance, overpriced medical care, traffic lights controlling overcrowded streets filled with angry travelers rushing to where?  Neighbors that have lived next to you for months or years and yet you don't even know their names. Politicians seeking power and money who quietly take away and erode your rights in the name of political correctness. Once again, the list goes on.  We are slowly becoming a country full of people filled with entitlement and simultaneously void of drive and determination.  A society who has legislated away our true beginnings of a free country..."one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all".  The rant could continue for hours but for what?  And at what cost?  Time wasted.  Time that could be spent pursuing the dream.

We dream for a reason...to imagine something better, something greater.  Some choose to follow their dreams, no matter the cost.  Others choose to live without dreams or choose to dream but not believe. Where do you fall?  I say...dream on.  Believe. Pursue.  Get some!