How Did You End Up On An Island? Part 2

If you've been reading along with me, you'll know that the answer to Part 1 of this question involved opening myself up to broader possibilities and taking the leap of quitting my job as a lawyer.  As I wrote in that post, my job for the next year was going to be to design an exciting new life, one that was more in alignment with my true self and how I really felt inside, now that I would have the luxury of time to sift through the clutter of our hectic lives and figure mine out!

Okay, So You Quit Your Midwestern Job, But How Did You End Up On An Island?

I spent the first week of voluntary unemployment sleeping in, going to lunches and matinees with my stay-at-home-mom friends, snuggling on the couch with my darling dog, Angel, and voraciously reading books.  Or, as it helped me to think about it so that I didn’t feel too lazy, I spent my first week implementing the first component of my new plan – to just BE and decompress for a little while.

My first real order of business came quickly:  ditch winter and spend time with my family in Florida.  While there, I also planned to duck away for a week-long trip to a tiny island in the Bahamas where my family had been vacationing for 25 years.  We had even built a family home on the island, but I hadn’t visited in several years. 

Well, one week on the island turned into a month, turned into several months.  Walking into that small community of people who had known me since I was 16 was a true homecoming.  I love the small-town values combined with a sophisticated flair from an international mix of people, the indescribable beauty of the sea, the comforting warmth of the sunshine, the overwhelming peace and contentment I feel here, the pace and experiences of island living, and the time to fulfill all my domestic “nesting” leanings.

I was home.

Why go back to the cold?  Why return to the rat race?  I was HAPPY on the island.  At peace.  Satisfied.  Content.  To the core.  Sure, there were still a host of unknowns, but I quietly sensed that it would all just work itself out.  This is where Faith comes in for me.  For once, I wasn’t trying to plan every detail, and it was evolving better than I could have even imagined.  I trusted that would be the case with eventual work and other details, too.  

So, I sold off everything in the States and declared this small island my permanent home, with my U.S. base conveniently with family in South Florida.

Massive Moving Sale

I kept the beloved piano and giant sunflowers photo, but ditched the shovel and winter gear!

Amazing what you'll part with when the question becomes "Is this worth moving cross-country & paying for storage space?"

Taking stock and marking off one of my many lists during the sale/move.

Ahhh, already on my way to a Better Life!

A Word About Love

One other thing – as much as I try to protect the privacy of those close to me who may be less than enthused about their lives being broadcast in this manner (like my uber-private beau), my story is incomplete without one other critical piece.  Back on the island, I reconnected with The Great Love of My Life, a Bahamian man I had dated for 5 years more than a decade prior.  It is such a small community that I suspected I would cross paths with him when I came for my visit.  But there was so much water under our respective bridges that I wasn’t sure if we would even still be friends, much less entertain the possibility of a romantic reunion.   

However, some fires are inextinguishable.  Our love burns stronger than ever, and coming to this as wiser, more-experienced people gives us a fresh perspective and appreciation for what we have.  We are together now, and I expect we will be forever this time around. 

One of the few pics you'll see here of my beau!

Life is good.  I am so thankful every day that I followed those “illogical” nudgings.  To me, that is what Faith is all about, and mine has deepened tremendously.  I am so thankful that my Type A personality let go of my ingrained habit to plan and attempt to control every detail.  Rather, by trusting that something better would evolve for me and my loved ones, it does.  And it just keeps getting better in ways that I could not even have imagined.

Thank you for joining me on this amazing journey!  May you dare to live your life to its fullest, too.  It’s not your location that matters; it’s your state of mind!  Be open to Choosing The Better Life for yourself.  I can’t wait to hear about your journey!

How Did You End Up On An Island? PART 1

"How did you end up living on an island?"  This question is posed to me on a near-weekly basis.  The end result was a few decades in the making, so it defies any succinct answer, but I’ll give it a shot.

Where Were You Before You Moved To The Island?

After graduating law school and obtaining a Master’s Degree in Education in the Midwest, I moved to South Florida (where my parents and brother had relocated) and worked for four years as an educational/legal consultant to school districts across the southeastern United States.  Then, for a variety of reasons, I moved north to a wonderful Midwestern city that is unfortunately prone to long, grey, cold winters.  For 10 years I practiced in a downtown law firm, focusing on school law and business/transactional matters.  With everything you hear about law firms, I felt fortunate that I liked and respected my colleagues and the Firm’s clients.  Although I was not passionate about the actual work, I had found my groove, worked long hours at it, and just clicked along in the life I was living.

2009 brought a roller coaster of traumatic events in my personal life.  I regained my footing in 2010, but I began to approach life from a slightly different perspective.  I wanted to-the-core happiness.  I didn’t want to just keep going through the motions.  I sought personal fulfillment.  Blah, blah, blah.  :)  Things were calm and I was okay and life was fine.  But I felt a restlessness about me, a dissatisfaction, a haunting sense that I wasn't happy enough - if you can quantify such a thing - for the rest of my life.  I knew, or at least believed, that there had to be more to life than what I had tapped into.

So, I began to think about making some changes.  Specifically, I began to think about career change and geographic change.  

Why Did You Quit Your Job?

I started to slowly take the usual next steps associated with career/geographic change:  researching resume/CV formats for career-changers, updating my resume, contacting others to serve as references, researching other cities (particular nods to Nashville, Charleston and Wilmington), researching job opportunities in those areas, visiting and even browsing rental properties in Nashville, my top contender, and talking to a local realtor about listing my condo for sale. 

Visiting Nashville, playfully "praying for" a job teaching in Vanderbilt's College of Education, maybe my dream job?

But even with my growing interest in Nashville and exploration of other career possibilities, I kept hitting a wall.  I couldn’t bring myself to take steps much beyond thinking about it.  I couldn’t even finish my resume.  This lack of follow-through was foreign to my little organized self since I usually love to cross items off of my ever-present lists of things to do. 

Something was going on.  In wondering what was holding me back from the typical next steps, I kept feeling pulled in a direction that didn’t make sense to my logical brain . . . take a year off. 

“What?!  Take a year off?  And not have a job?  Not have a specific plan?  That is hardly a realistic option!  I’ve ALWAYS worked.  Even in college, every year I went home to waitress instead of going on a Spring Break.  Besides, I’m a responsible grown-up now.  You don’t just leave one job without having the next one lined up, especially in this economy!  Puhleez.”  My Type-A brain scoffed at the very notion. 

However, try as I might to redirect this impulse, it kept coming back to me.  Eventually, having promised myself to never again ignore those quiet nudgings that guide us from within, I finally gave in.  When I gave notice, my law partners were wonderfully supportive.  Some encouraged me to consider a leave of absence instead of a total break from employment with the Firm.  But I knew that I had to be completely untethered and relieved of all obligations or self-imposed time frames in order to make the most of my time off and really keep the options wide open.

I left my law firm early in 2011 amid tears, fears and high hopes for the unknown.  My “plan” was to simply BE for a few months, then start exploring other career/location possibilities in full force.  I’d budgeted savings to give myself an entire year off.  My job for the next year was going to be to design an exciting new life, one that was more in alignment with my true self and how I really felt inside, now that I would have the luxury of time to sift through the clutter of our hectic lives and figure mine out!

Little did I know how things would continue to unfold . . .

Island Back-Story: How I Discovered This Tiny Paradise

(Editor's Note:  Originally posted on March 16, 2012, this post has been updated to add in pictures!  Once I retrieved old photo albums from storage, and consulted my dad's pilot's logs for details of our early trips, I corrected a few errors in memory and added the old pics!  Enjoy.)

Since the island is so small, and so far from where I lived in the States most of my life, how in the world did I ever find it?  Well . . .

15-Year-Old Midwestern Girl

Let’s go back in time to the mid-80’s . . . Madonna was huge.  So was hair.  As a 15-year-old girl, I primped quite a bit, finding the perfect combination of eye shadow and blue eyeliner, twirling a curling iron for hours, plumping up shoulder pads and otherwise behaving like a stereotypical teenage girl.

Still an 80's girl in my Senior photo a few years later.

Landlocked in the Midwest, I was beside myself with excitement over an upcoming family trip – to the exotic Bahamas!

Southern Flyer

Years before, while we still lived in a Southern state, my dad started taking flying lessons.  Eventually, he obtained his private pilot’s license, and my parents bought a small airplane with another couple.  Flying with my dad replaced long road trips as our mode of transportation for visits to extended family and vacations. 

Mom and Dad always took at least one kid-free vacation every year.  Because the Bahamas are known as a pilot’s haven with all the island-hopping that can be done and beautiful aerial views of the multi-hued water, my parents and another pilot couple started flying to the Bahamas for their grown-up getaways.  Usually visiting three spots during a week’s vacation, they found themselves saving one particular island for last, recognizing it as a favorite.

That First Trip and Its Many Surprises

After several years of this, my parents decided they loved it so much that they wanted to share it with my brother and me.  So, in lieu of lots of Christmas presents, we were going to spend the holiday in the Bahamas!  Bundled in parkas and winter gear, we loaded our suitcases packed with swimsuits and shorts into the airplane.  We shivered our way through a bitterly cold take-off and began to make our way across the country toward Florida. 

The movie Iron Eagle was recently released, and a favorite of my younger brother (age 11 that year).  Our first surprise on the trip was that Dad made a cassette recording as “Chappy” from the movie, narrating the different cities and points of interest we were flying over.  He timed it to coordinate with the nav points he was flying and, whenever he made one of the control beeps start going off, my brother and I switched on our Walkman and listened to “Chappy” explain what we were seeing below!  (It was very cool to us at the time, and, now, it is even more special thinking about all of his effort and creativity!)

I still have Dad's "Chappy" letter in my scrapbook!

We landed in Florida for an overnight stay, and my parents made an adventure of not letting my brother and me know where we were.  We took a taxi to the hotel, and I learned later that Dad had the driver take a circuitous route to avoid the extensive billboards advertising this major tourist destination.  As we were getting settled into our hotel room, there was a knock on the door which, oddly, our parents had my brother and me answer.  Surprise number two – there stood our grandparents!  The family had arranged for them to join us from their northern state for this adventure and to spend the holiday together.  Delightful!

Once we were all together, my parents revealed the third surprise – our location, Orlando, and a detour to Disney World!  We had never been, and my parents, somewhat concerned that two teenagers would be bored on a tiny, remote island, added this to the itinerary for some extra thrill.  So imagine THEIR surprise and horror when I burst into disappointed tears.  Excited to work on my tan and travel out of the country – my first time ever – Disney World was an unwelcome delay that would eat into that time.  How parents make it through teenage years is beyond me!  I settled down, and we all had a wonderful time in Disney World.

The Islands of the Bahamas

Finally, it was time!  We flew into the Bahamas, cleared Customs on one island, then flew to this small island that my parents loved - yup, the same one I now call home.

Like our parents, my brother and I quickly loved this place!  We enjoyed the sun, marveled at the Bahamian dialect and manner of speaking and otherwise enjoyed all things tourist.

Tourist photo op:  picking up starfish!

We stayed in the best accommodations available on the island, although they were still fairly primitive by U.S. city standards.  Our little cottage was itty-bitty for the four of us.  We were thankful to have running water, but it was not fresh water!  We showered in brackish water and brushed our teeth from the gallon jug of fresh water that housekeeping brought each day.  At night, we slept with the lights on after realizing that large cockroaches came out of hiding in the dark and covered the ceiling and walls – ewwww!

We stayed in the double-decker "houseboat" on the right.

This hardly sounds like the kind of place my primping 15-year-old self would tolerate, much less love.  But love it I did.  

The locals and visitors were all so very friendly.  We enjoyed three delicious meals each day at the marina’s club.  The beaches boasted the softest, whitest sand.  And the water was the clearest and prettiest I have ever seen, before or since. 

Snorkeling in the clear water.

Best of all, our little cottage came with a 12-foot Boston Whaler, so we cruised all over the island chain in our little boat, stopping to swim, snorkel, hunt for sand dollars, explore and lounge on the beaches.  I also loved to softly bob on the anchored boat, singing along to Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” while I soaked in the sun.  It was paradise.

Our little boat in the setting sun, photo taken from the houseboat porch.

And So On and So Forth

Thus began a love affair with this island that would endure for decades.  Thrilled that my brother and I loved the island, my parents turned this into an annual trip for us all.  

Second trip, 1987, ages 16 and 12.

Every Christmas for years to come, we’d pile into the plane and fly to our little slice of heaven.  As the years passed and we became “regulars,” we enjoyed trading stories and catching up with the locals and other regulars.

1987, my second trip, with brother and mom and two Bahamian friends who have now known me 26 years!

It really became a home away from home.  Eventually, my parents bought land on the island and, some years after that, built a vacation home.  “Renters no more!” people liked to tease.

As the years passed, life threw its curve balls, as it does to so many people.  For one, my parents divorced (as you may have surmised from other posts), but the island home remains in my family.  Thanks especially to the generosity of my mother I am happily nesting in our family home, complete with decades of fond memories. 

I am grateful to my parents for bringing me to this special place all those years ago and making it possible for the wonderful island experiences to be part of my world - then and now.