“You have exactly one life in which to do everything you’ll ever do. Act accordingly.”
~ Colin Wright
Normally, I dream about where we will travel next and not a new piece of furniture. What I didn’t realize was that, from the start, The Cloud was more than just a sofa. From the first time I sank into it’s soft, hypnotic cushions at Restoration Hardware, I wondered how something factory-made could be so intoxicatingly etherial. Paul and I would forgo movie date nights to sink into its fluffy decadence, dream of new travels, and how we want our lives to look. I’m pretty sure sitting on it made me a better person, as if I could conquer the world and reshape my future from its magical down-filled cushions.
But alas, the Cloud was the worst choice for a family of five with a dog–it’s white. If you’ve ever wondered what condescending, unfiltered judgement from family and friends feels like, tell them you’re buying a white couch. It’s socially acceptable to critically pound anyone who considers such insanity. The sofa delivery guys looked at our family, then the dog, and with judgey-raised eyebrows asked if we planned to leave the protective covers on, permanently (loud laughter).
The white-couch critic’s first response is to ask if it comes in any other color, which it did. I tried to bond with the other colored couches, I really did. Like Goldilocks, I sat on the navy one~too wintery depressing. I sat on the grey one~too lacking that tropical vibe. I sat on the beige one~no benefits of hiding the dirt, while not committing fully to being white. The feeling was absent with all the others. You know the feeling I mean, the tingly thrill that originates in your center and radiates outward to the tips of your fingers and toes. Like when you stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon or walk into your soulmate dreamhouse for the first time and know you’ve finally found each other.
After listening to many (unsolicited) opinions from family and friends as to how this sofa would ruin my life, I almost deferred to their omens of doom. But whenever I revisited the grey option, it felt like a soulless apparatus that was merely keeping my butt off the floor, didn’t make me a better person at all. Just gave me that crappy feeling that goes with compromise and not getting what I really wanted.
Welcome to my life–where what was going to make me the happiest was often highly criticized and impractical. And yet, it has been those types of unrealistic decisions that have led to the high points of my life. To name a few:
~ Taking a 6 month leave of absence from my job to take the girls to live in a developing Central American country to experience a different culture and learn another language. Paul could only visit occasionally so I mostly did this solo with three young girls. To family and friends it seemed so random and risky. Many assumed we had created a new category called a destination divorce.
~ A year later, I quit my perfect university job so we could live in Guatemala for even longer. I did development work and the girls went to school, became fluent. A few initial months stretched into three incredible years.
~ We uprooted, sold our home in Canada to opt for a more portable lifestyle which would include a lot of traveling. We moved to a tropical climate which made me so very, very, very happy.
~ A few years later, we spontaneously decided to travel around the world for 15 months. We put our stuff in storage, and with no itinerary bought one way tickets to Costa Rica. Everyone said it couldn’t be done with a bunch of teenage girls–such brutal stereotyping. It ended up being the most extraordiany year of our lives. We visited 33 countries, and lived for longer stretches in some of our favorite places like Costa Rica, Paris, Australia, Thailand, and Tokyo.
~ Last summer we took 70 days and traveled around the world again, focusing mostly on Southeast Asia, but also making stops in Qatar and New Zealand. We ended the summer with a cross country road trip from Los Angeles to Miami. Scheduling was tricky. The girls took courses online and got summer jobs they could do remotely. The youngest had to fly home alone from Thailand through Qatar to the U.S. Virgin Islands to get to summer camp.
With few exceptions, these decisions were met with mountains of resistance and criticism by the people who care about us the most. Understandably so. Sometimes they raised valid concerns as there were always significant logistical hurdles to smooth out.
But the secret many don’t realize is this: impracticality has a fantastic way of sorting itself out once you’ve committed fully to your version of happiness. When the critical whispers said you can’t separate teens from their friends, we watched how effortlessly the girls maintained their friendships back home–no Snapchat streaks were broken, ’nuff said. The girls took online high school and university classes even though we often had to creatively scrounge for usable wifi. They did all this from fascinating corners of the world that many don’t see in a lifetime, much less before 20.
The Cloud is my life story, in sofa form. My most-loved, most pivotal experiences of my life have always as started as scoffed-at, unrealistic ideas. In the movie ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’, the main character decides on a whim to buy a house in Italy. When she tells a friend, the friend responds, “Terrible ideas…don’t you just love those.” Turns out, I do too. All too often, I’ve had to push well past the practical to get what I madly, deeply, inconveniently want from this life. But those are the decadent cushions I permanently want to live in. In sofas, in life, I choose The Cloud.
