My husband and I just dropped off our last rent check, and it felt amazing.

A little bit scary, as we are leaping off into completely unknown territory, but amazingly exhilarating as well.

In the middle of April we will be moving into our 28-foot motorhome to pursue a life on our own terms. We’re after a life that prompts singing straight from our heart and soul, because there’s something about living amongst the crowded cities of Southern California, battling gridlock traffic five days a week only to come home and fight for parking, all while breathing in the smog-filled air of Los Angeles, that doesn’t quite stir up a song in the heart’s space.

Don’t get me wrong, we have immense gratitude for the many blessings we have here—the fact that we even have an apartment in a city where the housing crisis is all too real, the awareness that we have plenty to eat in a city where we bear witness to the hungry and homeless every time we venture out, the fact that we have jobs we enjoy that pay us a decent sum of money in exchange for our skills, do not go unacknowledged here. To us, though, these things don’t equal fulfillment, they merely portray an illusion of security—an illusion that has become increasingly obvious to us with each passing day.

We yearn for freedom and fulfillment on a deep soul level, and to us freedom doesn’t equal a few weeks of vacation a year where we can visit a place for a limited time, only to return to the labor of bringing someone else’s dreams to fruition at the end of that allotted time. We have a vision of what we seek to bring to the world, and this shift to the sun in Aries and the Aries New Moon we just experienced has opened a window for action.

This is the time for power moves.

Funnily enough, when we bought the RV last month we didn’t really have a plan or a timeline as to when we were going to make the move. We just started talking about getting a motorhome, then we started shopping around, and the next thing we knew we were the proud owners of an RV. The next logical step was to actually move into it.

So, here we go!

The minimalist lifestyle appeals to us. We spent the greater part of 2015 living on a yacht in Australia so we are no strangers to tiny-living. In fact, we love it. I’ve actually really struggled this past year living in a one bedroom apartment looking around at all the stuff I just don’t feel like I need after living on a boat.

And, we feel trapped.

This isn’t because we want to run away or feel like we need to find happiness somewhere outside of ourselves, as someone did try to tell us we were doing. It’s because we are explorers, and seeing new places fills up our hearts and souls. We stand firmly by the adage that travel is the only thing we can spend money on that makes us richer. Some people may argue, but that’s okay. To each his own, right?

Handing over the $1,350 in rent every month for the last 17 months has been excruciating. The apartment we live in is crumbling, leaky, moldy, is one of the oldest buildings in Long Beach, California, and we believe our drains are the entrance to the Upside Down (if you’ve seen Stranger Things, you know this is not cool). So we started to have a conversation about how we can begin creating the life we want and how we can bring our vision to the world. It’s challenging to birth your dreams into reality while giving away 45-plus hours of your time each week to someone else’s vision. It’s also hard to fund your own vision when you give away half of your income each month to the cost of living in Southern California.

We began to ask ourselves how we could break free from the rat race that is Western society—bills, debt, expenses, and the 40-hour work week grind. We started looking at where our real struggles were and how our life looked. The answers came clearly when we were honest with ourselves: We don’t want to live in a city (and there’s no such thing as forest here for at least an hour and a half in any direction), we don’t want to be someone’s employee forever (even if it is at a cool company with some awesome people), and we don’t want to live in the cycle of saving up, going on vacation when someone else says so, then coming back and doing it all again.

None of this filled us up on a soul level, so we took some action.

We stepped outside our comfort zone. We stared fear and doubt in the face and we stepped forward. We now own our home. And that home is mobile. For a fraction of what we’ve been paying in rent, gas, electricity, and fuel for the commute to work, we are going to live in our cozy little home that we can take anywhere, and will allow us to save money that we can invest in bringing our vision into the world.

It’s going to be interesting, as California has made it very difficult for people seeking to live in RVs, partly due to the severe homeless problem here and partly due to the fact that the system would do everything in its power to block people from pursuing this avenue to freedom from that very thing—the system.

As scary as some of this sounds and feels, I have never felt more sure of anything in my life, besides marrying my husband and knowing that coaching and writing are my calling.

They say that nothing grows in comfort zones, and in the past three years of my life I’ve found that everything I used to imagine doing, feeling, having, and being was waiting for me just outside mine. Now it’s time to find out.

 

Author: Lindsay Carricarte

Image: Kevin Dooley/Flickr; ML van dam/Unsplash 

Editor: Emily Bartran