Life In The Future.

We’ve been gone over a month now, and it’s been one of the greatest months of our lives together. While we miss our friends and families, it’s impossible to ignore how free we feel from the everyday distractions that stem from living and working in the same area for your entire life. All of the community events, meet ups, coffee with whoever…when you live 14hrs in the future, you barely even keep in contact with the people you know and love. It’s hard, but it’s exactly what we needed.

When we first decided to leave everything we knew, we penned a list of things we wanted to achieve; both individually and together. We started with things like: “go on more dates”, “visit historical sites” and “learn how to turn off technology”, but then we dug deep; adding things like “learn more about ourselves - apart from other people’s opinions”, “figure out how to shed the negative influences of our past experiences” and “regain our sense of adventure and playfulness”. We finished the list up with educational goals like Trista growing in her career and me learning how to become a full-stack developer. It’s a long list, but we knew we’d have the time - so why not go nuts with it?!

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Dancing In The Rain.

The first month was full of more dates and exploring than we’ve done in the past 5 years combined. We dug in to our devotionals and learned a TON about ourselves, adding to our lists as we went. Trista started progressing much more quickly and I started putting a solid 5-6 hours/day in to learning how to be a developer. I have to say, this has been the most prosperous month of our lives…and we’re just getting started!

We still have one month left in Chiang Mai, we’re the happiest we’ve been in the past few years, I’m over 10% of the way through my development timeline, we’ve seen some awesome historical sites, had tons of Thai massages and we haven’t cleaned or cooked once. To top it all off, this will be the first month in years that we put money into savings.
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Writing Something Worthwhile.

There are so many things we want to write about, but I think the thing we actually need to write about is how we made this happen so quickly; so that other couples who need this kind of change feel like they have a little bit more of a handle on it than we did. Let’s face it, not many people are crazy enough to sell everything they own to move across the world and start fresh! But with the world getting smaller by the year, and everyone already working from their laptops and phones at least 80% of the time, working remote is quickly becoming a viable option.

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Thanks for reading!

Till next time,

Erik Hayton