Why I Refuse to Die With Regrets

10+ countries, 2 businesses, 1 ultramarathon, and zero intention of slowing down.

While up to my hips in a Costa Rican pool last week, (which was as far as I was allowed to go as my tummy wounds weren’t quite healed yet), Rhett & I roughly mapped out our travels for the rest of this year.

Personally I enjoy a more ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ travel schedule, but my husband is a planner, plus he’s training for an ultra marathon (I know right? 🤷🏻‍♀️), so needs to do some qualifiers or something (I don’t ask too many questions).

Plus with our vacation club membership, to get good deals we need to look ahead. Plus we want to spend Christmas with our daughter.

So with all those ‘extra’ considerations it’s in our interests to make some loose plans.

And it looks a bit like this:

1. 3 weeks in San Diego (currently here now).

2. 2 weeks in Vegas, where our daughter flies out to join us and Rhett gets to watch the World Cup on every screen in the city, while my daughter & I lounge around pools & go to shows. 🥳

3. 2 weeks in Cabo for his 50th birthday at one of our Marriott vacation resorts, after which our daughter heads back to London.

4. We then hotfoot to Canada, namely Vancouver for a couple of weeks,

5. Then into the Rockies, where he’s running a half marathon and I’m pretending to be useful by holding a water bottle and a camera.

6. A week around the Banff area (on my bucket list).

7. Back into the US. A spell just outside New York. Down to Richmond, Virginia, to celebrate a good friend’s 50th.

8. A quick run back to England to put an investment house on the market.

9. Then, a few fluid weeks where we’re not sure what to do at this stage. Mexico, somewhere in the Caribbean, or Argentina are all being floated as options.

10. Florida for Christmas, with our daughter, and the Disney parks for the kid in all of us.

11. Daughter heads back to London for New Year with friends, while Rhett and I head down to South America. Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, maybe the top of Argentina.

12. By June we’re in South Africa, for Rhett to run the Comrades Ultramarathon. Roughly 90km, with a (brutal) 12-hour cut-off. (Seriously google “12 hour cut off comrades videos - and watch the people that are seconds from the end - brutal!) Anyway, I’ll be the one in the support car, eating biltong, sipping on a cool drink & planning the safari I’ve been promising myself for years.

So that’s the rough plan. And while all that’s going on, I shall continue to build the two exciting engines of my business.

1. This Big World - my travel challenge cards (and any other products I launch.) Growing the presence online, building the audience, launching the weekly travel newsletter for adventurous travellers, and growing the business to a saleable asset.

2. The 50+ Nomad - my creator brand. Posting daily, writing the books, building the resources, slowly putting the foundations in place for what I want this to become over the next 10 or 20 years, which is a body of inspiring work for people who want to live extraordinary lives in their 50s & beyond.

When I tell people our plans I usually get one (or more) of 3 reactions.

1. That sounds bloody exhausting! (That was actually my first reaction 😂)

2. That sounds exciting! “How can I do that?” Good question. I’ll keep writing about exactly that.

3. A sort of polite, slightly tight smile, (usually family response) roughly translated as, “must be nice for you.” Sometimes it comes with a small lecture about being realistic, settling down, the world being dangerous, my health, my age, the economy, AI, what if, what if, what if. I understand it. Most of it comes from a good place.

But I’ve never been one for living a ‘conventional’ life, (whatever that even means these days.)

I remember when Rhett & I first met, I said to him - “I want to live an extraordinary life.” Thankfully he was on board from the getgo.

Author Bronnie Ware spent years working in palliative care, and she catalogued the top five regrets of the dying. Number one, top of the list, was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

I’ve been lucky. I had parents who told me to chase my dreams. Do whatever it took to find happiness, fulfilment and joy in life.

I’ve never really felt an expectation to live any other way than I have. And the more I’ve lived extraordinarily the more extraordinary people I’ve met.

So if I dropped tomorrow, I’d go with minimal regrets.

The life I’ve already had - my daughter, my marriage, the lifelong friends I’ve made along the way, the travel, the businesses, the broke years and the recovery ones, every messy, expensive, terrifying decision to keep choosing the bigger life over the safer one - has already been amazing.

But I’m not ignorant. I know not everyone has been as lucky as I have.

Many didn’t have encouraging parents, or spouses who supported their dreams, or even easy & healthy children who were happy to be dragged around the world and super adaptable to all situations.

Everyone’s life path is different and their own, and I acknowledge that I have been given a set of circumstances that have opened more opportunities to me than others may have experienced.

So I’m not sitting here telling you to sell up, pack a bag, and fly around the world after a dog and an ultramarathoning husband. That’s my version. It may not be yours.

What I am saying is that Bronnie Ware’s dying patients didn’t regret not travelling to forty-five countries. They regretted not living a life true to themselves. And not having that regret is available to absolutely everyone, at every budget, in every set of circumstances.

You don’t need money or freedom or a passport full of stamps to live more truly to who you are. You just need the courage to stop living the life other people expect of you, and start living the one that’s yours.

For some people that’s a year on the road. For others it’s signing up for the class you’ve been thinking about, leaving the soul sucking job that’s crushing you, mending the friendship, writing the book, planting the garden, saying the thing. The scale isn’t the point. The truth of it is.

Only you know what ‘not dying with regrets’ means to you.

Only you know what needs to happen for you to close your eyes one day and go with a smile on your face thinking ‘yep I bloody lived!’

So go bloody live. ❤️

📍 Encinitas, San Diego 🇺🇸

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