Living the dream..or merely daydreaming?

When you go to our blog, you will see the title that says, "challenges and misadventures on the road to living the ultimate dream."  I have been thinking about the phrase "living the dream", in our case being living in the US Virgin Islands. I realized now I don't really like that phrase...it sounds..well, dreamy-ish... unrealistic...foolish....

Sure, who doesn't think living in the caribbean  to be living the ultimate dream? (Well, maybe a few of you, but majority will probably agree with me on that one).  The problem is, dreams are unreal. So when I tell people that we are going to live our dream...of course many are skeptical because it is unrealistic. Heck, I was skeptical...and I think sometimes I am still a little bit skeptical even though I have decided to do this with my husband.

I tried to convince myself that we are not those people who just quit their job and buy a one-way ticket to do something utterly crazy and unpredictable like this. Well, okay.. I know we are NOT one of those people (I don't think I can handle the stress and anxiety level of being that spontaneous..). Or at least, we are less crazy and less unpredictable (well, actually I am really not crazy and very predictable, my husband is somewhat the opposite of me). But, who can predict, no matter how much planning we do, of how we will manage once we move there? That's the part that scares me.. a little bit... and makes me skeptical of this whole idea.

So I kept going through this over and over again in my head, reassuring myself that this will work.
We do have a plan, and a timeline. We are working hard to save as much  money as we can, looking into networking online, searching blogs online about people who made it there, gathering paperwork for getting my PA license there, gathering paperwork about getting a business started there, etc, etc, etc (I plan on blogging in more detail about our planning and prepping of moving there as we go). It should work, right? It is possible to live there, heck tons of people did it. But tons more did it and went back to the mainland... for various reasons, including being unrealistic with their goals in life.

Some people probably think we are crazy, foolish, daydreamers. We are not. There is a reason why we want to live there, and it doesn't just involve cheap rum, gorgeous caribbean beaches and Johnny Depp...okay it really doesn't involve Johnny Depp at all. It really is about something more than that. I read online from people who already moved there that their first advice is to think why we want to move. If the answer is to escape from our life in the mainland, that is not a good enough reason. Well, I don't think that is our reason. It's just we are both sick of living in a place where everything that matters don't really matter. People only care about themselves, ignorance is rampant, all that matters here is money, what Kim Kardashian is doing and how to get everything I want right now. My husband said it perfectly: "there is no sense of community here." This is the major reason why we want to move, and why not move where it is also beautiful?

And where is that distinction between living the dream and reaching your ultimate goal in life? I like to call this reaching our goal in life: to live fulfilled, to live the best life we can be, to give something back and be a part of humanity. Is that too dreamy-ish? too unrealistic? Majority of my family will probably say yes. They will say just get a good job, buy a house and have children. But our goal in life is not to just work and have kids (something that a lot of my family members do not understand). Our goal is not just to do what everybody else is doing. We want a purpose and a sense of accomplishment in our life that we did something truly important and worth it for us. After all, shouldn't that be what living is all about?

I'd like to think that we are being realistic... and not merely foolish.

~josie

          He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
                                      ~Friedrich Nietzsche

          The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, 

                 and  should have.
                                      ~Louis E. Boone