For the past several months we have been sharing bits and pieces of our journey, but I can’t help but feel like the collective stories are incomplete. It may appear that we vacationed to the mountains, fell in love with the mountains, then moved to the mountains. End of story.
But that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
To be honest, I believe this story began nearly ten years ago, long before we ever took the trip that seemed to have started it all. And there are many lessons we have learned along the way.
Place Time Over Money
Nine years ago Brandon and I began the shift in how we wanted to live our lives. We wanted to focus on having more time, even if that meant having less money. This led to me being able to resign from my career and begin staying home with our kids. At the end of that year, Brandon also made a drastic career move, leaving the path he had been on for the previous 14 years and ultimately changing his trajectory, and even his retirement plan (gasp). We had a tug on our hearts that we wanted as much time as possible together as a family. While it is only in the past year that we feel like we are answering this call more truly, it was years ago this seed was first planted.
Letting Go
Six years ago we started to “tidy up” our home. That’s right, I read the book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and we got to work. We learned to let go of the things that were cluttering our home and cluttering our hearts and our minds. This was also the same time we were working hard to keep me at home with the kids. We had put on hold being able to pay off our student loans, and we were learning how to carefully budget. We wanted more time doing things as a family and we all agreed we were doing that with just one income. Little did we know, that years later, this lesson in letting go would lead us to examining everything we owned, to question the reason, and to let go of even more.
Do What You Love Now
It was three years ago that we took our family vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains. I know we say things like “the mountains were calling” and “this place was written on our hearts,” and it was, but I know now it was more about the life we could envision for ourselves here. We felt like we had found a place that had all of the things we enjoyed doing, and we decided that when we had the time, this is where we wanted to be.
And, at that time, we thought having the time to be here meant vacations and eventual retirement.
But 18 months ago, Brandon and I got serious—very serious—about really applying some of the lessons we had been learning. We knew that, with intentional budgeting and spending, we could finally get back to paying down that overwhelming student loan debt. By minimizing our things even more, we found that most of what we had accumulated brought us no satisfaction whatsoever, so we started to sell it and give it away. The more we got rid of things, the more we realized we did not need a house that size, and we decided we could sell that, too. We found we had too much time and money wrapped up in things we did not care about at all. We were learning that if we could eliminate the things we did not want, we could fill our lives with the things we did want…and we wanted more time together as a family doing more of the things we love to do.
Dream Again
Throughout the letting go and the reimagining, we learned to dream again. We reached back to our earliest years together and revived the dreams we had as a young married couple. We recollected how we always said we wanted a historic home and how we wanted time to travel with our kids. We realized the things we had been doing and the life we had been living was not in alignment with the life we had set out to live. We decided to make our lifelong dreams our everyday life.
And this is where moving to the mountains comes into play. Turns out, it’s not about the mountains at all, it’s about the life we envisioned living here.
By selling our house, we were able to pay off all of our student loans and to make the move debt-free. By keeping our remote work, we are able to both start and end our days right here at home. By decluttering our house, we were able to buy a home that fits our family perfectly. And by knowing how easy it is to get overwhelmed by commitments and schedules, we are able to keep our day-to-day manageable, leaving plenty of time to be together as a family.
Over the years, we had no way of knowing where we were going to end up, but we kept the faith we were on our right path. While there were times we took the long way around, we had faith we were still headed in the right direction. It was faith that allowed us to continually put one foot in front of the other.
Really, this is not a story about moving to the mountains. This is a story about having the faith that could move mountains. Faith that stuck with us through all of the lessons learned—and learned again—and lessons finally put into action. Faith that was nearly ten years in the making. Faith that brought us to the place we wanted to be, living the life we had hoped to live.
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