Mapping the Gap

The Why has been covered, but I’m pretty sure people are still wondering… How?  “A Gap Year Abroad.”  Sounds pricy.  Sounds complicated.  Sounds risky.  So many questions.  Sideways glances.  Such disbelief in this undermining of reality.  People are quite quick to inquire about all the obstacles to such an undertaking:  What about your house?  What about your cars?  Your jobs?  What about the dog?  Your massive collection of house plants?  What about the kids’ schooling?  What about all your stuff? And finally, the taboo one that nobody asks: Where in the hell is the money coming from?  It’s been fun to see people sizing us up like they’ve miscalculated our socio-economic status.  No big secrets here.  I’ll explain.

The juicy answer to all these practical questions boils down to three tasty words: Luck, Sweat and Balls. We have been gifted with good fortune in a few key arenas (Luck), we have the willingness to put in the mountain work (Sweat), and we have the cojones to believe in the profits of our gamble far more than the fears or obstacles that might bar our way. (Balls… or you can call this last one Conviction for those of a more polite persuasion.)

The Finances

Let’s begin with the big question.  The funds.  How does this work?  Well, the fortunate foundations of this venture began long ago.  With the bedrock of being born in wealthy countries to families that worked hard to provide for our advantaged upbringings, my partner and I had the educational and financial groundwork to begin on firm footing.  Our privilege is woven into our skins and greases the wheels of everything we do.  Let us not forget this.  We’ll call it Luck.  

Upon this nice foundation, we had managed to have a nice house and a modestly nice savings.  Enter, Balls.  In the spirit of living for today as opposed to far-off tomorrows, we got bold.  We brazenly re-envisioned our savings (some of it) as a round-the-world flight budget for our family of five.  I hear the tut-tutting of tongues more careful than ours, the shaking of disapproving heads, the pursing of more prudent lips.  I hear you.  But when I get a bit antsy at the thought of digging so savagely into our savings, I also hear the story of a colleague who lost her husband to a brief battle with brain cancer.  I hear her explaining about how she travelled to Europe alone on a route they had planned together, how his absence funded her single seat in Business Class, and how she had hoped to feel his presence in this extravagance. 

Let us not forget that we could easily be slashed to a family of four by the Fates on any unlucky day, our warm-fleshed dear ones gone like smoke on a breeze.  Life is more fragile than we treat it.  I won’t wail regret at the graveside.  Mortality is a sage and frisky financial advisor.  What is money when we have but one life to spend?  A year traveling the world as a family with no one to dictate our days but ourselves… There isn’t a price-tag for that.  This experience of rich living will never be taken from us, never lost in a market crash.  These funds will not sit impotent in some surreal banking app state, nor will they be forked over for steeply priced senior living in our twilight days.  The only true currency in life is Time.  And we are making out like bandits.  At least this year.

So, tailoring our itinerary to the world’s most affordable countries and our timetable to the month-long-stay discounts on AirB&B, we managed to imagine a family economy with my partner’s job as our solitary source of income.  We aren’t going big.  We aren’t seeing it all.  We aren’t out to “do” any countries.  Inhabiting new cultures.  Being together.  Seeking what is spontaneous.  Doesn’t cost much. 

Once my partner’s work gave the crucial green flash of “Go,” we started chucking kindling on the fire of this little fantasy.  As all the key elements of our lives seemed to ignite in alignment with our aspirations, a bonfire soon raged.  From whispered embers of possibility to a great life-purifying blaze, a gap year reality was upon us and all the great work that came with it.  A good deal of Sweat was sacrificed to fuel the flames.  It was such well-invested Sweat though.  I mean, really, we were sweating our asses off on the treadmill of routine life anyway.  At least this was innovative and empowering.

The Schooling

Another big question is the schooling.  Well, “world-schooling” is a thing.  It is something people do and write about.  It’s a well-trodden path.  It’s like home-schooling but mobile.  World-schoolers do it in a lot of different ways involving hubs, local schools, international schools, home-schooling curriculums, and unschooling, but most of them would probably unite under the same simple motto: “The world is our classroom.”  

So, as a well-institutionalised person would, I started our world-schooling path by submitting three applications to the New South Wales Department of Education Home-schooling office, complete with learning plans for Years 2, 4, and 6 with individualised aspects based on standardised test results, feedback from teachers, and my own observations. I had a Spanish curriculum and well-being aspects developed for each boy, as well.  I waited 10 of the 12 estimated weeks for “an authorised person” to do a home visit.  Then, impatient in early January, I emailed to say we weren’t going to have a home soon, so, could we please arrange that visit.  Soon after, I got a phone call informing me that a “home” is actually a requirement of NSW home-schooling, so, could I please withdraw our applications.  Despite my efforts to walk the straight and narrow, we’re going rogue.   

But this isn’t as renegade as it sounds.  As many educators agree, the system and all its “requirements” doesn’t really matter.  Learning does.  Obviously.  But it’s not that simple.  This is one of those arenas where questioning what is universally accepted can lead to unlacing the fibres of the cosmos.  I started digging deep into the home-schooling world, started rethinking all I’d been coded to believe.  Down this unexpectedly philosophical dive, I found myself crawling through the cavernous heart of education’s essential questions:  What is learning?  How does it best happen?  Who should decide what is studied and when?  And to what end aim?  What are education’s objectives for my children?  What are my own?  What do I want my children to truly know?  By what rubric are they being measured and how might this limit them?  What messages are they being sent about the value of their individual strengths, their capacity to learn within a specific system, and their acceptable options of a life path? How much does a child retain when they haven’t been taught at a level that is meaningful to them?  How much of a child’s own intuition and creative spark do we ignore, undervalue or outright dismiss as irrelevant to the course objectives?  How much time is spent teaching the masses that could be better spent for the individual child to follow his or her own inner voice of inquiry?  How do testing, awards, and comparisons to other children encourage a spirit of learning as a lifestyle?  Do I want my children to get the right answer, or do I want them to take a little time to explore the etiology of the wrong ones?  Do I want them to be skilled at being instructed or accomplished at being self-taught?  Do I want them to know how to properly fill in the box or break out of it and imagine their own boxes?  Probably both.  I don’t know.  It’s a lot. And each question begs another four.

I worry I may have dug too deep here, disrupted our family’s educational pipeline by fracking for a more primordial truth.  This rabbit hole is a dive into one’s own values and our deepest aspirations for our children’s lives.  This is no small thing.  It seems to me that education should not be about leading children to success in life but providing guidance in deeply living.  Success in life will follow, we must have faith.  Allowing our children to answer their own inner beckonings, observing what spontaneously plucks their passion, and surrendering to what wakes them in the world is a bit fringe in the modern idea of education, but it actually makes a lot of sense when one consults the true essence of human inquiry as an authority.  

At any rate, this cave system of questions will be my map on this uncertain path.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to unknow what I have uncovered in my probing.  I’m not even sure what I know.  There are quite a few forerunners to follow on this one, but as far as I can tell, the main idea is straightforward: kids can’t be stopped from learning.  It’s a simple formula.  Kids + Life = Learning.  Join them, and you are the teacher.  That’s the plan.

I’ll just note here that many parents said they couldn’t do this trip because they couldn’t school their kids.  I get it.  Even outside the lockdown traumas, I have often dreaded time with my own offspring. I’ve had many holiday countdowns.  But that was when we were living separate lives.  Once your kids are yours again, and you are theirs, and once your idea of “school” evolves into something with a pulse, all that goes away.  It’s not me vs them.  It’s us.  And it’s alive.  It’s been a paradigm pirouette out of nowhere.  We haven’t even properly started world-schooling, and here is a sampling of what our minds have shared, according to my phone’s search-history:

• Continental shelf marlin
• Bronze sharks
• Tide cycle
• Mussels recipe with beer
• Do mussels feel pain?
• Spinal cord anatomy
• Cysts
• Communist countries
• The military draft
• Marilyn Monroe
• Off-shore wind farms disadvantages
• First vs second degree murder
• The Blue Lake aquifer
• Serbian protest
• Boba tea same as bubble tea (not quite)
• The Prodigal Son
• Fairy penguins South Australia
• White flat bone found on beach (cuttlefish)

It’s been just under two weeks, and I can already see.  Simply being available to converse at length with my children as my main employment makes all the difference.  We aren’t strolling down easy street right now, don’t get me wrong.  My boys are still a handful and a half, and I am not winning on all fronts, but I have to say, the life-loving learner in me is totally getting her fix, and I’m influencing my little men like nobody’s business.  Hallelujah.  

Other Stuff

This post is getting long.  To wrap up quickly, our Luck is hefty.  We comment on it all the time.  Many people would like to take a gap year, but the How is simply not simple.  Caring for others, sharing custody of kids, health conditions, animals, educational pursuits, disabilities, debt, location-dependent employment, unwillingness of other family members, run-of-the-mill fear, and on and on.  We have a big list of blessings, which is partly why we had to do this.  We can.  

All the other stuff in life finds a new place.  Our pup, our fish, and my 50-some plants all scattered to find their new homes.  The house, we are selling for seed money in a new landscape somewhere down the road.  Our Sandvan, which is still serving us well, will sell at auction in Sydney before we head to Indonesia on March 1st.  Our car is being safely held by family (thank you), and we pay monthly rent for our household of stuff- a cost we question but stomach with a bit of grump.  It’s been a lot of work to sort it all out.  A lot of Sweat.  A lot of Balls.  If I had another life to live, I might have voted to put it all off.  But I don’t.  Just the one.  This is it.  So, here we are.