Ro Wells Travel

So here I am, age 30, having just entirely uprooted my life and moved to a different country. I had a stable income, a steady job and a place to live. Yet I still decided to quit my job, sell most of my belongings and move half way across the world. Well, across the Atlantic anyway. As of the end of October, I am living in Canada. It’s taken me a long time to get here but here I am. Ready to start a new chapter. I can’t pinpoint an exact ‘beginning’ to the decision to move abroad, it was kind of just a natural culmination of various experiences and decisions. I have always wanted to go travelling and Canada has always been at the top of my list.

I have lived abroad before. I did two ski seasons in my early twenties where I lived in Austria. I was out there for five months at a time, two years running. I loved it. I loved the lifestyle, I loved the scenery, I loved the experiences I had out there. Then I came back to the U.K., got my Master’s degree and got a ‘proper’ job. But after six years, I knew that the work I was doing wasn’t feeling fulfilling anymore. I felt very stuck in life, like I wasn’t really moving forward, just repeating the same set of motions. I knew I needed a big life shake up to get me going again but I was completely overwhelmed at the thought of trying to work out how to do that, which resulted in a total inertia. Every now and again I thought about going travelling but the little voice in my head always found a reason not to go when I asked myself “Why not just go travelling for a bit?”. My personal favourites were: “I can’t go because I can’t afford it”, “I don’t know how I’ll earn money while I’m out there”, “I can’t go because it’s not the right time in my career” and “I can’t go because it means I’ll lose the house that I’m renting.”

Somewhere in the back of my mind there was probably, “I can’t go because it’s not what society has planned for me”. We’re given a script at the age of three that you go through life in a predefined set of steps: you go to school, you go to university, you get a job, you get married, you have kids, you retire and then you die. Although we try to rebel against that, it’s programmed so strongly into us throughout our lives that it’s probably always in the back of your mind somewhere. But that script doesn’t work for everybody. It’s definitely never worked for me. Somewhere over the last six years I’d forgotten that society’s script isn’t my script. However, when I asked myself the question “Why not?”, the answer was never because I didn’t know where to go. I always had a list of places, of countries that I wanted to see, of cultures that I wanted to experience, of lakes and mountains I wanted to visit. But still, the list of reasons not to go were overpowering the little voice saying to go. So I just carried on with life as it was.

Then, in January 2023, one of my best friends died very unexpectedly. It completely floored me. She was an incredible person, an absolute force of nature. She was one of the strongest, smartest and most loving people I have ever had the joy to know. Losing her served as a very poignant reminder that tomorrow isn’t always guaranteed. We never know what the universe has in store for us and even if we make plans for ‘later’, ‘later’ may not happen. I was still in the same job that wasn’t satisfying me, I was struggling financially and wasn’t enjoying where I was living. I was starting to feel a lot of stress and slowly started to feel lost again. Maybe that shake up in life that I needed was to go travelling. It was something I’d always wanted to do but kept putting off for bullshit reasons. The list of answers I’d previously had to that question, telling me not to go, didn’t seem as powerful as they had previously, they didn’t seem robust enough to stop me anymore. Suddenly, the first answer that came to my mind to the question “Why not?” had become “Well yeah, why not? If not now, when?” So I applied for my visa, booked my flights and off I went.