A Good Base

Firstly, it’s a difficult thing to focus on adventure if you don’t have the financial and/or emotional support to give you the security to do things. Secondly, what is adventure? It means different things to different people. So how have my wife and I approached these competing requirements?

Well, if I look back on our marriage, we have been more adventurous than I realised. Back in 1994 I couldn’t get a job in an English school as an Economics teacher. My wife found the JET Programme advert in the Sunday Times and encouraged me to give it a shot. Neither of us knew a thing about Japan, she had never even been on a plane in her life, we had one child and another on the way. So, you could definitely define that as adventurous, but we needed to have the emotional security to take a chance and give us a chance for financial security. Less than 7 months later I was on the way to Japan, which was utterly unknown to us in those pre Internet days, and 10 months later the rest of my family joined me, my wife having taken her first ever flight with a baby and a toddler. Now that’s adventurous!!

Pretty much everything else has followed on from that initial adventure but one thing has remained, the support and security I find from my family. My latest adventure of leaving full time teaching is in the same vein so watch this space!