Did we consider ourselves Americans or Australians?
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Living without regrets is the truest form of freedom. It means you are living in such a way that you make choices and take actions that you won’t feel remorseful about or wish you could change later on. It involves embracing opportunities and making decisions aligned with your values and aspirations so that you can look back on your life with satisfaction and contentment rather than dwelling on what could have been.
Is it easy? No. But these were the things I had to consider in making a life-changing decision.
At one point, my family and I needed to decide whether we were going to leave Australia to go to America and take an opportunity. We did—and thrived. Then, years later, we reached a point where we needed to decide if we should stay in America or return to our “home” in Australia; it was nearly an impossible decision. Did we consider ourselves Americans or Australians?
In the end, we made the decision together and called it our “51/49” decision. It was like weighing one choice in your right hand and the other in your left—and finding them impossibly equal. One day, the choice seemed to lean one way, the next… the opposite. How do we decide?
It was heartbreaking to think about leaving our American friends. They had easily become our family, and that is how I will think of them, always. I still consider them some of my closest confidantes; I will forever cherish my friendship with them. We spent so many fun times watching our children growing up together and our friendships becoming closer as we experienced the typical annual American traditions. Our Thanksgiving, Halloween, July 4, and summer block party memories were some of the happiest times of my life.
We had done what I had hoped we would do when we moved to the United States; we had created a home. But, almost six years on, and due to circumstances beyond our control, we needed to consider whether we should return to our first “home.” But only if we could do it with no regrets. We knew we could never go back and change our decision: once it was done, it was done. And we knew we would never know what life “would have been” if we made the other choice.
This “51/49” decision pulled me in many different directions. Yes, it was going to be an exciting experience, but uprooting my children, leaving our friends, who had become family. Finally, the financial and logistical stresses of a move across the globe made for extremely unsettling times.
Could we make this decision with no regrets? How would we regroup—as a family and as individuals? What, truly, was the next right step? I will say that this was when I realized I needed to learn a new aspect of constructive restlessness: trust.
And so we ultimately made the move. We decided we would take the long way back to Australia and travel to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and France. We knew that such an opportunity to travel the world for three months would never arise again.
But we were uneasy. We had no “home” anywhere—we boldly forged our own path. We made that 51/49 decision to go. We knew we needed to live authentically and wholeheartedly without being burdened by the weight of past decisions and actions. No regrets.
When we are passionate, we often feel as if we are steering a ship. Often, our ambitions can steer us toward True North. But we can forget the currents, and even though our hands are on the wheel, our sails are billowing, and the skies offer us a clear view of the stars to navigate by, the ocean can be unkind.
You sometimes don’t know what lies ahead under the dark waves. However, if you remain true to your internal compass, if you point it toward your deepest desires, and you trust your gut, you know you may get caught in the riptides, but you will come out the other side.
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