You can't change your life and be sensible at the same time

Just a quick entry.
This is our penultimate week in our house at 45 Sun Street, we will be leaving on the 7th of June. Looks like we will complete the sale this week or at least early next week. On top of this my brother has almost completed the paper work on buying my half of the bungalow. So after all this time it looks like everything will happen at the same time, that is the sale of our properties, giving us the funds we need to move and to seriously think about boat shopping.
And then we came across a boat we like the look of. She's a Young Sun 35 cutter rigged sloop, 1981 vintage, that is in Grenada. And it's going for a bargain price, well by the looks of it. It's owned by an Englishman who wants a quick sale.
We emailed him for more photos, and yesterday we had the survey through. It needs a little work, but mostly cosmetic. We really like the look of this boat, it's a bit salty, traditional build, a heavy boat that is supposed to be seakindly. We're talking to the owner and are on the verge of saying yes, but of course we will need to see her first, but shes 10 hours flying distance away. That's a long way to go to find out that we don't like her, and a lot of money in fares and hotels.
We could just take the plunge and buy her without stepping on board but that would be very foolish, or would it?
So it looks like all our planning may fall together, fall into that one moment that fate has laid before us. The money, the boat,the shedding of our ties to this old life.
Tomorrow we have booked a Skype call with the owner of Sequin, and tomorrow we could have completed on the sale of two houses. This is very very weird, or is it fate.
The other day whilst clearing out my old journals and song books I came across a saying I thought very apt for the moment we're in.
You can't change your life and be sensible at the same time.

Leaving yourself behind

Cupboards and drawers are slowly getting emptied, some stuff going to charity shops, some to car boot sales, lots of it going to the recycling centre. This is the detritus of a life lived in one house for the last twelve years, and a myriad of other stuff that has been hauled around for the last 50 years or more. When your about to decant half way across the world to a different climate, and a new life you have to be ruthless.

 This is a very therapeutic feeling, but it also takes you back on a journey through your life. The minutia, the ornaments, the nick nacks not seen for years evoke that time when this thing was important enough  to hang onto. The albums, vynal   records that have sat on the shelf for over   all those years that you have been unable to play for at least the last fifteen, cause you haven't got a deck anymore. And anyway you've moved on and got older and your tastes have changed. And popular music is of the now, deep and meaningful songs of yesteryear drag me back, but are some how lost and locked in their own time zone, and they have sat on that shelf for so long, unplayed, and a testament to who you were and what you became.

I have promised myself that I will find a deck and convert them all to MP3s and log them on my ipod, but I don't because its such a long and laborious process, so I'm going to let them go, set them free and take them to a charity shop. Sgt Pepper, Dark side of the Moon, Crosby Stills and Nash, The Muswell hillbillys, Love over Gold, Bringing it all back home, the list goes on, Bookends.

It won't fit on the boat, if it wont fit on the boat it has to go, and it feels good. To discard the trappings of who you are, the bits of ephemeral stuff that defines you, or think defines you has to go, has to be left behind as you move on into another life. The same life, of course, you only get one, after all, and shedding is so good, but at the same time scary

The one thing that I have a problem with though are my song books, the books that I have been keeping that contain the ramblings of a songwriter since 1970s'. I've got about twenty books that contain songs I've written, the majority, awful along with journals of my wanderings through this world,this life, this existence. Some day to day when I was prolific,some documenting my adventures, some mundane,some profound, but mostly just plain boring, but perhaps my grand kids may discover them and have an insight into who they had as a Granddad.

 A granddad, how did that happen, comes to us all. So these jottings, these slices of my life are the hardest things to discard. Jackies daughter says that she will look after them, she seems to see a value in them so thats where they will probably go to, but it's a big ask to expect her to haul them around with her throughout her wanderings. All I know is that they can't accompany us on our new journey into sailing land. So I have to let them go, as precious as they are to who I am.

And then there's this town that we have been so much apart of  for almost twenty years. Movers and shakers, known to so many, as we trace our way through all the connections that we both have made. We have touched so many lives in our quest to just do something, to make something happen, sucked into the fabric of this tiny corner of the world, just trying to make a difference.

 We will miss that, I know we will because Ulverston in Cunbria, England has sustained us, has given us a purpose, has given us friends.and a family that we are about to leave behind to find our new adventures on the high seas. The islands of the Caribbean beckon, the uncertainty of what we will become, of what we have chosen as our swan song.

 The leap into the unknown, the shedding of the trappings of what we were, to what we may be. It's so exciting to be stepping out into the unknown, but at the same time very very scary, but with the shedding of all this detritus so liberating and if it won't fit on the boat it has to go.