The Best Year Of My Life

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Today we worked our 10^th job in our 10^th state, Wyoming. We are officially 20% done with our jobs and have five more months of travel to enjoy. Time is flying past us. We’ve met well over a hundred new friends and covered 5,000 miles. After Colorado this week, we will have successfully completed all of western America.

We truly live an adventure.

The other day Heath asked me if this would be the best year of our lives.

My kneejerk reaction involved heavy sarcasm. Yes, the rest of marriage is going downhill from here.

But I understood what he meant. What year could be better than a year full of travel and new friendships and new places? His words made me think. What would the best year of my life look like?

We began talking it over, just so I could make sure he didn’t think the rest of our marriage would be totally mind-numbingly boring.

I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of dreamers on our trip. (I feel so lame calling it a “trip.” On our voyage? Mission? Journey? Expedition?) These dreamers want to start their own tae kwon do dojo, play guitar on stage, fly across the world, or start a little league for underprivileged kids. These people have big dreams that they work toward slowly every day.

That’s the key: They work. Slowly.

The first blog I ever wrote was, well, horrible. I wrote it in the Concordia University gym in between intramural games. I spent a full hour writing a three sentence “About Alyssa” section that would bore you to tears. I was inexperienced, slow, and jumping into unknown territory.

The next 131 blog posts were written on couches, in boring classes, and on my iPhone all before I knew things like SEO or how to customize a URL or how to buy a domain with my name. I worked for two years before I even shared my blog posts publicly. I didn’t write every day, but I slowly gained momentum.

I loved it. Sure, I wasn’t blogging full-time or getting more than five visits a day, but I spent my time working toward a dream. Every day, I grew closer and I recognized that.

I think that’s what my “best year of my life” will look like. It won’t be filled with accomplishments or hallmarks or anything especially wonderful. The best years of my life will be the years I invested in working toward dreams. Those are the years of challenge and growth.

We have a lot to look forward to in life. A real house without wheels, published books with our names on the cover, the ability to make homemade wine, eating quesadillas for dinner, and so on.

These accomplishments are only so sweet because we feel the pain of hours of working toward this goal.  We know the sacrifice and we rejoice in knowing our slow work has finally come to fruition.

So I guess this will be the best year of my life. I will film a documentary, I will write a book, I married the man of my dreams! I’m slowly working toward my golden future and crossing insurmountable items off my bucket list.

There is no shortage of adventure and possibility in this world when you treat these years as the best years of your life, the years where you worked toward something great.