I grew up poor in a semi remote Native reserve in Canada in the 1970s and 80s. The first ten years of my life my parents were still basically living off the land and most of what we ate was wild food. I didn’t even have that many sweets or junk food which saved my teeth when I was young.

Then as a teen, I had to fight and claw my way through life in order to get anything. Sure we got ‘free’ help for food, health care, dental, eye and education … but it was just barely enough for me to barely get through high school. At the end of it all, I still had no prospect of making a living on my own in my own home community … I had to leave in order to survive. Even after then, I had to fight every step of way to make a living and fight off my old community members who thought I was being ‘too white’ and the non-Native people who thought I wasn’t ‘white enough’ … it was completely messed up.

After fighting through all that crap into adulthood, I met someone I fell in love with who wanted to do the same things I wanted to do. We didn’t make that much money but we figured out how to travel to over 30 countries over 25 years. About six years ago was our last trip because we caught a virus that make us sick and cough our lungs out … it was terrible. It took me about three months to get over it. My wife never got over it and now sits at home with chronic lung disease. It’s left us at home and we can never leave again.

The reason why I am saying all this is is that you have the world by the tail … you’ve got everything. You have a job, shelter, a bit of money and you are young and capable.

Give yourself about ten or 20 years and you will feel less and less like doing anything and then it will all be over. Once you get to a certain age, you will feel like ‘hey, I think maybe I want to do something’ but by then, it will be too little, too late and you won’t have a choice and you will be stuck in your apartment or house or home or whereever you’ll be and just sit there and wait for death. The entire time you’ll be sitting there, you’ll be regretting that you never did anything and that you never went out and tried just doing the bare minimum of excitement.

I feel terrible that I can no longer do much and that I have to stay at home taking care of my wife. I love her dearly but I would much rather we both head out into the world and just go somewhere, anywhere as far as money would take us. I really never cared if where I went was warm, dry, hot, cold, wet or miserable or absolutely fantastic. Sometimes, the best part of the trip was coming back home and realizing just how wonderful and fantastic home really was compared to many places in this world.

The only thing that doesn’t make us completely miserable and regretful is that we did go out there and take in as many sights, sounds and tastes as we could afford. It was fantastic. We saw the Acropolis hill, the pyramids, Machu pichu, St Peters, the Mediterranean, buddhists temples in asia, indian landmarks, dozens of cheap motel dives in the US and Canada, the oceans on every side of North America and so much more … all for as little money as we had.

Now that we can’t move or go anywhere any more … we look at old photos and reminisce about every trip we ever took.

Go out there and go as far as you can possibly go … then when you get old and grey, you can be as sad as you want but at least you can look back on all the great things you saw.