We have a life of abundance. More than we know. And we’re not alone. Most of us living middle class lives have enough food on the table, clothes in the closet, and important on our list, wine in the cellar.
Yet, we are conditioned from early on to want more, to strive for bigger and better. It seems few of us take the time to take our laser focus off the next material goal and ask ourselves a simple question, “Why”?
Why do you want more? Or more importantly, “Why do we need more”?
When is enough, enough?
If you’re going to change your life, to uproot yourself, to leave it all behind and start again, you need to ask yourself, “When is enough, enough”? When have I had enough of the way I’m living my life now?
Do I have enough courage to change my life? Do I have enough money or financial stability to make a big move? Will I have enough to fulfill me in my new life? These are all important questions to sit down and get real about.
For us, the exploration of these questions came at the end of a particularly long and unfulfilling day of work for my husband Peter. As soon as he walked in the door, I could see he was eager to talk to me.
I poured us a glass of wine and asked him how his day was.
That’s when he hit me with it. “I had a epiphany at work today. I realized that the currency in my life is not money, its time. My time and how I spend it is more valuable to me that how much money I make.”
Amen to that.
I had been waiting for Peter to reach this conclusion on his own, to be ready to change his life and therefore our life on his own time, at his own pace. And now we were here. Ready to ask ourselves, what is enough?
Getting to ‘enough’
It’s important to note that we didn’t hate our jobs. We both had interesting work in television journalism and documentary production.
Peter at UN headquarters in NYC 
Anna on set
But the industry was changing drastically. We were in our early 50s and watching the younger generation enter the newsroom and production offices with their enthusiasm and tech-savvy know-how. We were trying to keep up, to learn new tricks, to stay ‘current and relevant’.
For Peter this meant learning how to edit if he wanted the good gigs. Despite the fact he had a 30-year track record of being an outstanding cameraman and photojournalist, it was no longer enough. For me, it meant having to pick up a camera and learn to shoot like the pros if I wanted to get the good gigs as a director. Despite more than 20 years as a respected factual television writer and director, it was no longer enough.
We weren’t bitter. We understood emerging technology was driving these changes. I’ve long felt that the dawn of CNN more than three decades ago was the beginning of the end for television news as we knew it. Gone were the days of working on a story for the evening news. You had to ‘feed the beast’ around the clock now. Come up with new angles and updates every half hour or more.
Then along came Facebook and ‘social media’. Now everyone with an iPhone was a ‘photojournalist’. Discouraging to say the least. Still, we were thankful that we had been part of the best years of the business. We just knew it was time to move on. For us, it was enough.
Do we have enough?
We had a plan of where to go. This was the easy part. If you’ve followed our story here on this blog, you’ll know we bought a house in a medieval village in Italy a few years before Peter’s ‘epiphany’. We’d spent a lot of time and money renovating it. It now sat a world away, empty. Waiting for us. We knew we wanted to live in ‘Casa Vistaverde’ and to create a new life and finding meaningful work in Europe.
We also knew leaving our jobs and relocating a big chunk of our life overseas would take money. We had to work out a financial plan that would take us through the rest of our lives, even if we never worked again. This meant getting tough with our choices.
We had to learn to live on less and stick to a budget, something I was never good at. Thank God for Peter. He was the voice of reason and the steady hand where our finances were concerned. We knew the key was to carry no debt into our new life. If we eliminated all debt, we had total control over where our radically reduced monthly income was spent.
Let enough be enough
We made a promise to each other to do everything within our power to stay out of debt. Gone are the days of frivolous shopping sprees motivated by bored spells. I had to say ‘arrivederci’ to regular spa pampering and monthly hair salon visits. We adopted a simple life.
Bye-bye pedicures
If we can afford to pay cash for something, we buy it. If we can’t, we don’t.
We’ve put away a bit of savings to cover any unforeseen emergencies but planning, just like life, is not foolproof. We’ve had to take a leap of faith. But here is the unexpected thing, the more we embrace the simple life, the happier we are.
It is true for us that less is more. The more you have, the more you have to worry about, to take care of, to occupy your head space. We’ve lightened our load and gained so much more in return.
Slay the ‘doubt demons’
Old habits die hard. A cliché that is oh so true. All the best intentions and prosecco sunsets in the world can’t keep all of life’s doubts at bay. So inevitably, there were times in the early days of our new life that I had doubts that we had done the right thing. Were we too impulsive, too reckless to have left our jobs early, to have left ‘money on the table’?
Were we being foolish to not want more?
I voiced these fears to Peter one day in a flurry of tears and apologies for being perhaps too forceful in driving our big life changes and not cautious enough in thinking it through.
It was Peter’s turn to pour us a glass of wine and sit me down directly across from him and look me squarely in the eye. That’s when he hit me with this. “I want you to look at me and tell me honestly, do we have enough? Do we have enough food to eat? Adventures to go on? What don’t you have now that having more money would buy you? What more do you need?”
Bless him. Just like that he brought me back to our truth. There is nothing more we need. Nothing more I want.
What does being rich mean to you?
I feel rich. Not because I have a big bank account but because I am free. Free to determine how I spend my day. Free to decide what I do with my time. Like it is for Peter, time is my currency too.
What does having a rich life mean to you?
A presto
Anna
