Why We’re Taking a Family Gap Year

It might have been exciting to suddenly quit our jobs one day, break our lease, and “travel the world” but that’s not how it happened. We were looking for something more goal-focused, not strictly revolving around the idea of travel. Plus, taking a year away from the security of work doesn’t neatly align with our sense of responsibility to build a foundation for our daughter’s future, and our eventual retirement. So our gap year dream gradually took shape over the course of several years, during which time we developed more and more clarity on what we actually wanted to do.

Long before our gap year became a reality we contemplated taking an extended vacation — perhaps a month or two. Gradually, though, we realized that in order really embrace our projects and goals we would need more time. It naturally followed that if we’re going to do this the right way, we’d better try to give our plans a bit more definition. Otherwise we might end up wandering around aimlessly on an extended vacation.

So in the spirit of being intentional and focused, here’s a (perhaps incomplete) list of our family gap year goals.

Developing skills and learning new things

Agriculture, Spanish, and basic websites.

Part of Johana’s upbringing took place on a farm that we visit during almost every trip to Colombia. It’s a convenient base for us to learn a bit more about growing things during part of our gap time. We’re also hoping to do some WWOOFing to add a bit more structure to this at some point.

So many times I’ve wished I knew another language, and this has only increased since marrying a Colombian! Now I have the extra motivitation of wanting to communicate more effectively with family and friends there. We also want our daughter Vienna to speak both English and Spanish from the get-go. This made it an easy decision to spend a large part of our gap time in Latin America. The immersion will help but I aim to take a few classes here and there as well for added structure.

As we contemplated other potential areas of future work and talked about wanting to document our experiences, learning at least a little bit about website creation took shape as learning goal for both of us.

There’s a lot more we could mention: learning how to use transportation systems in foreign countries, trying unfamiliar foods, signing up for tours not directly related to our hobbies or goals. To some extent, though, we assume that these kinds of “brand new experiences” will happen as we go. Better to base the actual planning around a few key learning goals.

Pursuing creative interests

Johana and I both have creative inclinations that we’ve occasionally nurtured over the years but never consistently. So a priority for me, as an example, has been to give more importance to music-making. I’ve got my traveling recording set-up and I try to carve out time most days to play. And the idea is to take a few lessons along the way. Regardless of what this means for the future, I’m happy to have the time now to see what it could mean to place more emphasis on creativity.

Growing as a family

We think we’re good parents but it’s scary how often we just weren’t fully present after long days of work. A gap year holds most of the same potential for family challenges that exist at home. But it also creates an opportunity to be more fully present with each other, not just before and after long work days but during our more energetic parts of the day too!

We’ve also talked about the importance of giving attention to our individual goals during our gap year. This means we’ll both be able to deepen our relationships with Vienna through one-to-one time while giving each other time to “do our own thing.”

We feel that something simple, but huge, that we can give Vienna during our gap year is our presence. We won’t always be perfect parents. But now we have guaranteed time to be more present and experience more of our daughter’s growing and learning moments.

Immersing ourselves in new cultures

We’re a binational couple, each of us from diverse countries, and we’ve both been foreigners living abroad. These things have helped strengthen our belief that we should at least occasionally immerse ourselves in unfamiliar cultures in order to understand, even if just a tiny bit better, what the immigrant experience is like for people in our own communities. Besides this, we both just like exploring.

Planning for the future

Maybe one or both of us will return to the industries we left, but we’re not sure. What other kinds of work might we be open to? What kind of lifestyle do we want? What’s best for Vienna? Could we be self employed? Where do we even want to live? We could consider all of these things without taking a gap year, but we hope this year reinvigorates these questions and offers some new insights.

Improving our physical, mental and spiritual health

What do any of these goals mean if we aren’t able to physically, mentally, or spiritually commit to them? Can we be fully present with each other as members of a family if we haven’t first taken time to work on ourselves? Same goes for the new people, places, and cultures we come in contact with as we travel. What about our creative, learning, and future planning goals? These too would be better approached from a healthy frame of mind, body, and spirit. Reflection, meditation, yoga, and spending time outdoors are things we’ve talked about doing more of to help with all of this.

I also suspect that there will be a kind of cyclical nature between focusing on our health, and focusing on all of our other goals. Spiritual calm is helpful for music, while at the same time music can be a kind of instrospective activity leading to a spiritual calm. Working on a farm requires a reasonable degree of physical health, while the work itself can be part of the exercise leading to better physical health.

To summarize, we feel it’s important to be intentional about planning a gap year and to try to have clear ideas on why we’re doing this, as well as well-defined (and reasonable) goals. Even writing posts like this one helps! It will be interesting to do a future reflection on all of the above once we’ve had time to see how it all goes. (June 2024 update: here is our midpoint reflection on these goals!)

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