Taking Time Off: The Decision
Welcome to our blog. A blog about pursuing dreams, taking active decisions and living life with no regrets.
Let’s start with the basics – who are we? We are a small family of four: Michael, 42 years old and born in Sauerland, Germany and Nina, 41 years old and born in Copenhagen, Denmark. We met when we studied in Australia in 2003 and have lived together in United Kingdom, Germany and since 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark. We have two energetic sons; Niklas (8) and Frederik (5).
Until summer 2021, we lived comfortable and busy lives in Copenhagen and both held exciting and challenging leadership jobs in the banking and communications sector. While we are both ambitious and dedicated to our respective careers, we have long played with the idea of taking a break from work life while the kids are still small to have dedicated time off as a family and travel the world together. The idea first came about during a holiday in Malta in 2018, inspired by friends who had taken life-changing decisions to travel or move to new parts of the world.
What was initially a far-away dream became a firm wish as we saw how quickly the kids grow up and time passes. Knowing that we will be working for many years still to come, we felt that a sabbatical with our children with their current ages would be an investment and an adventure we would never regret and always treasure. And a time which will give us experiences and learnings which we can also use going forward when we start working again.
We started planning where we would like to go, how it could be managed logistically with children in school and not least how to finance such an adventure. How many continents is it realistic to cover, should we aim for many countries and short stays everywhere or would we be better off with longer stays in fewer countries giving the fact that we were travelling with smaller children? By end 2019, we had a great nine-month world tour mapped out which balanced these considerations and were planning to take-off in fall 2020. Then two things happened: new job opportunities which made us decide to postpone the trip to 2021 and shortly thereafter COVID-19 which made us reconsider if such a trip would actually ever become possible.
In end 2020, we took up the discussion again. With our youngest son set to start school in summer 2022, the window of opportunity for taking time off together was closing as we wanted him to be back to start school with his friends. With vaccines being developed and the prospect of a more reopened world again by summer 2021, we decided that we were going to push ahead and pursue our dream of a joint sabbatical.
We would need to change our travel plans and take more spontaneous decisions on where to go – and also accept that maybe we would not be able to travel as much as we had hoped. But it still felt worth it and as an opportunity missed if we did not go ahead with taking the time off and spending unique time together. And so here we are in summer 2021, at the beginning of our adventure! More to follow in the next blog about our plans and how we are planning in times of COVID-19.
