I don't want you to take the title of this blog too literally or to take it as me being flippant. There are worries associated with no home, no job and no income and I'll get to that later in this blog.
The other day whilst Aannsha and I were having a late lunch of homemade Spanish tapas and enjoying the waning afternoon sunshine, I had a realisation. Actually it was more of a confirmation of a realisation that I'd had the day before when, once again, we found ourselves with no Internet connection. Yes, we'd chewed through another 20GB of data in just 12 days of trying to be as frugal as possible with our data allowance. But that's beside the point.
Let me paint a picture. I'd just spent a day and a half editing together an 8 minute video for YouTube. There's nothing unusual in that, video editing is a very time consuming task. Both Aannsha and I were very happy with the end result of the video and we wanted to get it uploaded immediately so that we could move on to spending the next hour filling in all of the back end YouTube bits and pieces that make the final product that you, the end consumer sees. The upload was going great, it was at 93% and had an estimated 6 minutes before completion. Then it stopped uploading. I checked and there was no Internet connection. I checked why and discovered that once again, we'd used all of our data allowance. Then I checked what time it was, uh oh it was siesta time, so I knew that the shop where we buy more data would be closed until 4:00pm and that was 3 hours away.
Had such an event happened when I was back in Australia (I know the circumstances are different, especially unlimited Internet data allowance. But play along here), coping with the seemingly never ending utility bills, business invoices and mortgage payments and working at my computer repair business, where I was constantly stressed about 'not having enough hours in the day' and being inundated with phone calls from clients 40 hours a week, I would have 'cracked the shits' (another great Australian-ism) and lost my temper at no one in particular, just the world in general. Then once 5.00pm rolled around I would have switched off my phone, opened my first bottle of red for the evening and attempted to drink away the stresses of my day. That way of living is not good for anyone.
But this time it didn't happen that way. I just shrugged and said "Ah well, we'll get it sorted later, once the shop reopens." and suggested that we should break for lunch and have a cold beer. Time is something I have more of now, so I'm not stressed by trying to maximise the productivity of every single minute of the day. And I can tell you it feels absolutely fantastic! In fact re-reading these words simply does not do justice to how good it feels. It's like a whole new me. Mellow. Unstressed. Relaxed. Chilled. And I love it.
Now back to the no worries bit. 'No worries' is a phrase that is widely used in Australian speech and represents a feeling of friendliness, good humour, optimism and 'mateship' in Australian culture. It's actually been referred to as the 'national motto of Australia'. In my opinion it's an expression that's so widely used that it's actually no longer truly representative of whether someone is worried or not.
So am I worried at all? Yes I am, but not in a stressful way. I'm worried that the year is advancing and by the time we come back from Gibraltar it will be the end of February and we need to find our yacht sooner rather than later. I'm worried that our finite finances from the sale of everything in Australia is being nibbled at with every trip to the grocery store. I'm worried that YouTube has once again moved the goal posts on us being able to monetise our Sailing A B Sea channel with income-rewarding adverts. I'm worried about handling all the legal paperwork necessary for yacht ownership whilst completing it in a language that is not my native tongue. I'm worried that our blogs and YouTube videos won't be good enough to attract and retain a loyal audience. But these are all worries that I don't have much control over, so rather than stress about them, I give them to the Universe and ask that everything works out perfectly in the end. After all the Universe is good at that sort of thing. It's been doing it for billions of years.
