The day has almost arrived and I honestly can’t believe it.

Tomorrow is the day I set off on a new lifestyle of travel, uncertainty, and adventure.

I remember when the little countdown on the top right-hand corner of my laptop said ‘784 days left until I see the world’ or something like that. Now that counter says 1 day.

Over the past few weeks, and especially the last week, I’ve found myself doing a lot of back-tracking. Lots of ‘oh dear Lord what am I doing?’ and ‘Is it too late to back out of this?’ and ‘Am I really ready to do this??’ (hint: the answer is below)

In order to clear my head I’ve been doing a lot of walking around my neighborhood. Head phones in, warm sunny day, and about 3 miles of up and down hills. Good for the soul and for thinking.

Last week a song from the musical If/Then came on and I really started listening to the lyrics. Surprisingly the lyrics to the song What If? (both the original and reprise versions) were extremely relevant to the way I was feeling about my current life and impending adventure.

“My plan is just perfect, courageous and daring to start my life new. Now I look at this morning, it moves me to say “Oh my God, what the hell did I do?”

I can do to this, I know I just need to take care. Be smart, self sufficient and hyper aware. Tell me what if I’m bound for disaster? What if I fall off the cliff? Will I ever just learn how to live and not wonder what if? What if?

See each choice that you make is a kind of a loss. Each turn that you take and each coin that you toss. You lose all the choices you don’t get to make. You wonder about all the turns you don’t take.

You stop and say hey to a stranger. And where will it lead? Who can know? But you learn how to love the not-knowing. So here I go. Here I go.

You choose and then everything changes. Take a breath and then fly off the cliff. And you know that there’s no turning back. And you wonder what if? What if?”

I kept wondering if I was making the right decision to leave everything and take this trip. What if it didn’t work out? What would have happened if I had stayed in San Diego? What would the next few years of my life bring because of this choice I’d made?

It’s normal (I think) to wonder about what could have happened in your life if you’d made a different choice. Where you’d be living. Who you’d know. What opportunities you might have had.

But if you think like that too much you’ll drive yourself crazy. I know I have to mentally slap myself every once in a while to knock it off.

You’ll never know the answer to your “What if…” questions. Moving forward is your only option.

Even if I did successfully (or unsuccessfully) back-pedal when it came to this trip, then there’d be the ‘what if I hadn’t backed out?’ question.

So what’s left to do?

You take a deep breath, maybe close your eyes, and you jump off the cliff. You step out into the unknown and take whatever comes your way next.

So early tomorrow morning I’ll wake up, have a mini freak out, take a deep breath, probably have another mini freak out, and step on that plane to Seattle.

There’s no turning back now.

The opportunities to come, both good and bad, will be because I made the decision to go; to take a little (ok large) leap of faith. And it won’t be the last choice I make that will cause me to wonder ‘what if’ - not even close to the last.

But hopefully some day soon I’ll learn to love the not knowing.

So here I go.

What were you feeling before your life changed drastically because of a decision you made? Have you ever wondered ‘what if’?