We are leaving today on an adventure and I have a lot of feelings about it.

We’re heading to Portugal.

We’ve booked an apartment in Lisbon for a month, and after that… honestly, we don’t totally know.

Somewhere between seven and ten weeks we think is the plan, but even that’s kind of loose.

And that looseness is very much the point.

Let me back up, because this didn’t happen in a straight line.

I have to go way back to see where the thread starts….

When I was about 6 months pregnant with my second son, I got a call from my dad.

He’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

And I was honestly pretty calm about it, maybe even a little dismissive, because I’d spent years working in hospitals and prostate cancer was basically on everyone’s chart. I told him not to worry. I genuinely believed that.

My son was four months old when my dad passed away.

Even 23 years later, that stings in a specific way.

Because prostate cancer IS highly curable. My dad was just one of the very small percentage of men for whom it wasn’t, and I have never fully made peace with that.

So fast forward to not that long ago, and Rob (my 53 year old husband), gets diagnosed with prostate cancer too. Out of nowhere. No symptoms, no reason to even suspect it.

I think the word “trigger” can be somewhat overused, but I have to say, I was truly triggered. Intellectually I knew the statistics that he would be fine. But my nervous system only knew one other story. And it was a story of suffering, loss and grief.

But my nervous system only knew one other story. And it was a story of suffering, loss and grief.

We ended up seeing about five different doctors because Rob was in kind of a grey zone and we wanted to be sure about the path forward. And every single one of them told me not to worry, it’s very treatable, 99% of the time this goes fine.

And every single time, I’d say: my dad was the 1%.

And every single time, they’d slow right down. They’d go through everything with me carefully. They’d walk through what likely happened with my dad, why Rob’s situation was different, why they felt confident. I appreciated that more than I can say. My nervous system was slowly updating to the present.

We did the wait and see, as that was the one most were recommending. Prostate cancer is a slow growing cancer, generally. And they felt there was no urgency.

Well shortly after, things progressed and it was no longer wait and see.

Treatment happened. 

And then, not long after that, Rob had a job change, which was its own whole thing.

So there we were. A little unmoored. A lot reflective.Feeling very uncertain about everything.

But here’s the thing about uncertainty: it’s clarifying.

When you can’t count on the plan, you start asking better questions. Not what are we supposed to do next? But what do we actually want?

When you can’t count on the plan, you start asking better questions. Not what are we supposed to do next? But what do we actually want?

We have 5 young adult children who are all out in the world just living their best lives. Three of them in the past few years have either taken gap years, backpacked through Europe, Asia, or done some schooling abroad. And Rob and I have been saying during these years, how come they get to do that?!

We started talking about doing a grown-up gap year in a few years. We started planning and even saving for it. But then our plan kind of got messed up with his diagnosis and job change.

We have been feeling pretty frustrated about it all…because we actually had a good plan!!

And then we looked at our situation and thought, OK but why are we waiting?

I work online. Rob is looking for his next opportunity and can do that from anywhere.

Maybe we can’t do what we had dreamed about doing, but what can we do?

We’d visited Portugal a few months ago because I’m running a retreat there in 2027, and honestly we both just really loved it!

So we thought, what if we just go? 

Not forever, not some dramatic life overhaul, just, what if we go spend some real time there and figure out the next chapter from somewhere we actually want to be?

So that’s what we’re doing.

It’s a little scary. But I remind myself nerves are easily confused with excitement!

There’s a lot that’s uncertain in our lives right now and I won’t pretend otherwise. And I feel anxious about it all.

But then the other night, we were watching Landman (a show I had a hard time getting into initially but find that Tommy (Billy Bob Thornton) drops some bombs of wisdom that I love).

There’s this moment where Tommy tells his wife that he knows what she wants out of life:

“You want every meal to be memorable. You want every moment to feel like an experience. And you want every night to feel like a honeymoon”.

And yeah, that’s not exactly realistic because life is hard and uncertain and sometimes just a lot.

But as a direction? As a north star for this next chapter? I’ll take it. In fact, I kind of love it.

That’s what this is. 

Midlife, and finally doing something just for us.

We raised our kids, we worked hard, we carried a lot of weight. We’re not retiring, we’re nowhere near ready for that. We just want some new adventures and a season of life that actually feels like ours.

I’m going to document the whole thing : the beautiful parts, the messy parts, the figuring-it-out-as-we-go parts. I’ll be sharing photos on Instagram (@leahdavidsonlifecoaching) and writing about it here on Substack.

If you want to come along for the ride, subscribe below. I’d love the company.

Leah

P.S. If Prostate Cancer is is caught early, it is highly treatable and curable. Please make sure the men in your life are routinely checked. It was a completely, flukey, routine check that caught Rob’s… he had never had any kind of symptom. Get checked and spread the word.