Realists and dreamers

We have this self-sufficiently book, The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour, and today for the first time I noticed the sub-heading: "for realists and dreamers". Which struck me as very apt in our case, because we have been thinking about growing more veg and fruit, and also planning to live in a more rural setting and maybe having some chickens and/or a goat and trying to 'live off the land'  more for quite a while now, but so far it's mostly been dreaming. And also, were realists enough to see that it will remain just dreaming for quite some time to come. So in a way, we're both realists and dreamers.

Dreaming isn't bad, I love to dream about many things: taking a year off to sail around the world, or just backpack around it, or going to Africa to film things in the Big Cat Diary way, or doing a fantastic internship at Penguin or just moving to the English countryside to write novels, or to New York and be a sort of Desmond Morris-like city-biologist/anthropologist, or any other variation that does not involve the job I currently have, the house and city I currently live in, and the things I currently do every day. And I know there are people who actually quit their job and sell their home and start up a little farm/restaurant in the middle of France, or start a diving school in Mozambique, or write novels on a mountaintop in China. But then, that's not really me. I'm not the one to leave everything behind and start somewhere new. I need a firm base, a mother ship so to speak, to return to. Also, I'm not the kind of person who can just drop their cats and books and tea off at someone else's and not return in a year. I need a lot of things to keep me happy and comfortable. So even though I would love to do all those things, I'm both a dreamer and a realist, and I see it's not really going to happen any time soon.

But that does not mean I'm not a little bit jealous at those people who actually do do these things. But I comfort myself with the thought that in the case of the little cottage/farm with the vegetable plot, fruit trees, and chickens, there is the smallest chance of it actually happening one day.