13What Are You in It For?Clarifying Your Outcomes at Home, at Work, and in the Community

Signing Up for Adventures, Large and Small

As is the case with any marriage, when Sian Wayt married Per Wingerup, she had no way of knowing everything she was signing up for. In her case, one of those things was becoming immersed in her husband's sense of adventure. Growing up as a boy in Sweden, Per's parents scrimped and saved to make sure that their children saw a good part of the world. When he wasn't in school or traveling with his family, Per spent a lot of time running in the woods creating “little adventures.”

When they became parents themselves, Sian and Per knew they wanted to pass that sense of adventure on to their children. When their daughters were 10 and 12 years old, they decided to take them out of school for a year to travel around the world. They had talked about it for three or four years and, then, one morning at breakfast looked at each other and said, “Do we want to sit here and have breakfast when we're 65 and the kids are out of the house and say, ‘Oh, missed opportunity. Why didn't we do it?’”

“We couldn't afford it, but that didn't matter,” Per told me. He resigned from a job that he loved not knowing what he would do for a living ...

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