This was originally published on my old blog BackpackBook (Livro de Mochila), a project that blended literature and travel, sometimes just traveling in my lucid dreams. It ran as â20 anos em busca do sonhoâ on October 4, 2007.
With a great deal of planning and discipline, the SchĂźrmann family reached an enviable level of recognition and experience, driven the whole way by dreams. Today the family carries and shares baggage that is still constantly growing.
Em Busca do Sonho gathers twenty years of the family’s experiences and stories by sea and by land. The co-pilot, Heloisa SchĂźrmann, tells it in detail, from the birth of the dream, when they barely understood the sea and its mysteries, through to today, when they’ve learned to respect it.
Taking a risk means you can get it right
Even before they started planning the first trip, they decided not to tell their families about their plans, and they kept the secret for almost ten years. They would give one month’s notice before departure that they were no longer going to sail against the wind, and that from that moment on they would be guided by the winds of their dreams.
As expected, once the news was out there was a lot of disagreement, but ten years of accumulated wind beat the few days of headwind. The boat would probably have risked capsizing if the news had reached the great storms of opposition any earlier.
The fear is understandable in cases like this, risking a professional life plenty of people want in order to travel the world in a small boat, trading the “safety and certainty” of a successful future for adventures across an unsafe and uncertain planet.
I suspect the eagerness of the storm makers to shout “I told you so” was well and truly sunk after twenty years.
The post also carried a short biography of Heloisa, nicknamed Formiga in the family, who trained as an English teacher in New York, ran a school in FlorianĂłpolis with around a thousand students, and is a passionate reader of Jules Verne. She left a settled life in Santa Catarina to live out the dream of adventuring around the world with her family.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s early or late to hitch a ride on those dreaming winds. What matters is the strength of those dreams to survive the storms of disagreement.
Marcella wrote in from her sabbatical to say that the more of the world she sees, the more convinced she is that the only people who don’t travel are the ones who don’t want to, having watched a one legged backpacker cross from Tibet into Nepal that morning.
I told her about a slight, unassuming Dutchman I met walking across Chile with no arms and a backpack he had adapted himself, and how astonishing it was to watch him manage alone. Plenty of people with all their functions intact ask me how I can travel so much, and where I find the money and the time. I always say that wanting isn’t enough, you have to do it. If you really want to travel, trade the fashionable trousers or the expensive night out for a trip and the return will be priceless.