A little more than a year ago, we gathered with our family to celebrate our engagement, just a few months before we were to depart on a round-the-world travel adventure.

The national lottery draw was taking place that evening and the winning prize was a heaping $50 million dollars. Our guests flipped out their wallets and purchased a handful of tickets, agreeing to split the rewards if we happened to win. Glasses were clinking and clanging and eyes became wider as talks of pursuing dreams of travelling, changing careers and picking up long-lost hobbies filled the room.

It’s interesting how the mind soars when money is no issue.

As the guests of honor that evening, everyone turned to us and posed the age-old-question “What would you do if you won the lottery?” With one glance at each other, we knew our answer. We told them “We would do exactly what we are doing now, going to travel around the world.”

The moment was revolutionary. We knew that we had reached a breakthrough that some people wait their entire life for, and some never even experience. We were living our dream now, not “someday” when we win the lottery or something else of the sort falls out of the sky.

We weren’t always this adventurous, bold couple willing to take risks. In fact, it took us quite some time to realize that we were the only people standing in the way of us truly living out our dreams of travelling the world.

We once lived a very typical, mundane life that lacked any sort of passion. Being a couple in our mid-twenties, there were a lot of expectations of us that included all the common milestones: build our careers; get married; buy a house. Bumbling through life, we did just that and signed up for corporate jobs and started planning our future.

Dreams have a way of creeping up on you. First, the seed is planted in your mind. Then it begins to linger and you catch yourself thinking what if. Then, it consumes you, following you around everywhere you go just begging to be heard. Finally, it gets so loud that you need to make a choice: follow through or bury it deep inside.

The mere thought of travelling the world exhilarated us. We often talked about how cool it would be to pack our backpacks and buy a one-way ticket out of Canada, without any real plans other than lets just see where the world wants to take us.

The decision didn’t come easy. Like most people, we were unsure of the uncertainties that life would bring on the road.

We had been avid believers of The Secret teachings for quite some time and firmly understood the principals of the law of attraction. We decided to apply the law of attraction and change our thinking. Instead of focusing on all the things that were stopping us from travelling, we begun to see that there was truly nothing stopping us! We used affirmations such as “Our life is full of adventure” and visualized ourselves enjoying palatable foods from all over the world.

We made a choice. Choice is the key word here. The power to choose between happiness or living a routine life was in our hands, it always was.

So, here we are writing to you from our one-bedroom flat across the world in Melbourne, Australia. And we call tell you that travel was the very best decision we’ve ever made.

We can tell you what it’s like to have hiked through the lush green rice paddies in the north of Vietnam, slipping and sliding knee-deep through the mud while embracing the rain gently landing on our foreheads.

We can tell you what it’s like to take a boat to a remote floating village entirely built on stilts in Cambodia’s Sunken Forest, quietly brushing by the tops of trees that once stood over 10 meters tall. Or we can tell you what it’s like to have time stand still when snorkeling with beautiful sea turtles off the shore of the Gili Islands.

We can tell you all this, because of that simple choice we made last year, one that didn’t depend on anything other than a shift in our own perception of what is possible.

The lottery ticket didn’t win. Of course, everyone went back to their normal routines. But for us, it didn’t matter. We were already on our way to a richer life in more ways than one.