From Nowhere to Anywhere
The world keeps spinning, and we are still…still saying we are going to quit our jobs and travel the world, still working hard at careers that give us means but no fulfillment, still yearning for an elusive drive and motivation, still defining success from the outside world’s perspective, still following our heads not our hearts, still not starting. This was our reality circa November 2019 and had been for years.
From an outsider’s perspective, you would think we had it made—loving families, a wide circle of good friends, six-figure jobs, solid careers, living in the neighborhoods we wanted in the city we loved, each with a car, several trips a year, and so on. I mean, we had it pretty good, right? Then why did we feel so terrible?
You see, we were lying to ourselves, pretending that all these things would somehow make us happy and fill the emptiness that we felt inside. We had become something we didn’t recognize, inauthentic shadows of our once fearless and passionate selves. Even after all that patience and grinding and waiting, we were nowhere. Something had to give!
Come December 2019, we finally started to consider an entirely different life, one where we would be free to travel, explore the world and ourselves, and be the Captains of our own journeys. And then, Reed gave Graclyn a travel backpack for Christmas and a book of all the world’s potential destinations. This put our intention to travel the world in motion.
Come January 2020, we were full steam ahead. We started to etch out our voyage across the Earth where we would explore lands unknown and find our true selves in the process. We put in our notice to quit our jobs in late February. It was all happening! And then, on our last day of our former life, in the middle of March 2020, the world shut down.
May we express, it is a more than uneasy feeling to realize you just willingly relinquished financial and job security to do something that you are no longer allowed to do and have no line of sight to when, or if, normality will return. An all-out freak out ensued. Like many people, we spent the next couple weeks trying to decipher up from down, feeling scared, thinking irrationally, and wallowing in the unfortunate situation we had found ourselves in. Then, Graclyn’s parents invited us to come out to Sedona, AZ to stay with them for a few weeks, and seeing as we had nowhere to go but up, we accepted.
Sedona was a godsend for us. We went in down and out and came back uplifted and invigorated. We started to take more responsibility for ourselves and our situation—we cleaned up our health, we got back in touch with nature on the beautiful Sedona trails, we had fun playing games and laughing over deep, meaningful conversations. We grounded ourselves in a space of love and rekindled our spirit for what we had initially set out to do.
Come May, we no longer felt sorry for ourselves. We were seeing the opportunities and possibilities we had in front of us, and we were fired up! We adopted a new motto, “Say Yes to Adventure” and got shirts to prove it. And wouldn’t you know, as soon as we said “Yes,” the Universe started to open up. Reed’s cousin Dave invited us to a houseboat trip on Lake Powell for early June 2020. We moved all our stuff into storage and said goodbye to our life in Austin. We set off on an adventure, one that we are still living today from anywhere, one that keeps getting Bigger and Bigger the more we say Yes. Welcome to Big Adventure Living!
Nice to Meet Y’all
We (Graclyn Glazier and Reed Dennis) are just an ordinary couple that want an extraordinary life. We’re adventurers exploring inside and out. We live in the now. We come from Love. We appreciate the wonder and magnificence of the Universe and our implicit connection to it all. We believe our journey is our destination. We lead from our hearts and fearlessly pursue our passion and purpose of spreading Light and Love in the world. Our mission is to ignite the human spirit and empower others to realize and act upon the greatness that is already inside them.
We met at work back in 2013, and after a few years of arm’s length flirtation, we embraced the inevitable and started dating. We kept our relationship a secret for several years to appease those that follow unwritten rules. After living that Monica and Chandler life at work, we were glad to eventually be at separate companies and free of the surreptitiousness and secrecy that had come to define our office romance; we must say, however, it was quite the thrill. We’ve been going strong for the last seven years, and it’s always a Big Adventure.
We’re both Texans, raised in the DFW area, Graclyn from Southlake and Reed from Plano. We both went to the University of Texas at Austin. We’re eight years apart, but if measured by maturity, Graclyn is older. We share similar interests like hiking after noon, beach naps, carpaccios and tartares, not following the crowd, getting fired up, building friendship and community, functional health, critical thinking, and Hendrix dirty up martinis with blue cheese stuffed olives from The Cheesecake Factory. We are blessed with amazing family and friends.
We have a strong desire to give to this world and to co-create the change we want to see in it. We both say yes to adventure, to ourselves, and to abundance. We respect each other as sovereign beings and celebrate our individuality. We live freely in Love. And as of June 2022 …. We’re engaged!
GRACLYN GLAZIER BIO
Graclyn is a lover of life, dad jokes, and spending time outdoors. Born on April Fool’s Day, she’s always been a bit weird, and God help her, incredibly clumsy. She loves her friends and family fiercely, thinks deeply, and feels even deeper. Endearingly, her friends say her spirit animal is a golden-retriever—happy-go-lucky, energetic, and occasionally spastic.
Graclyn currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Fire Up Nation, and in addition to her overall management responsibilities, she is responsible for strategic planning, organizational development, logistics and technology.
Graclyn is fierce, her birth color is Fiery Red. She is a natural born leader and was Class President of her high school. Following college at The University of Texas at Austin where she majored in Finance, for four years she was a consultant for Mercer, a leader in human capital consulting, where she specialized in consulting on executive compensation.
Then, in an effort to work more closely with people on the day-to-day, Graclyn became an HR Business Partner for Epicor, a global software company headquartered in Austin, where she strategically liaised between the Marketing and HR functions. In these roles, Graclyn contributed to and managed a variety of projects for senior executives that had global scale and company-wide impact. Graclyn has also held internships at a law firm and at a hedge fund and was a sales associate at a shoe store.
Her greatest realization in life thus far is, “Fulfillment has to come from the inside. Happiness is putting your ego aside and living authentically, true to yourself, not to who you think you need to be. It is throwing the guidelines and conditions out the window. It’s a choice, one that you make and are responsible for.”
Reed Dennis Bio
Reed is a creator, a poet, a dancer, an old soul, an idea guy, a leader, and a lover of appetizers. Reed has always been fiercely independent, go with the flow, free-spirited, a bit eccentric, and spontaneous. He loves contemplating big issues and finding connection in the disparate. His family and friends, whom he loves dearly, find him endearing, and at times, unbearable. He tells it like he’s sees it, your feelings be damned. He rarely meets a stranger.
Reed currently serves as the Chief Creative Officer of Fire Up Nation, and he is primarily responsible for content development, marketing and sales, and finance.
The Reed of today is a dream-doer with an open mind that is seeking learning and understanding to better himself so that he can serve for good in the world. He stands for Freedom, Light, and Love. Prior to his more recent transformation back to his authentically passionate self, Reed was sometimes over-indulgent, overweight, unmotivated, inauthentic, slow, a hard partier, a diminisher, moody, quick to judge, and abrasive, garnering such nicknames from friends as Party Rock Reed, Mr. Appetizer, Crouton Reed, WOR (Waiting on Reed), among others.
The Reed of old worked at Mercer, a premier human capital consulting firm, where he advised Boards of Directors and senior executives of large publicly-traded and private companies on their pay programs for their senior-most people.
Prior to that, Reed attended the University of Texas at Austin where he double-majored in Advertising and Finance. He spent the better part of his Junior year of college studying abroad in Vienna, Austria and traveling throughout Europe. Reed has also held jobs as a newspaper ad salesman, a spokesmodel, and as an intern for Business for Diplomatic Action, an apolitical nonprofit whose mission was to counteract anti-Americanism in the world.
His greatest realization in life thus far is, “We are all divine creators created to create in the likeness and image of God. We all have unique gifts to bring to the world and the power of the Universe inside us. If we let go of fear and control, then our world, our impact, and our energy gets so much Bigger.”
