My first cruise was on Independence of the Seas, and, strangely enough, I was nervous.

I don’t think I expected to be. I was excited, obviously. The ship itself was stunning, with beautiful interiors, elaborate decoration and the kind of polished luxury that makes you want to photograph every corridor. Everything seemed meticulously considered. There was something almost theatrical about walking onto a ship this enormous and realising that this wasn’t simply a way of getting somewhere. The ship was somewhere. It was a destination that happened to move.

But underneath the excitement was a feeling I hadn’t really encountered before.

We had never travelled this way as a family. We had travelled to places, but this was different. There was no familiar airport routine followed by arriving at a hotel and finding our bearings on solid ground. This was an unfamiliar place reached in an unfamiliar way, and then the unfamiliar place itself was moving.

And underneath us was the sea.

A lot of sea.

I think that was the part my nervous system noticed before my conscious mind did. The ocean is beautiful when you look at it from a beach, but there is something entirely different about being surrounded by it. You become suddenly aware of the depth beneath you, of how little of the world you can actually see, and of how much trust is involved in simply being there.

There is also an extraordinary amount of preparation involved in taking a cruise. Documents, timings, luggage, boarding, cabins, schedules, ports, excursions, what you need and when you need it. It is meticulously organised because, ultimately, you are taking an entire little world and moving it across an enormous body of water. For someone who likes to understand where they are going and what happens next, there was something both reassuring and unsettling about that level of organisation.

And then I couldn’t eat.

Perhaps I was a little seasick.

I had never experienced it before, so I didn’t quite know what was happening. I simply knew that food, which normally felt like one of the great pleasures of travelling, suddenly held absolutely no appeal. My body was having its own opinion about this adventure.

That, too, became part of the journey.

Because sometimes the mind says, I want to go, while the body says, I don’t know if we’re safe yet.

And I think there is something important in that distinction when we talk about manifestation.

We often talk about wanting our dream lives as though desire should automatically be enough. We imagine the destination, write the script, visualise the experience and wonder why we aren’t moving towards it. But perhaps there are times when the obstacle isn’t a lack of desire at all. Perhaps some part of us is simply trying to protect us from the unfamiliarity of actually having it.

The dream can be exciting in our imagination because imagination has no waves.

Reality does.

Reality has unfamiliar airports, strange hotel rooms, enormous ships, different languages, new people, disrupted routines, heights, crowds, uncertainty and the occasional stomach that decides it would rather stay home.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons people don’t always make it to the places they say they long to visit. The desire is real, but so is the nervousness. The mind can spend years saying I want to travel the world, while the nervous system quietly asks, But will I be okay when everything is different?

Maybe manifestation isn’t always about convincing yourself that you aren’t afraid.

Maybe sometimes it is about teaching yourself that you can be afraid and still go.

One of my favourite memories was waking up at around four in the morning and wandering around the ship while almost everyone else was asleep.

There was something magical about it.

The ship that had felt so enormous and busy during the day had transformed. The corridors were quiet. The public spaces were almost empty. The lights were still on, but the noise had disappeared. I could walk through this enormous floating world and feel as though I had somehow discovered it before everyone else had woken up.

That was when I really understood that the ship wasn’t just a vessel.

It was a world of its own.

There were restaurants, theatres, entertainment, shops, pools, lounges, dining rooms, corridors, staircases, balconies and hundreds upon hundreds of rooms. People lived their temporary lives inside it. They ate there, slept there, dressed there, celebrated there, met strangers there and woke up somewhere completely different.

A floating city.

Except the city moved.

There was another side of the experience that I loved: the glamour of dressing up in the evening.

After spending the day travelling across the sea, there was something wonderfully extravagant about getting dressed for dinner. People appeared in evening wear, looking polished and glamorous, as though we had all collectively agreed to pretend this floating city was the most sophisticated place on Earth.

And perhaps it was.

The friendliness of the passengers surprised me too. There was a strange sense of temporary community. Everyone was, in some way, sharing the same little world. You could speak to someone you had never met, knowing that you might never see them again, and yet for those few days you were fellow inhabitants of the same moving city.

I wish I had participated more.

That is one of the things I remember most clearly.

I was too nervous to go to some of the evening shows and activities. I watched the idea of them from a distance rather than always allowing myself to experience them. Looking back, I don’t think that was because I didn’t want to go. I think I wanted to feel safe first.

And there is something strangely profound about recognising that afterwards.

How many experiences do we miss because we think we need to feel completely confident before we begin?

How many trips remain dreams because we are waiting for the version of ourselves who isn’t nervous?

How many opportunities pass by because our nervous system hasn’t yet caught up with the life our imagination has already chosen?

I don’t think we should shame ourselves for that.

I think we should become curious about it.

Perhaps the journey is not simply Where do I want to go?

Perhaps it is also:

What would help me feel safe enough to go there?

That question changed something for me.

Because the point isn’t to force yourself through every fear. The point is to make the unfamiliar familiar enough that your body can begin to believe what your mind already knows.

And then, somehow, we became a cruise family.

That was the surprise.

The thing I had been nervous about became something I wanted to do again.

The unfamiliar became familiar.

The ship that initially seemed enormous became navigable. I knew where things were. I understood the rhythm of it. I knew what it felt like to wake up surrounded by ocean.

And perhaps that is how expansion actually happens.

Not always through one enormous leap into a completely fearless new life, but through repeated evidence.

You go somewhere unfamiliar.

You survive it.

You enjoy parts of it.

You learn.

Your body remembers.

Then the next unfamiliar thing doesn’t seem quite so unfamiliar.

This first cruise also completely changed my understanding of distance.

Before travelling this way, there was always this idea in my mind that if somewhere was far away, you had to go for a long time to make it worthwhile.

But this trip dismantled that idea.

Three days.

Three countries.

Three days of waking up somewhere new.

It was quick, but it was real.

And I loved that.

There was something liberating about discovering that travel didn’t have to follow one particular formula. You didn’t have to wait until you had two weeks available. You didn’t have to believe that a distant destination required an enormous amount of time before it was worth the journey.

Sometimes three days can be enough to open a door.

Sometimes you don’t need to move somewhere to experience it.

Sometimes you just need to go.

That little cruise planted an idea in me that has stayed ever since: what if the world is closer than we think?

Not geographically, necessarily.

Psychologically.

We make places seem enormous when they live only in our imagination. We tell ourselves they are too far away, too complicated, too expensive, too unfamiliar, too difficult, too much.

And then one day you book the trip.

You board the ship.

You wake up at four in the morning and walk through an empty corridor while the ocean moves beneath you.

And you realise the thing that seemed so distant has become your Tuesday morning.

Independence of the Seas was my first cruise, but it gave me much more than a first experience of cruising.

It taught me that unfamiliar does not have to mean impossible.

It taught me that my body may need time to catch up with my imagination.

It taught me that fear can come on the trip too.

It taught me that I don’t have to wait until I feel completely fearless before I let myself experience something wonderful.

And it taught me that the world can be travelled in small pieces.

Three days.

Three countries.

One enormous ship.

A little sea sickness.

A lot of beauty.

A few moments I wish I had been brave enough to say yes to.

And one very important realisation:

I had become a cruise person.

More importantly, I had become someone who was beginning to understand that the world did not have to be conquered all at once.

It could be sampled.

Explored.

Returned to.

Felt.

One small journey at a time.

And every time I woke up somewhere new, I could be grateful that I had gone.