Boomer of the Week: Joyce Major Seattle, WA

The stories of personal transformation that we are sharing with you each week have been written by members of our Boomers TV community. They are generously sharing their journey with us to offer hope and inspiration.

This week, we introduce you to Joyce Major, a Boomer who makes her home in Seattle, WA when she is not travelling the world!


Joyce Major

Standing here at 58 years old...

If I turn my head and look back, my memories are of the “straight-out-of-college Joyce” teaching a class in mathematics extraordinaire, with shoulder length straight hair, matching sweater and skirt, stacked heels and enthusiasm. Next stop: motherhood. Like so many of my friends, I read every book about childbirth and childrearing, crowning “The Time Out” as the queen of my mothering style. After a divorce with the usual fallout and an educational toy business, my career moved to a long successful stop as a real estate agent. And then with both sons graduated from college, my responsibilities seemed to have whittled down to just taking care of myself and the cat. I had a successful real estate business, an adorable houseboat with kayaking right out my door, friends to play squash with, ski with, rollerblade and laugh with in the beautiful city of Seattle.

Sounds like a great life, right? Yes and no.

From the outside ‘Joyce’s life’ looked quite nice, but if I lifted my head out of the fog, I saw a woman not fully present, not heart happy, and lacking passion. A question kept gnawing at me- Is this life, the one I am leading right now, the best way for me to live, to use my talents, to help the planet? Unable to either ignore the question or answer yes, I looked around for ways to shake up my life, bring change. The startling idea to travel solo as a volunteer around the world for a full year hit me like lightning one day while I was hiking up Rattlesnake Mountain. Reeling from what must have been either oxygen deprivation or divine inspiration, I knew the trip was the answer.

Jumping out of my life, my shoes, my houseboat and my career, I found my heart

I decided to celebrate my life with the gift of freedom for a full year and perhaps, just maybe, do a bit of good along the way. Not wanting to walk around looking at old churches and ruins like a typical tourist, sleeping in plush, culture-avoiding hotels, I put together a chain of volunteer vacations staying a month on each project. I worked with rescued elephants in Thailand, tended lion cubs and worked as a baboon monitor in South Africa, and helped rescued kangaroos and joeys in Australia and rescued primate trade monkeys in England. I learned about wildlife rescue and spent time with passionate people who loved their work. I found my heart. I taught English in China, studied Portuguese in Brazil living with a family in Rio, worked as a newspaper reporter in Ireland, as a restoration worker in Italy, and at a sustainability sanctuary in New Zealand. It was a year packed full of change and new experiences from feeding baby bottles to lion cubs to interviewing TV stars in Ireland, to bathing elephants in a river to planting trees in New Zealand, living in a bamboo hut, an insect infested house, a monastery, and a tent. But I was always learning about the environment and always giving back. In this one year of organizing myself, I traveled to all but one continent, took the Trans-Siberian Express, lived in different cultures and got exactly what I had bargained for, change! My spirit is refreshed and my creativity has returned. Just getting by the layers that were clouding my vision, I have been blown away from a year spent volunteering around the world.

Smiling at the World

However, returning to Seattle, my former life seemed alien and uncomfortable to me. With no passion for my real estate career, I turned to writing. Focusing all of my energy into writing a book, Smiling at the World, I want to encourage other people to travel and volunteer. I also write freelance articles about the environment and feel a deep responsibility to help protect the earth, her resources and all of her inhabitants. Traveling and seeing the beauty on this planet, I want to be a part of the solutions to protect the earth.

What's Next?

With my fresh outlook, I met a kind-hearted man and we have decided to live together now to learn about the magic of love. Maybe it wasn’t really change that I wanted after all, maybe what I wanted was me who had been lost under a pile of old habits and worn out ways. Future travel? I hope to take a group of ten international college students on a five-month trip to five wildlife sanctuaries around the world and film a documentary about the experience.