Shoulds

By Jason

You may have seen my post about regrets and moving forward earlier on Facebook. If you didn't, here it is:

"The trick, it seems, is learning how to turn regret into resolve."

In our lives we find it's so frequent that we regret actions that we took, or didn't take. We lash ourselves psychologically and verbally with the word "should". Saying things like:

"We should have done this..." OR
"I wish we hadn't have done that..." OR
"I shouldn't have done this..."

These are useless statements if they aren't coupled with action. They only create stress without providing a way out of that stress. We lack the power to change the past. Focusing on past mistakes is a sure road to low self-esteem. As a so-called perfectionist, it was a trap a fell into for most of my life.

This works in the future tense as well. I can't tell you how many times I've said or heard the word "should" in future context. "I should work out more" or "I should travel more". 

These are just a different way of lashing yourself over the past. If you say you should work out more, this only means you're beating yourself up for how much you haven't exercised thus far. If you say you should read more, it just means you're angry at how much you don't read. 

Honestly, does saying "I should" ever make you feel better about yourself? Does it ever lead you to actually taking the action? Or are you just setting yourself up for future regret?

One of the challenges with trying to travel is that it's so much more work than you think it will be. Imagine, if you will, how you feel after a week or two or intense (not sitting on a beach) vacation. The phrase "vacation from our vacation" is so common as to be cliche, so I imagine that most of you know what I'm talking about. 

We left home just about six months ago, and have been on the move essentially ever since. This experience which has been so moving, informative, and spiritually satisfying has also been kind of like a full time job. 

There are, at current, 7 started but unfinished blog posts waiting to be published. I get halfway there, and then I fail to finish them. The result is that most of you guys haven't seen peep from us in months. And as time passes and the drafts pile up, I keep piling the "I shoulds" onto myself. I should post more. I should update our images on Flickr. I should add things to Facebook.

As you can see, none of these thoughts have led me to post. They've just led me to feel bad about myself. Which leads to more piling up of obligations and commitments unfulfilled. It's a hellish cycle that leads to less and less productivity.

So today I'm deleting all the drafts. And I'll make the following commitment. I'm going to post more. There may be a bit of a gap in the record as our times in Spain and Morocco got little blog love, but hopefully we'll have a better record of our changes and lessons and experiences as we go forward.

This trip is the second best thing I ever did, and I want to share it with you.

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This is me standing in a literal hole, not unlike the figurative hole of my failure to post on this blog. 

La Mezquita

By J.T.

The Mezquita in Córdoba, Spain is one of those amalgamations of time and tradition. Originally a Mosque, after the reconquista of Andalusia it was preserved, more or less, and turned into a cathedral.

In its original form and function, it contained 900 columns, meant to evoke a forest. Walking through the columns, I felt an openness and containment all at once.

The columns of La Mezquita

In its heart now lies a (rather gaudy) Baroque dome. The two architectural styles couldn't be more dissimilar. Jason found them rather jarring, but from a semiotic standpoint, I enjoyed it.

Taking the original symbolism of the forest of columns, I interpreted entering the cathedral as descending into the mind. And, after wandering through there, like an errant knight of Camelot or a mad explorer, I came to the heart of the cathedral. God.

The Baroque center of the cathedral.

Symbolism is a difficult thing, because you can never be certain if this was what the creator intended. On the other hand, it doesn't matter because individual interpretation is important, too.

The blend of styles also brings up another important point. On a visit to a local museum, we learned about Averroes, a 12th century Muslim philosopher from Andalusia. I don't know the exact quote, but he said that the only reason you would ever think that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were fundamentally different religions was if you took a literal view of their texts, which is a silly thing to do. Keeping the columns of La Mezquita intact thus serves more than a practical purpose. It reuses the Islamic symbolism for a holy Catholic place of worship, perhaps driving home Averroes's point.

Jason's favorite picture from La Mezquita

Day 7 - Gratitude

By Jason

 

No, thanks.

Instant coffee is terrible.  As I drink my bitter, bitter coffee and write this post, I'm forced to wonder if I might not be happier with a little bit of something to turn the flavor around.  Maybe I should go to the kitchen, see what I can find. I'm pretty certain Judy's got some agave nectar stashed away somewhere and that could be just the thing... 

I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that because at age 20 I started working construction and I drank nuclear sludge with no sugar or cream. I did it and it was terrible, but somehow I figured it was impressive to these men that I was tough enough to take it without. I'm not sure it did any good, but I do know I built a little tradition for myself. On the list of trivial yet definitive factors of who I am, somewhere you'd find:

 ...
47. Really good at parallel parking
48. Drinks only strong, black drip coffee
49. Unflappable sense of direction
...

At some point in life certain behaviors just become part of who you are, to the extent that changing that behavior would mean having to reevaluate a central part of yourself. It's at this point that you find yourself doing things just to validate your identify.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, at least for our American readers, that if someone offers to help you out in any way your instinctive reaction is to say "No, thanks."  

I don't have a good idea of when self-reliance became an integral part of my identity. If you look at the facts, the reason I'm where I am today is because others have helped me along the way. As I take a day to appreciate my father, I cannot deny all that I owe to the wonderful people that raised me.  But at some point it became extremely important that I be self-made, that I take care of all of my problems, and that I manage to meet my goals alone and primarily through my own industry.

Independence and self-sufficiency became very ingrained in me, to the extent that accepting assistance can feel as if I am somehow diminished. 

Help is the cream in my bitter self-identity coffee. 

(Just go with it.) 

No thanks

If this doesn't apply to you, then you can go ahead and skip to the next section where I thank everyone (including you!) for all the help you've given us in the process. It's a good bit, and I'm sure it'll make you feel all warm and fuzzy, you nice person you. 

But if any of this rings true, please do me the favor of reading the next part and letting me know if it makes sense. 

I believe that self-reliance is central to the American character. All of our heroes, our success stories, our idols, all of them are self-made people. Facing overwhelming odds against a strong foe and overcoming them by yourself is essentially the Disney narrative of American identity. If you look at our popular stories, so many of them are power fantasies in which a perfect (or redeemable) protagonist outwits or overpowers great evil. Often that evil is collectivized, faceless, made of many against the hero as one.  

The Platonic Form of this ideal can be observed in the works of Ayn Rand. In her "Objective" view, the world consists of powerful individuals and weak takers, who rely of their collective numbers to drain the vital essence from the few worthy heroes. At the end of the day these heroes overcome the weak by demonstrating to them that collective power, shame, and taking can be overcome by refusing to be a part of society. 

If you aren't familiar with her work, check out the Wikipedia article for Atlas Shrugged right now and you'll get it. I'll wait.

... 

... 

... 

Got the idea?

The problem with mindset that elevates self-sufficiency as the ultimate goal is that it ultimately and necessarily undermines generosity. Follow my logic:

• The best way to be is self-sufficient. The best people rely on no one. If I am going to be the best I can be, I will be 100% independent. THEREFORE:
• If I need help this means I am not 100% independent. THEREFORE:
• Receiving help lessens me. THEREFORE:
• I am conflicted as the recipient of help. On the one hand, I may have needed it to get through a situation. On the other hand, by accepting someone else's help I have conceded that I am less than I thought I was. You've helped me but you've also diminished me at the same time. THEREFORE:
• Conversely, if I help you, then I am diminishing you. THEREFORE:
• If I currently carry the delusion that I'm 100% independent, then by helping you I've implicitly stated that I'm better than you. 

Ok, so that may feel a bit extreme, but it all really does logically in place. If they're being consistent, people who feel conflicted about receiving help must also feel conflicted about giving it. 

The rational end to this type of thought is that we all face this struggle we call life alone. If we succeed we succeed alone. If we fail, we fail alone.

A bitter, bitter cup. 

Know thanks

 As we begin to turn our entire life on its head, I'm starting to get confronted with certain assumptions that fit in well with my old existence but have a lot less use in this new one. The fact is that for this whole plan to work we're going to be relying on your generosity. If our kneejerk reaction is to deny help and attempt to be completely self reliant we're going to fail.  

When our friend L (generic in case she'd prefer privacy) was here in Seattle earlier this year, she made an extraordinarily generous offer to us. She was so excited about our trip the she offered to allow us to borrow her very nice camera in order to document our trip. Cameras of the type she is offering to lend us carry a heft price tag, and it's doubtful we'd be able to buy one on our own on our budget. But having it will undoubtedly increase the value of our experience and allow us to share that experience better with all of you.

My first instinct was to say, "No, thanks." 

Call it luck or call it wisdom, I checked myself away from that before speaking, and instead said, "Thank you. That is very generous and we'll do it!" 

After this Judy and I talked about this and made ourselves a little pact. If anyone offers to assist us in any way on this trip we are going to take them up on it. No polite refusals or other deferrals. If we need help and anyone is offering, we'll take it. 

Consider yourselves warned. 

As we've done this, we've discovered that accepting generosity from our friends has made us better friends, and better people. Rather than feeling lessened for owing you all for your help, I feel like I've become a greater and better person. Additionally, I feel that you've appreciated us to a greater degree because we were able to freely be generous to you.

My first real lesson on this trip is that family is something that you create, and you create it by giving with no expectation of return, and asking with no obligation for reciprocity. Love is giving, yes, but it also receiving. You can't do one well without doing the other. 

Now I'm going to try and list all the ways that you've helped us. For privacy sake I'll avoid naming names, but you know who you are. Items are in no particular order.

Thank you so much! For:

• Coming over and helping us prep our house and paint our front porch! Without your help, we never would have finished it. Thank you!
• Allowing us to stay in your home the first weekend our house was on the market, giving us a place to relax after a month of grueling prep. Thank you! 
• For working with us to sell so much of our property, by setting up appointments, meeting with buyers, and organizing our moving sale. Thank you! 
• For talking me down after our buyer left us high and dry, claiming that they just couldn't deal psychologically with a slanted house and I had the second of my three emotional breakdowns in selling this house. Thank you!
• For choosing to understand that this life journey is of central importance to us as humans, even if it's not something you would do and you've never heard of anyone doing it. Thank you! 
• Providing us the material means to afford this by making me a part of your company and your family. Thank you! 
• Making us feel so loved through throwing parties, brunches, lunches, dinners, and get-togethers to celebrate our place in your lives and this coming adventure. Thank you!
• For providing a home to Apollo where he can feel safe and loved and have the opportunity to continue his life for the moment without us, but with a lifestyle that is similar to what he has had so far. Thank you!
• For giving us your phone so that Judy and I can communicate. Thank you! 
• For opening your homes and your personal networks to us, so that we can connect and meet friends-to-be on our travels. Thank you!
• For providing us the opening by letting us stay with you on the first leg of this adventure, and giving us the beachhead we needed to begin to believe that this is possible. We're finally going to be roommates, can you believe it? Thank you! 
• For giving us encouragement to follow our dreams every step of the way. Thank you! 
• For raising us to be the man and woman that we are, and never discouraging us from realizing our true selves. Even if you're not with us physically, you live on in our spirits and we will take you out into this world so that we can try and teach others what you taught us. Thank you!

For all the things big and small that I haven't mentioned but that mean so much to me, Thank you. 

Happy Father's Day!

The Dallas Arboretum & the Importance of Talking Science with Kids

By Judy

When I visit my sister in Dallas, I don’t see much of the city. It’s city with a serious sprawl problem, and besides making sure I eat some good Tex-Mex and hitting up the outlet mall, I don’t usually do much touristy stuff. I really go there to see my sister and her three kids.

When I went down there this past April, I decided to squeeze in one attraction. Since my Mom would also be there, I thought going to the arboretum would be ideal. We let my youngest nice, Hailey (4 years old) skip preschool for the day and come with us.

More botanical garden than arboretum, Hailey and I spent a significant amount of time seeking out “princess gardens”—the type of garden we could imagine a princess having all to her own. Hailey also couldn’t resist showing off her cartwheel technique on some of the wider expanses of grass.

A princess would definitely live here.

While that sort of play—imagination play and physical play—are important, we also spent time really talking about the plants we saw. The needles of a weeping pine were surprisingly soft; sod is so tough you can build houses out if it; Japanese maples can come in green or purple.

The Dallas Arboretum includes an exhibit on pioneer living, complete with model homes and a covered wagon. Hailey was able to play house and pretend to drive the wagon, combining both that imaginative part of her brain while learning that before cars this was how people got around. The beds in the houses were small and hard, and it was difficult to believe that people could ever sleep on them. One house was modeled on a real-life doctor who collected insect specimens and medicinal plants, which were presented in glass cases. Gross yet fascinating!

The needles of this weeping pine were surprisingly soft. 

None of this was particularly in-depth science or history, but it did facilitate conversation and increase her general awareness of her surroundings. No child is ever too young to learn something about the universe. Building critical thinking skills is just as important as growing imaginations, and can even be as fun!

There’s a whole wide world out there that’s ripe for exploring. But it’s making sure that you have those conversations, and engage with your travel companions (no matter how small) that really make the world an interesting place.

J.D. told me a story not long ago about searching for fairies with his grandmother on his grandparents’ farm as a kid. He wondered, when he told me this, if it would have been better to have looked for plant specimens, because, eventually, we all have to grow up and realize that there are no fairies. I think that we can strike a balance though. Creativity is essential for developing brains. But so are critical thinking skills. I don’t think that searching for fairies is wrong; I just think that imaginative play shouldn’t be the only way we engage with children.

Eventually, Hailey will grow up. She’ll stop pretending to be a princess and maybe even stop doing cartwheels. Hopefully her curiosity about the world will never leave her. My wish for her is to keep both her imagination and ability to look closely at the world and ask questions.

And that’s why we spent the morning at the arboretum.

My mom watches Hailey demonstrate her cartwheel technique.

Day 2 - Terror

By Jason

Your Account is Overdrawn. 

Funny how that subject line pops right out from between "People you may know on Google+" and "✈ This One’s Big! 72 Hours Only -- Flights Starting At $49, $99, $129, or $149 One-way*".

Day 2 and we're out of money. Shit.

Is Quotewizard still hiring? 

This snapped me out of my early morning daze pretty abruptly. Log in real quick to the bank, see what's going on.

Turns out we had a couple of unexpected expenses come in and I'd not left enough money in the checking account to cover them. In a spasm of thriftiness, I'd over-transferred my money to my savings account. 

So, we're not out of money (Less the $10 damn dollars the bank charges for the convenience of transferring electronic money from one pretend ledger to another in the case of overdraws). But the next thought is this:

Very shortly, we will have no income. 

This is like the antithesis of the American Dream. Soon we're gonna be bumming around the world, working where we can, but probably can't count on a stable or reliable source of funding. And that was the point, right?

From here on out, every dollar I spend is gone, not to be replenished. When we run out, the trip is over, and real life is back on. Any financial mistakes I make now are coming right out of my dreams.

Deep breaths.  

Budget, finances, saving, philosophy

We're going to write a lot about budgeting on this blog, so I won't go crazy with it here. We talked last night about content here, and who was going to do what, and I think JT is a bit more suited to cover the practicalities of how we actually pull this off. But here's the rundown from a very high level:

1. Average budget is shooting for $100 a day. At this level, we have enough funds saved to cover us for well over a year of travel AND have money in the account to help us reintegrate into our lives.
2. We are going to attempt to hit this goal with the help of generosity. In practice this means couchsurfing, work exchanges, rideshares, and plain ole' mooching off you, our friends.
3. We're going to cook our own food, stay in budget locations, and avoid peak travel times. We're going to be opportunistic in our traveling as well, not being so rigid in our planning that we can't take advantage of a good deal or chance to do something cheap. 
4. Where we can find contract work, we will. So if you know anyone who needs a brilliant writer or master spreadsheet jockey, please let us know. 
5. When the money is out, the trip is over. Full stop. 

What this means, in practice, is that the trip is much less a yearlong vacation and much more a yearlong pilgrimage. In a very real sense, money and time have become the same thing for us.

The philosophy is that we can make do with less, increasing the value of our experiences while decreasing the costs. How many times in our lives do we spend a large amount of money on things that fail to live up to their expense. If you spend $60 going out to the club and buying drinks and living it up, how does that compare to buying a $6 bottle of wine and spending an afternoon with your friends in a park? Was the club 10 times more valuable to you as an experience? Will you even remember it?

See, the funny thing is that we're all living in this money/time dynamic, but the abstraction of modern living makes it hard to see. I work (give my time) for my money, and I spend my money (my time) to acquire things of value. All too often, those things are very heavily advertised to me as solving all of my problems. Houses, cars, alcohol, clothes will get my happiness, confidence, satisfaction, sex. And there's a huge part of my brain that is panicking at the thought that I'm extracting myself from all this promise. 

I'd hate it if it sounds like I have the answer to things. I don't. My only hope is that by forcing ourselves to live at length in a minimal fashion we'll get closer to finding out what is truly valuable.

 (PS - for a huge dose of humble pie of a financial nature, check out this thread on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1g2t15/whats_the_most_pathetic_thing_poverty_has_forced/

I'm so grateful to my parents that I never had to experience this. I feel like we should all save pieces of this post to read for the next time we get really annoyed that the wifi is spotty at Starbucks. Every time I start thinking that I know what living is all about, I should reread this.)

Day 1

By Jason

Monday. The day of dread. Early mornings, groggy meetings in the kitchen. Fart around on Facebook, Reddit, Marketwatch, Google News. Chat with coworkers about the weekend. Anything to delay the inevitable. There are potentially panics waiting for you in that report, in those emails. Something went wrong over the weekend. 

Something always goes wrong over the weekend. 

The project you so glibly tossed to yourself Friday afternoon is now half a day behind and you've got to get it done. Past You is a dick for sure. That guy didn't do his job, drank too much this weekend, played too many computer games, wasted his time.  

You always waste time.  

Now you're over-tired, stressed out, got a headache, and disappointed in yourself.

So grab a Cliff Bar, get your second cup of coffee, and buckle down. You've got to get this week going so that you can get to the weekend. 

 Stop.

This Monday is different. I'm enjoying an americano out of the hugest cup I've ever seen in a little bank-turned coffee shop, having just had a hour long conversation with my best friend who isn't my wife. He's just about to go to bed (time is different in Germany, I guess). We talked about politics, and privacy, and PRISMs. It's part of a 16 year conversation we've been having, the end of which will only happen when we either A.) Fix the world or B.) Get too old to care. 

My best friend who is my wife still has a week of work left, so I'm pretty certain she's not going to love this post. Don't worry, love. It gets better. Way better.

Ok, if you're still with me, here's the Cliff Notes version of what's going on:

1. We took some great trips, saw how big and small the world is at the same time.
2. We decided to uproot ourselves and drift in the wind, seeing what we could see. 
3. We fantasized that we could determine a whole different way of living this life outside of what we like to call "The Plan".  
4. We saved up enough dough to do it. 
5. I quit my job last week. She quits her job this Friday. 
6. As soon as we get the house wrapped up (rented or sold) we're on our way. 

I can (and probably will) talk at length about my opinions on The Plan, but suffice to say that I've become pretty damn skeptical about American Dream Trifecta of Nice Stuff, Nice Family, Nice Job. Having been fortunate enough to achieve these goals at a young age, I discovered that they don't carry with them the enlightenment and contentment I thought they would. The thought of just building up my pile over the next three decades is pretty stifling to me, so in characteristic fashion I decided to toss it all out and see where we land. 

So that's what we're doing. Planning to see how folks are living. Getting off The Plan, getting on the road. 

Thirty is the new twenty, right?