One of the beauties of aging is learning what you truly enjoy in life, and stripping out the things you don’t – Marie Kondo-ing your head. But the risk in methodically eliminating what you don’t like is limiting yourself to a brutally efficient set of comfort behaviors and repeating them ad nauseam, making your world smaller and smaller, and cutting yourself off from new experiences.
That’s how old people shrink.
Well, that just scares us to fucking death.
So much so that we’re willing to throw everything up in the air and force ourselves to start fresh.
We Are Our Own Cossacks
We’ve set our own village on fire, and now we have to flee the burning wreckage. We’ve sold our property, our car, and 95% of our belongings. All that’s left after almost 50 years together fits in a 10’x15′ storage unit, in the event that when we’re done with our travels we return to the US. If not, the kids can divvy up what’s left like we’re dead. In the meantime, load lightened.
That lightened load looks like a couple of suitcases each and a fierce desire to see the world before we burn out and it burns up. Not to mention leaving behind every comfort behavior we’ve developed and every responsibility we’ve accrued over the years. That’s a seriously light load.
Our travel protocol is to have no travel protocol. We have no itinerary and no set plans. When we’re done in one location, we’ll look at the map and decide where to go next. If we make no plans, we’ll have no choice but to live in the moment.
Pretty much the only thing we’re set on is not darting about like short attention span tourists. Two weeks here and two weeks there sounds exhausting, but it also seems like the worst way to experience another place. We don’t want to dash, we want to slow down and savor. Most countries have a three month tourist visa, and that seems about right to embed and really pick up the flavor of a place.
How long are we going to live this extreme lifestyle? Until it’s not fun. We may find after six months that we really prefer to be settled. We may travel for ten years until it’s physically too demanding. We may fall in love with Senegal and just stop.
We don’t know. Which is, after all, the entire point.
So what about that workup requires a travel blog? Well, it exists so friends and family can keep up with us, obviously. Most important, however, is that we’ll forget. We’ll just… forget. Over time, this blog will become our memory of this chapter in our lives.
Hopefully, this adventure itself will keep us sharp and capable longer than if we’d just retired to putter in the garden. But when we do finally start to fade away, we’ll be able to read this blog and remember.
— Mark & Dorothy