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It’s A Job

07/27/2018 by John 2 Comments

This week, I started working at an all plant-based Mexican restaurant. Not exactly a dream come true, but it’s a job, and I get paid. I get to move around, interact with people, make delicious food, and get out of the house. It will be fine for now. Who knows, I might actually come to love it.

It’s part of the lifestyle. I’m living in New Zealand. I have to remind myself of that sometimes since it still seems somewhat unreal. Having this job right now is just a small piece of the bigger picture. It helps enable me to be here, living in this wonderful, vibrant city where I can run in the hills and by the sea. It’s a job with flexible hours, even flexible seasons that match the times when I might want to go away so as a lifestyle piece, this might work out just fine.

I need to get back to knowing that a job doesn’t define who I am. It is a means to an end. I don’t need to love my job, as long as it serves me and I don’t serve it. When it starts to feel the other way around, that’s when there is a problem.

Mostly, I am happy to have something to do. Someplace to go. A purpose to my day. It has been so long it seems. I have not worked a day since April. Crazy.

It’s hard going through life without a sense of purpose. But maybe it’s a less complex idea than that. It’s hard to go through life without a place to be, or any responsibilities to anybody other than yourself. You just wake up in the morning and don’t know what to do.

Hard. That’s probably the wrong term for this, isn’t it? Hard would be not being able to work and wanting to. Hard is not being able to feed your family. My life has never been hard.

We’ve been in Wellington for three weeks and we’ve stayed in three different places now. There is a view out over the hills here and we have a little more room to spread out. Still, we will pack our bags one more time before we get into a more permanent lodging situation. We are like a stone skipping across the water. Slowly we are getting closer and closer to coming to a stop and sinking down to rest. Hopefully, we will like where we land.

One Week In New Zealand

07/13/2018 by John 1 Comment

View across Lake Taupo of the volcanic peaks of Tongariro National Park

We have been in New Zealand for only a week, yet it feels far longer than that. Time seems to behave differently when you are displaced so dramatically in space; it bends and stretches, distorts, and elongates. Life in the states already feels like a distant memory, yet I know that as soon as I step back off a plane into some could-be-anywhere terminal back in the U.S., it will feel as if I never left.

What is there to say? Do you want to hear about our flight into San Francisco and our dramatic ascent up and away from the runway and having it explained nonchalantly by the pilot that there was “traffic” in the area? How about our business premier flight abroad Air New Zealand (paid for with airline points, not real money)? Sorry, not much to say about that because I was asleep for most of it on my seat that turned into a bed. Do you want to hear about how there are “four seasons in a day” here? Yes, it’s true. On any given day since arriving we have experienced some combination of brilliant warm sunshine, cold biting winds, rain of varying degrees from a light mist to a torrential downpour, and the occasional bit of hail.

Business class seat in lounger mode

I wish I could give you more than words. Words don’t justify it. I can’t make them as vivid as the slanted winter sun tinted landscapes of forested hills and pastureland we drove through after landing in Auckland. Words aren’t as dramatic as the snow clad visages of Mount Tongariro, Ngauruhue, and Ruapehu looming over Lake Taupo. My words can’t fully convey the kindness we have felt from so many people since arriving here, from the grocery store clerk who helped us set-up our new phone plan, to the friends we have know for 20 years, to the people we are staying with in Wellington, who were total strangers to us just a few short days ago whom we now can call friends.

There is much I will remember about our first week here, but one thing that struck me was a feeling I had driving through the countryside on one of the two-lane roads that pass for interstate highways here. It was a feeling of familiarity and comfort. It was the feeling of being home.

Looking down on Wellington from Mount Victoria

Coffee Thoughts

06/22/2018 by John 3 Comments

I sip my coffee and hope that the muse will arrive. I can feel better about this cup of coffee. We spent the extra to make sure that it was organic and fair trade certified. Whether or not this really does much to help or if it just makes someone with too much wealth already a little bit wealthier I cannot know. But it soothes my conscience, a consumer ashamed of my consumption, ashamed that my actions cause harm to others. I see a field far away in a hot, humid place, a life spent picking the beans from the plant one by one, placing them in a canvas sack so that I can sit here thousands of miles away and stimulate my adrenal glands to make up for the lack of sleep my first world worries have caused me.

But I also see that coffee picker at home with his family, joyful and happy. I have experienced this first hand, lying on a cot in Costa Rica, in a home with immaculately clean dirt floors, a gap between the ceiling and the walls to let the mountain breezes blow through, the tin roof singing during the afternoon rains as the creek outside swells and recedes with each passing shower. Though I could barely communicate with them, it was clear they were some of the happiest people I have ever encountered, living a simple life, miles of walking away from anyplace where one could actually buy a bag of coffee.

There is good and bad in this world in equal measure. It is far too easy to get consumed by one or the other. The pursuit of the things we deem “good” can lead to unhappiness just as surely as engaging in what we call “bad”. The urge to wrap this up in some tidy little sentence is strong, but sometimes, often, there is no tidy ending (though it appears I’m still trying to find one). Best sometimes to just let things be.

Journal entry from 6.4.14