Work

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.

Living in The Unknown

05/04/2018 by John Leave a Comment

We’ve been out of work and out of an apartment for two weeks now. The car is littered with random shoes, bits of recycling that need to find a home, and pieces of clothing tossed into the back seat while speeding down the freeway as the cool mornings give way to warm spring afternoons. The road thus far has led from Chattanooga to Asheville, Nashville, Huntsville, Sewanee, and back again to Asheville. Soon, the wheels of the Matrix will turn north towards Philadelphia. We don’t know where or when we will have a place to call home again. We are living in the unknown.

New Zealand is so far away that it is tomorrow. That is where we are trying to go: into the future. But in the present, we lie awake at night in other people’s bedrooms wondering if will make it or not. When the morning comes, we expectantly open our email to see if a job offer has landed there and breath a sigh of frustration when we see that nothing has arrived; another day of waiting has just begun.

I sat in the dentist chair yesterday with the hygienist sticking her implements into my wide open mouth, asking me if my wife and I are the “bicycle people”. And though I have not worked a bike tour in close to a year now and my bike is slowly turning to rust in someone’s basement, I grunted an acknowledgment that yes, we are indeed the “bicycle people”. She asked me if I knew how many people would love to trade places with us. I thought about all the sleepless nights we’ve had recently, the confusion over whether we are making good decisions, and our bank balance that for the foreseeable future will only be heading in a negative direction. Once she removed her hands from between my jaws and I could again use my full powers of communication to respond, I glanced up at her and said: “there are pros and cons.”

Farmers And Sailors Revisited

03/17/2018 by John Leave a Comment

What Do I Really Want?

Is it really to be a “digital nomad,” letting the wind take me to some remote corner of the world where I’ll sit in a café and work from my laptop? Or would I rather put down roots somewhere close to friends and family? The problem is I still want both.

While owning a house and living in Asheville, I thought I wanted a life on the road, one full of new places and new experiences, but now that I’ve got it, I wonder what it would feel like to settle down someplace once again? There is a part of me that treasures the routines of being in one place and having a more consistent schedule. For example, I want to run another 100-mile race, but I have not been able to develop the discipline required to train for one while moving around so much.

It’s the Farmer’s And Sailors showdown surfacing once again. Though I love the life that I have been living over the past three years, never remaining in any one place for longer than 5 months at a time, it wears on me. Just when I start to know a place, it’s time to pack our bags and move on.

I know that happiness is not a place on a map. It is instead a quality of mind that must be cultivated. Life is precious and short and so I want to be intentional about how I spend my days. How can I be a farmer and a sailor at the same time, having my routines, a community, adventure, and discovery no matter where I am or what I am doing? How can I plant my garden on a moving vessel?

Based on a journal entry from 2.12.15