A Visitor in My Own Life

This process of unplugging from my life is taking longer than I expected. Today is the one month anniversary of leaving my Rockyford home and beginning a great adventure.

It doesn’t feel like a great adventure though. It feels like visiting my life. Here is my son, but he is different. Here there are sisters and a daughter, but it is different.

This little journey to the coast is perfect preparation and introduction to travel for a hermit. I’m finding what works and what doesn’t for luggage. What I really need to have with me and what’s extra weight. What it’s like  to use public transit again.

Life on the Rocks

I’m familiar enough with Canadian culture to feel some comfort in unfamiliar surroundings, but still having to stretch a little. After all, I spent the last 30 years or so sticking pretty close to home. It’s much easier to travel through familiar territory, to familiar places where familiar people feed you familiar food and put you to bed in a style to which you are accustomed.

So this trip is travel 101 in preparation for travel 2.0 to Mexico. Mexico will still be familiar to some extent because I’ve been to the area we’re visiting, I know some of what to expect and I think my knowledge of French may help with the language. Also, I know some people where we’re going and we’re renting a friend’s house.

I made some minor mistakes on this trip that illustrate to me how easy it is to complicate your life for the wrong reasons. I’m learning that I need to watch that I make the right decision for the right reason. There is some busting out of moulds I need to do. Most of this has to do with ways of spending money and time.

Some of it though has to do with my relationship to myself and those around me. Living unfettered by home and work responsibilities gives you a different perspective on our society and our individual ways of being in it.

I see a society very caught up in its unsustainable practices and divorced from community. Even while many individuals wake up to the downward slope that is consumerism, they cannot figure out how to leave it behind without hardship or turning the clock back to a simpler time where no one really wants to live.

I get it though. I too resist changes I want to make in my life. It’s so easy to see the changes others need to make and even tell them how to make those changes – lol. Adopting permanent change into my own life is more difficult. Look at the extreme measures I’m taking to create change in my life! It’s ironic because I know that change is constant and inevitable.

Wandering urban centers and frequenting big box stores is such an eye opener and these days I keep one eye clearly focused on my reactions to what I’m seeing. Canadian urban culture is as foreign to me as what I suspect I’ll find in far away Mexico and Thailand.

People are fascinating! Crazy, but fascinating.