Life One Way

Let me see…. It’s been over half a year since I’ve written here, I’ve moved halfway around the world, and I’m still unsure of things.  Time to say fuck it, then chuck it, and become someone else?  Wha…?

I’ve been contemplating the future.  The past year has been one of a lot of thought but little action.  It’s been nearly a year since I posted to this blog, so that should give some idea of just how little action I’ve taken.

That has to change, and soon.  In fact, soon isn’t really soon enough.  That change has to start now.

So, I’m going to put down my options – for the first time – in writing.  I can:

• Move half way around the world, get a job teaching, meet lots of new people, live lots of new experiences, and pursue my passion (photography).
• Spend the next year or two traveling around my home country and live a life of near subsistence, hiking and camping and working, while pursuing my passion (photography)
• Stay put where I am

Obviously that third one isn’t a real option for change.  It’s doing what I’m doing now.

Money is definitely a limiting factor.

If I go overseas I should be able to get a job teaching (English) in quite a few countries.  I’ve got the necessary training and credentials to do this, and there’s something really appealing about immersing myself in another culture where I’ll get to constantly meet new people.  And think of the great opportunities there will be to photograph lots of interesting places and people.

If I stay at here in this country traveling around, there are a lot of places I’ve never been and certainly there are experiences I haven’t had yet waiting.  Roads I’ve not taken….  But money?  That’s a problem.  I could eek out a living doing odd jobs here and there, making my way as I go.  I’ve got enough saved to start, but I’d have to find a way to bring in enough income to fully support myself while doing this.  Finding a sustainable source of income while living on-the-road is crucial.  Could I sell photographs?  Could I put my experience to work photographing people and selling them portraits?  It won’t be good to find myself 2 or 3 years hence having spent what savings I have now.

No.  Whatever it is I do, it must entail earning a living – enough that I can actually cover all my expenses (start-up and ongoing) – and hopefully put some away for the future.

I think my next step is to actually look at the start-up costs and monthly expenses for each of these options.

I’ve come across an interesting site called Matador Network.  The design appealing, the subject matter interesting, and the content well written.  Best of all, it’s put together by a group interested in the exchange of ideas and information about the cultures and people of the world.  Actually, it is the Matador Abroad “channel” that I’m most interested in.

I found the site while searching for some stuff Greg Madison has written on Existential Migration.  I’ll probably have a lot to say about Madison in the coming weeks and months.  I’ve recently ordered his book, The End of Belonging: Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation.  To get a sense of what the book is about, his post, Existential Migration: Is Travel An Existential Need? is worth a read.

Would living life one way be considered a nomadic lifestyle?  I was just reading the Wikipedia entry on Nomads and wondered if my thoughts on movement through place are essentially a nomadic approach to living life.  Or, are they different?  Here’s what Wikipedia says (emphasis added for later discussion):

Nomadic people (Greek: νομάδες, nomádes, “those who let pasture herds”, commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world.[2] Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but traditional nomadic behavior is increasingly rare in industrialized countries. Nomadic cultures are discussed in three categories according to economic specialization: hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, and “peripatetic nomads”.

Nomadic hunting and gathering, following seasonally available wild plants and game, is by far the oldest human subsistence method.[citation needed]

Pastoralists raise herds, driving them or moving with them, in patterns that normally avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover.

Peripatetic nomads, who offer the skills of a craft or trade to those with whom they travel, are most common in industrialized nations.

The first thing that strikes me about the article is that it is primarily a discussion of communities and cultures.  This is certainly different from what I’ve been talking about in regards to movement through place.  One of the primary ways in which an individual is able to really experience a place is by arriving there alone.

In my post Movement Through Place, I mentioned the need to remove any cloak of familiarity in order to expose yourself to a place and let it wash over you.  When a community travels together, the very nature of the community – its purpose – is to offer inclusion to its members through the exclusion of outsiders.  These closed communities provide the kind of structure and support that their members would otherwise have to discover or develop anew when arriving in a new place alone.  It is the need and act of discovering the new community – I’ll call it the hosting community – which fundamentally alters a person, bringing change to their point of view on the world.

The third item I highlighted in the Wikipedia excerpt is the most interesting to me.  Who or what are peripatetic nomads?  There seems to be some confusion about this.  On the one hand, people say that gypsies are peripatetic nomads – this again implies the presence of a closed community separate from a host community.  But then I came across a site called Nandango where the author writes:

Ok, so I’m not a gypsy or a carnie but even still I could be a more modern day version of this, someone moving to settle populations offering my skills in exchange for work or to perform services (and no, not those kinds of services).  Since I graduated from high school 12 years ago I’ve moved back and forth between 21 cities/towns.  That’s not including moves into different apartments within the same town.  Though maybe one of those shouldn’t really count because although technically it was a different city it was only 15 min away.  And yes some of those towns are repeats but months or in some cases years, separated the time in between.  The point being that I had to pack everything up and move it, only to pack it all up and move it again later.  This last stint in Utah really slowed me down.  I was there four years which is by far the longest I’ve lived anywhere since high school.  The next longest was one full consecutive year in Hawaii.  Every other place less than a year.

This is very interesting to me, and I wonder how it felt to move around so frequently.  I wonder if they experienced the kind of movement through place I’ve been describing on this site.  And I wonder if they ever tire of living that kind of life.

A few days ago in my post about the film The Man from Earth [Amazon Streaming, DVD], I wrote about the “can’t go home again” feeling everyone experiences at one time or another, and said this is really the simplest form of what I call the movement through place phenomenon.  I wrote:

I suspect that most people when they give cursory thought as to why this is, come up with the answer that they have grown or changed over time.  And while there is certainly some truth to this, I have come to feel that a big part of the change in people is due to the movement through place.

So what exactly is movement through place?

Imagine leaving home after 18 years to go off to college.  You move to a new place, far from everything familiar.  You build new relationships, discover a new town or city, and spend the first few months developing in ways you never imagined.  Come winter holidays you return home and discover so much has changed.  This is probably the first time you assigned some personal meaning to “you can’t go home again.”  You know that you have changed, and suspect that everyone else is probably about the same as they were when you left.  But what is the cause of your change?  Is it only the passage of time, or have you experienced something more, a movement through a place where there are new people, new accents, new sights and sounds, foods, feelings, weather, architecture, opportunities, experiences…?

That the “can’t go home again” feeling can become so pronounced after so short a time makes me think that change of place has a much more profound effect than the passage of time.  The amount of newness you experience when you first go to college can only be attributed to the place (and everything that comes with that place).  A counter example might help.

Your married and have kids.  They’re growing up and you want to spend as much time with them as you possibly can before it is their turn to go off to college.  So you take trips with them away from home, exposing them to as much of the world as you possibly can.  In summer the family takes 3 weeks and travels to Europe (lucky kids!).  When you return home, everything is as it should be, your friends are the same, you feel pretty much the same, and you’re happy to be home again.  Where is the “can’t go home again” feeling?  Why is it missing?  Was it because you were gone for only 3 weeks?

No, I firmly believe 3 weeks is enough time to acquire the can’t go home feeling, providing the conditions are right.  Rather than the amount of time that has passed, it is the amount of place that has passed.  In your first few months of college, everything about the place was new, but on the trip to Europe, the family around you created a barrier between you and the new place.  In essence, some of your home was there with you throughout the trip so you never got fully immersed into the new place.  Your discovery was limited because everywhere you went, a very big and important part of home went with you.

The saying, “home is where the heart is” comes to mind.  (I promise not to include cliche idiomatic phrases in everything I write, and certainly using two in a single post will be the exception not the rule.  Whoops.  Make that three in one post.  Hehe.)  Home is your spouse, your kids.  And when you bring the people you love with you, you’re bringing your home with you.  I don’t believe you can’t really experience or understand fully what movement through place is really about, or at least what I think it is about, until you’ve traveled somewhere alone, or at least with a group of people you don’t know or have only recently met.

When you travel surrounded by family – in a cloak of the familiar – can the unfamiliarity of the new environment wash over you?  Can you really soak in new places?

I do not argue or believe that you can never have worthwhile experiences when traveling within a cloak of familiarity.  As my children were growing up we had many vacations filled with wonderful experiences, but my strongest memories – and therefore the things that were the most important to me – are of the kids and my spouse.  But when I’m in a new place without the cloak of familiarity….

The number of places I’ve lived – for any significant amount of time – is three, all in the United States. I’ve lived in two other places for shorter periods (less than a year each) and both of those were internationally, the first time in Europe, the second in Asia. As a child I grew up in a stable home with both parents around and a sibling to play with. We never moved and I never had to change schools until it was time to graduate to the next.

Every summer my parents would take us somewhere that was at least a few hundred miles from home, but usually much farther than that. We would spend three weeks away from home, but of course not away from each other. So it wasn’t until I moved away for college that I experienced what life was like in another place for the first time, stripped of almost everything that was familiar except for a few personal belongings and perhaps a photo or two of home.

It was the first time I experienced the movement through place feelings I described a few days ago in my Man from Earth post [Amazon Streaming, DVD].  When December rolled around and I had finished my first semester finals I headed home only to find that it, or rather I, had changed and the home I had left was now a memory.