I cheat

As I am feeling lazy, but desire to contribute, I am posting two article-type pieces I wrote a while back. The first I wrote about a year and a half ago, when we were living in our van in New Zealand. But I guess that will be rather obvious...

My dad said to me, some years back, that life is a balance between time and money. By which, I took him to mean that we usually have more of one or the other, but we need a healthy combination of both to truly enjoy either. For lack of a better goal, I have spent my independent life trying to find this balance.

Following sixteen years of thorough education I was loosed upon the world with the idea that I could do anything. But I soon found that “anything” is not a real option – one must make choices. But how? How to find a job that is fascinating enough to devote one’s life to, yet which leaves time to pursue a diversity of other interests? One can work a job purely for the money earned, and thus the lifestyle provided. But we spend too much of our life at work – at bare minimum some 40 hours a week – to have such a dichotomy between “work” and a “real life” outside of office hours.

I spent three years at a not-for-profit arts organization, where the temporal benefits outweighed the financial. Yet I felt strangely disconnected between my actual labor and its fruits – intellectually I knew I was a fundamental part of the machinery for successful operations, but I felt replaceable and tangential.

So I decided to cut all ties, go for a walk, and think things through. I spent a month in Ireland, traveling cheaply, and slowly. I was hooked – by visiting a small region over a longer period of time, I was able to discover a much stronger sense of a place than I had previously through the whirlwind concept of “doing” a whole country in a week or two.

Following my return to the States, I found a position working on small cruise ships operating along North America’s west coast. The hours are long, without days off for potentially months at a time, but life is simpler. There is not the same division between work and play – you are always on a boat, no more than 50 meters long, with more or less the same people, surrounded by whales and dolphins, glaciers and arroyos. You clean, paint, talk to guests and coworkers, anchor, dock, and repeat again.

Of course, it is not a lifestyle for everyone – any attachments “on shore” make the periods cruising feel interminable. But people often find positions on the boats to finance a travel lifestyle – work hard, save money, and take months somewhere new, exploring and relaxing.

Currently, I am spending the year living and working in New Zealand. This past austral summer, I worked as a waitress at a restaurant on the South Island. Not necessarily the intellectually stimulating situation that I imagine my family would have chosen for me, but I find the instinctive physicality of it appealing.

I have a simple life. My partner and I are now traveling the island in our Toyota van – it is our transportation and our home. We also spend a substantial portion of our time tramping – seeing the country from the roots up, so to speak. I have minimal monthly bills, I get an embarrassing amount of sleep, and I am able, with not completely consistent success, to send cards and presents to friends and family, for birthdays, weddings, births, and deaths. Time, for many I know, is a scarce commodity, yet I have some to spare.

Yes, I do sometimes yearn for a more extravagant lifestyle. But I am of the generation who views it as our prerogative to see the world – we are so fortunate that we no longer perceive travel as a retirement reward for decades of hard work, and I have managed to find a lifestyle that allows me this option.

In all of this, however, I have a nagging fear that I am wasting my potential, discarding like a spoiled child the benefits provided by my advantaged background to live so selfishly. There are those who find ways to travel, yet also to give back to the world that created them. And, in all honesty, as much as I say I find more fulfillment working as a waitress or a deckhand than in previous office-based jobs, these options are only satisfying in the short-term. Before long, I do need more intellectual stimulation. Perhaps I could find it progressing through the ranks as an officer on the boats, or in the right office environment where I am closer to more tangible results, or perhaps through a new combination of something physical but academic, like teaching. But the difficulty remains that the decision still needs to be made, and with a real position comes both responsibility and the associated loss of freedom. I will no longer be able to take off as completely to a random corner of the world and be surprised by the similarities and fascinated by the differences I find there.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera discusses the ideas of lightness and weight. So often lightness is described as positive and fine, while the opposite is heavy, dark. Yet, he says, weight is also associated with the burden of responsibility for others – the weight of a lover pressing down on one’s chest, the heaviness of a child resting on one’s hip. “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.” He suggests that it is only through the burden of responsibility that one can find fulfillment in one’s life. The airiness and freedom of being, which is so romantic and liberating, has the danger of leaving one drifting above the splendor of the world without becoming a part of it. But the opposite danger is to become so weighed by one’s burdens so as to lose the beauty of the larger view. This, I suppose, is the real balance to strive to achieve. I am no closer than any other.