Transcriber: Annet Johnson Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
What if you revolved your work around travel
instead of revolving travel around your work?
That’s the question I asked myself
that allowed me to become a nomad in 2018 at the age of 48.
Travel has always been a part of my life.
It started in the Canary Islands at age two with my parents.
At 16, I was an only child with divorced parents from New York City
when I went to live with a host family on a farm in Normandy, France.
My host mom picked me up at the train station.
We drove out of the civilization of Bayeux and into the remote countryside.
It was 1986 and Gadaffi was a threat,
so I assumed death by terrorism would be my greatest fear.
When we arrived at my host mom’s house, I suddenly had eight new siblings.
They all kissed me on both cheeks.
One of them took me to my room and she explained to me
(Speaks in French)
And with my broken French at the time,
I understood her to be telling me I’d be sharing the room with Francois,
a friend of the family.
Gadaffi fears vanished.
It turned out, Francois left that evening and I had my own room, and a herd of cows.
And that summer, I became part of a new family,
learned to speak French fluently,
fell in love with cows,
and felt I had found my calling in cultural immersion.
After college, I wanted more experiences like that.
Instead, I began working in corporate.
My dreams of cultural exploration were replaced by my ambition
to be promoted to president, get married, and have kids.
Twenty years later, I felt I had lived someone else’s dream life.
My reality was a go-nowhere career
and a childless marriage that made me miserable.
I debated whether to leave my marriage for years.
One day the ping-pong of emotion between my head and my heart
became a searing pain in my neck.
I couldn’t stay in any one position for more than 60 seconds
before the pain returned,
and at the same time it felt like a two ton weight
was pulling down my left arm and I couldn’t let go of it.
I had herniated two discs in my neck.
I asked myself a question:
how much pain did I want to be in just to stay in an unhappy marriage?
The pain became my catalyst to leave.
Once divorced, I had no distraction from how unhappy I was at work,
which was weird because I had a pension, a 401(k), and health benefits.
My boss was nice, my colleagues were kind,
but I felt I was drifting aimlessly counting down the years to retirement.
Have you ever felt disappointed that your work had no meaning
apart from a paycheck and benefits?
Or, like you had to be more loyal to your responsibilities
than to your heart's calling?
I bought into the idea that I was having a midlife crisis.
I tried therapy, depression shopping, even meditating at a monastery in France.
But, all I discovered was how much I needed my corporate job
to pay all those expenses.
I tried getting a sabbatical, but pre-Great Resignation
my company felt those were for family and medical leave,
not personal development.
I thought about how some cultures, like Native American have a vision quest,
and countries like Australia and New Zealand have a gap year
that are an expected part of life.
The problem is these are viewed as parts of becoming an adult.
They’re things kids do before or after college.
They’re not for someone in their forties or fifties.
It dawned on me that we have no process in midlife
to find our purpose, apart from therapy.
But I didn’t want to find what was wrong with me,
I wanted to figure out what was right with me.
One day in January 2017, sitting at my desk,
I felt a sharp pain in my chest.
I immediately flashed back to the pain in my neck from years earlier.
This time I chose my heart over my responsibilities.
I committed to quit my job later that year,
travel a few months, and then find a job I’d be happier in.
That career break has turned into almost five years of nomadic travels.
I intended to find a new job; I found a new life.
Here's why I feel everyone over 40 should experience nomadic living.
First of all, it’s rooted in our ancestry.
Humans started as hunter-gatherers.
We roamed, settled for a bit, and then roamed some more
until agriculture was discovered,
and we became sedentary because populations grew.
The American Heart Association warns that too much sitting at your desk
can result in diabetes and heart disease,
and those can lead to strokes and dementia.
Did you know, though, when our ancestors began being sedentary,
our bodies became smaller and our bones weaker?
Staying in one place is literally bad for our health.
Waiting for retirement to travel isn't the answer either.
You may know that the average global retirement age is 65,
but the average global life expectancy, according to the World Bank,
is less than 73, and those eight years probably won't be your healthiest.
Nomadic living can help you step outside your comfort zone.
I started my travels in Costa Rica.
On a bus ride from Juana Costa to La Fortuna,
I met a wonderful couple from Canada.
They were headed to Samara and we agreed to meet there a couple of weeks later.
I was staying in Corcovado National Park
when the time came to research how to meet them.
It was also the first time in my life
I was trying to make last-minute travel plans.
I quickly learned the only way to get to them
was either a dangerous or an expensive ride.
I had a meltdown.
Clearly, if I couldn't figure out how to meet my new friends,
I was not cut out for nomadic life.
I thought about giving up, going back to New York,
and asking for my job back.
After my pity party,
I had the epiphany that changed me from a career-break traveler to a nomad.
I realized instead of trying to force my destination
to be someplace I couldn’t get,
I could instead allow my destination to be any place I could easily go.
Stepping outside your comfort zone can make you feel really incompetent,
and it can show you how resourceful you are.
Nomadic life is full of possibilities to turn problems into opportunities.
Nomadic living allows you to experience spiritual connection
and presence to your life.
I’ve always wanted to believe that the universe has my back,
but when you’re focused on making it through a miserable work day
so that you can distract yourself in front of a television,
spirit doesn’t seem to exist.
On that trip to Costa Rica,
I was trying to meet those friends in Samara,
but for some reason, I kept calling it Samsara.
After I gave up trying to get there and focused on a place I could easily go,
I found the town of Uvita.
I went on Booking.com to find a place to stay
and the very first property I saw was called Samsara.
Do you have goosebumps?
I did.
So after I booked it, I looked up the definition of that word.
I learned it means the cycle of life and death we’re born into,
where our soul seeks to free itself from karmic bonds.
It seemed the perfect metaphor for my life at that moment.
While at the Samsara hotel, I went for a walk in the small jungle behind it,
and a movement made me stop at the stream.
I could have sworn I had seen a lizard running over the water,
but obviously that's not possible.
But as I stared at that stream,
I saw the lizard again running on two legs,
like a human on top of the water.
And that's how I learned about the Jesus Christ lizard.
I’m not religious, but I sure felt connected to spirit.
Imagine if you could experience these moments where your vision,
your thoughts, and your emotions
are all focused on what’s happening right now, in the present moment,
with no distractions, and find peace.
Nomadic living allows you to tap into the meaning
and purpose you want for your life.
I lived in a small town in Portugal for six weeks.
While there, I rented a car with a GPS
and I drove the same roads every day with that GPS turned on,
until one day I decided to turn it off.
And as I drove down the same roads I had 100 times before,
I learned I had never actually seen them.
There were churches, trees, fields, and stores I had never noticed.
The drive made me realize
I had become so trained to live life as a series of goals
with obstacles to overcome and metrics to measure my success
that I was blind to the opportunity right in front of me.
I’d been expecting to find my fulfillment in my destination,
some other job I wanted to do.
It turned out everything I was looking for was in my journey.
In other words, my journey was my destination,
my own adult vision quest.
Your purpose may be different than mine,
but nomadic living showed me that I had been sleepwalking through life,
and it awoke me to who I want to be and what I want to do.
So here’s another question:
What if we considered nomadic living after 40 as a model
to find the meaning we want for the rest of our lives?
The question I’m asked the most when I tell people I travel full time
is: How do you afford it?
I was shocked to discover that the budget I set aside
for the first three to six months of travel lasted over two years.
It turns out living nomadically is radically less expensive
than a fixed life in one location.
And with coaching, freelance writing, and odd jobs,
I’m not struggling to make ends meet like Frances McDormand in Nomadland.
If you don’t want to go all in like I did,
The Great Resignation has made remote work acceptable
and many people have already left their desk behind
with a reliable income source, making it affordable to travel alone or with kids.
If you want to be a nomad, ask yourself that powerful question:
How can you revolve your work around travel?
Once you’ve embraced it, you can research the answers.
For those of you who can’t or don’t want to leave your job or live nomadically,
you can be a temporary nomad on your annual vacations.
Instead of arranging everything in advance,
pick a destination and wait until after you land
to figure out what to do and where to stay.
If none of the other reasons I’ve shared so far
have convinced you to try living nomadically,
consider this fortunate circumstance.
On February 21st, 2020, I landed in Christchurch, New Zealand.
I planned to stay for three weeks.
Thanks to the pandemic, I stayed almost two years in a virtually COVID-free world,
where I could still travel freely.
Nomadic living can sure put you in the right place at the right time.
But this is about you finding your meaning for your life,
and living nomadically can allow you to become
the most inspired version of yourself.
So, I ask you again, what if you revolved your work around travel?
Thank you.