The wind is blowing again…

The wind is blowing again.

I walked into the sauna yesterday and inhaled the mustardy scent of human sweat. Soon I was contributing my own odoriferous flavor to the moist potluck and my mind began wandering. I remembered this time I was dogsitting and was struck by one of the most poignant pictures of the human condition I’ve ever seen.

I was asked to dogsit two dogs for a family from church. While I was staying at their house, I noticed something peculiar. Whenever I would leave, I locked the two hounds away in their kennels, and getting them inside was somewhat of a hassle. They didn’t want to go into their kennels because they knew they’d be locked there for a while, all alone, not free to roam the house. Same thing before bed, I locked them in their cages and slept.

But this was the weird thing: Sometimes throughout the day, they would wander the house and end up in their kennel to lie down and chill for a while. The cage door was obviously open, and they chose to stay inside their cage for a spell.

I thought about how interesting this was, and how many humans do the same. We have the whole world at our fingertips (aka, the whole house to roam), yet we choose to stay in the one place that feels the most comfortable, even if it’s a cage by some definition.

“I wish I could travel like you do,” is a sentence I hear a lot.

“Well then…do it,” is a sentence I say a lot.

For many of you reading this, there is no external force keeping you tied to your present situation. Like Gary V says, if you’ve ever spent $5 on a cup of coffee, you have no excuse for not doing the things you want to.

Valid ‘kennels’ are things like family, sickness, and there are probably a few others I can’t think of right now. Invalid examples are: work, money, laziness, procrastination, and fear.

Fear may be the biggest example of an internal prison in which we lock ourselves. Many people have plenty of money and could take a week off of work to head to Colombia, but it’s the mystery, and by extension, fear, that keeps them from taking that trip.

Honestly, I’m usually more scared of having a comfy life in the suburbs than I am of exploring the planet.

The wind is blowing again.

I’m almost 30 and I’m stuck in this cage. It’s a cage constructed of stocks, jobs, time restraints, and a series of numbers and acronyms to which people devote their lives: IRA, 401k, ETF, and so on. I’m tired of sitting in this American kennel and can’t help but wonder if there’s more of the house I’ve yet to explore; more of ways of doing life than I’ve previously tasted.

I work for other people. Someone else makes my schedule, aka, they manage my time. If your time = your life, then what am I subjecting myself to?

We’re far less free than we realize.

But the wind is blowing again.

Earlier this year I held a one-way plane ticket to Guatemala but I chickened out and bought a return flight a few weeks later—before I even left the States.

But now I’ve got friends in Chile and Costa Rica and a few profitable investments and I’m thinking of buying another one-way, but this time, without the chickening out. This time, I’m escaping from winter like Plato from the Cave. I’m fleeing the country as if consumerist capitalism could destroy my soul. (ahem)

The wind is blowing again.

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