What are We Doing?

“What are you going to do? Won’t you get bored?”

I got that question a handful of times. I’m sure many more thought it, but most were too polite to ask.

Want to know a secret?

Sometimes I miss being bored.

This new life is wild. Most of the time when I wake up during the night, it takes me a second to register where we are.

We’ve literally changed everything.

A big one is no longer living in a house.

Each morning, I wake up without the assistance of an alarm.

I somewhat awkwardly hoist myself over Chad, who’s got the outside of the bed. Surprisingly, I’ve only kicked him in the head once.

I fill the Jetboil with water, turn on the fuel, flick the lighter, and set the little pot atop the flame.

Once the water is boiled, I pour it over coffee grounds in my French Press, stirring slowly.

What we do is different as well.  Rather than commute to jobs and spend our days there, I work on writing projects. I sit, sipping my coffee, sometimes as the sun comes up and sometimes later.

We go out for walks and explore.

There’s more time to spend doing what we love, though you’d be surprised at how fast the days go by.

I get my banjo out more often, carefully unsnapping each of the gold latches that hold the hard case closed. Weather (and people) permitting, I sit outside, softly playing as the sun begins to fade.

Where we are is different too, constantly changing.

I don’t regret it, not for a single moment.

But putting your life together – after you’ve shattered everything – sorting and fitting it to include just the pieces you want, takes time and energy. Figuring out how you’ll sustain yourself long-term is a big one too. It requires faith and perseverance.

You find yourself catching parts that managed to sneak along on the adventure – parts you carried that were never truly you. Yet they somehow follow you from California, all through Nevada and Utah. Fingers crossed; you think you FINALLY ditched them in Colorado.

The internal sorting is a big job, I’ve got decades to sift through.

Boredom is hundreds of miles away, back in a tiny cubicle. It sits in a drawer with all the papers I used to audit. Not once, twice: the next year I was auditing them again.

I’ve never seen or experienced an America like this.

Tiny farms and endless fields. Some bright green, others reduced to prickly looking blonde stubble – all that’s left after the corns been harvested. It’s flat and repetitive yet still captivates me, especially when the sky is dark and moody, elbowing out the sun.

There’s no room for boredom. Our tiny home contains just the essentials.

To a degree, we may be running away. But in doing so are getting closer to ourselves. Cheesy as that sounds, I think anyone who does something like this gets an opportunity to discover so much.

It’s impossible not to.

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