One Step Closer

This is not an all of a sudden thing.

No. Not hardly. Far, far from it!

What we have going on here are some last steps being taken to realize the fulfillment of something we have been dreaming about, planning, and working toward for quite a long time.

What we have going on here is a definite personal statement regarding life and lifestyle choices in an age where too many others … some of them well-intentioned … some of them players in the scheme of things that Orwell wrote about … work hard to keep us inside some corral that defines their own agendas and comfort zones and denies our own.

It’s about attaining and exercising levels of personal freedom and independence unknown by most and dreamt of by only a pitiful few. It’s about living life rather than life living us while we yet have life to live.

We, the two of us involved in this living adventure, have always been free spirits.

We have both experienced some pretty hard knocks walking the road of life. The two of us have, as well, known and yielded to the rigors, commitments, and compromises involved as parents rearing little ones and eventually letting go of them once they arrived at the point where they thought their wings were strong enough to carry them.

We’ve made all the normal rites of passage except the final passage. We have no control over the time and place where it finds us. What we do have control over is what we will do with ourselves between now and then as long as we have the health and will within us.

It has been a struggle … a real fight … to get to this point in our adventure.

There has been a tremendous amount of detaching and letting go … a lot of Golden Calves evaluated and tossed into the flames ... a lot of priorities examined and adjusted ... a lot of establishing boundaries and perimeters. Careful. Calculated. Meticulous. Avoiding knee-jerk reactions that hamstring objectives.

Most of the people in our concentric circles that we initially told about our plan looked at us like we had developed some sort of deformity. A few of them … well-intentioned of course … seemed to undertake some sort of personal ministry to pull us out of the depths of our despair and heal our ugly deformities. Others simply wrote us off and ceased to have anything to do with us since we no longer fit into their life schemes. A few look at what we are doing, wish they could do what we are doing, but are still wearing fetters that secure them to their own choices.

This is a dream that we began exploring and planning quite soon after we signed the mortgage papers on this house twelve years ago. We considered a lot of options and alternatives that would compliment the inherent nature of free spirited people. We did a lot of reading and studying on the subject. There are options and alternatives that had to be waded through … something of a sifting process … to finally arrive at the best solution to satisfy our needs.

Was signing those papers the right thing to do? It seemed so. It was socially correct and provided a roof over our heads. It also quickly became a stark realization that we were fettered to something that controlled us to the Nth degree, kept our noses to the grindstone laboring for the man, kept us greasing the gears of the social and economic machinery, kept us playing the game, and kept us from living from the heart with spontaneity and creativity.

Signing those papers kept our bodies within the realm of humans doing when everything in our hearts … everything in our spirits … wanted the freedom to live as humans being.

There are a lot of how-to guides on how to build a bed in a van. We looked at a lot of them. Some of them are complicated contraptions. When it came time to do the bed build I simply figured a little material list to build something solid that would accommodate the queen sized mattress. I’m not going to go into detail on the construction in this blog. I did post an album of pictures on my FB page that gives something of a little step by step detail on the construction. The actual building of it can be accomplished in good day if you want to bow up and get after it. I split that good day up over two days and went about it more casually.

We are just a few more steps away from doing some roaming and wandering.

Two interesting words.

Roam and wander.

Roamers and wanderers are given a bad rap when you take the dictionary definitions at face value. Those definitions apply bad connotations to folks like us. The definitions make it sound like our roaming and wandering is purposeless.

Bunk.

Poppycock.

Roaming and wandering is replete with assorted levels of purpose and experience.

Freedom ..... Spontaneity ….. Creativity ..... Watching sunrises and sunsets ….. Unencumbered ….. Unrushed ….. Unharried ….. Babbling brooks ….. Starlit skies ….. Snowcapped mountain ranges ….. Sights galore …. No uninvited and unwelcomed drama and bullshittery ….. Rubber Tramp Rendezvous' ….. Owning time rather than time owning us …..

Just to name a few.

Yes.

This is PURPOSE. This is purposeful roaming and wandering.