Wanderlust
Recently I've been thinking a lot about the life we are living here in Cedar Rapids. We live in a comfortable home, we have good jobs, we have a great if unconventional little family unit, and we have good friends. Yet for me it seems as though there should be something more to it.
Since I was little my parents always struggled to make ends meet. For a long time I believed that it was perhaps that they just really didn't make enough money. We lived a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle that my parents still live, always just barely ahead of the bill collectors. As I've grown older I've realized that most of that came out of plain old bad money management, but when I was young one of my biggest goals was to get away from that lifestyle and into one that was more comfortable than merely just scraping by. To some extent I have met that goal. Though Shel and I still carry a significant amount of school and credit debt (paid off sometime next year, finally), we have managed to carve out enough to go on a nice trip once in a while and afford a few other luxuries such as a new car, a new (though quickly deteriorating) couch, a new recliner, a new computer, a Xbox 360, and some spurious shopping trips to Williamsburg.
Yet the question lingers, now what? I have a wife, a child, a dog, a Terry, a job, a house, and a car. What's next?
The summer after my junior year in high school I went on a backpacking trip with my church youth group, the original plan was to whitewater raft, and go backcountry backpacking for five days. It was my first trip to Colorado and the first time I had ever seen the Rockies. Though the trip out turned out to be a partial bust, we only ended up backpacking for three days due to what I will call stupid people syndrome, Colorado had me at hello. The majesty of the mountains was simply overwhelming. I decided right then and there that someday I wanted to live there. I've never forgotten about that, it has always been in the back of my mind.
So here I am, leading what most would call a perfectly normal life, yet every few months my mind slips out west and I kick myself for being here in Iowa. I've always lived in Iowa, but I don't feel like it's the place for me. I need to go.
Once in a while I work up the courage to talk to Shel about this. In our household this a hotly contested issue. It has been discussed before, and will be discussed again. I know how she feels. Shel likes the routine and consistency. She doesn't deal well with change. She likes to be close to family. She likes life here and questions why we would dispose of everything we have here on the chance that things will be better in an unknown place far away from family, but if it is really what I want she would do it for me. I am highly adaptable, and although I love my family I have no overriding need to be particularly close to them geographically. I like to roll the dice once in a while and step out of myself and see what happens, good or bad.
We would have to find new jobs. We would have to sell our house. A lot would change. I want to go, so I will do research, I will pore over web sites, we will save our money, I will convince my wife that this is a good idea and then, when the time is right in two to three years, we will go west, into the setting sun and to something new, something different, and something that will be life-altering.
Since I was little my parents always struggled to make ends meet. For a long time I believed that it was perhaps that they just really didn't make enough money. We lived a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle that my parents still live, always just barely ahead of the bill collectors. As I've grown older I've realized that most of that came out of plain old bad money management, but when I was young one of my biggest goals was to get away from that lifestyle and into one that was more comfortable than merely just scraping by. To some extent I have met that goal. Though Shel and I still carry a significant amount of school and credit debt (paid off sometime next year, finally), we have managed to carve out enough to go on a nice trip once in a while and afford a few other luxuries such as a new car, a new (though quickly deteriorating) couch, a new recliner, a new computer, a Xbox 360, and some spurious shopping trips to Williamsburg.
Yet the question lingers, now what? I have a wife, a child, a dog, a Terry, a job, a house, and a car. What's next?
The summer after my junior year in high school I went on a backpacking trip with my church youth group, the original plan was to whitewater raft, and go backcountry backpacking for five days. It was my first trip to Colorado and the first time I had ever seen the Rockies. Though the trip out turned out to be a partial bust, we only ended up backpacking for three days due to what I will call stupid people syndrome, Colorado had me at hello. The majesty of the mountains was simply overwhelming. I decided right then and there that someday I wanted to live there. I've never forgotten about that, it has always been in the back of my mind.
So here I am, leading what most would call a perfectly normal life, yet every few months my mind slips out west and I kick myself for being here in Iowa. I've always lived in Iowa, but I don't feel like it's the place for me. I need to go.
Once in a while I work up the courage to talk to Shel about this. In our household this a hotly contested issue. It has been discussed before, and will be discussed again. I know how she feels. Shel likes the routine and consistency. She doesn't deal well with change. She likes to be close to family. She likes life here and questions why we would dispose of everything we have here on the chance that things will be better in an unknown place far away from family, but if it is really what I want she would do it for me. I am highly adaptable, and although I love my family I have no overriding need to be particularly close to them geographically. I like to roll the dice once in a while and step out of myself and see what happens, good or bad.
We would have to find new jobs. We would have to sell our house. A lot would change. I want to go, so I will do research, I will pore over web sites, we will save our money, I will convince my wife that this is a good idea and then, when the time is right in two to three years, we will go west, into the setting sun and to something new, something different, and something that will be life-altering.
posted by Chris at 6:43 PM
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