Someday I’m going to be a professional adventurer
Just the other day, my husband and I were talking about how, someday, after the kids have left home and before our bones crackle with age, we are going to be professional adventurers.
Neither of us are sure how well that pays.
And the Internet is a funny thing because, just today, I happened somehow upon an interview with a guy named Andrew Skurka, who it would appear, is a professional adventurer.
His official job title is “long distance adventurer” In this interview, he is asked how well professional adventuring pays.
“Well,” Skurka says, “I have sponsors, I do a lot of public speaking, and I do private guiding. I also keep my expenses pretty low and avoid owning a lot of possessions. It helps that I’m only 28 and don’t have a mortgage to pay.”
I’m not 28. I do have a mortgage. But I’m intrigued enough by Skurka’s remarks to go on to read his blog, in which he talks more about his “lightweight lifestyle.”
This is a pretty romantic notion. I dig it.
A lightweight lifestyle is fairly synonymous with what I’ve been reading about on so many popular blogs lately that I would almost call it a trend: minimalism.
I have three kids and, like you, perhaps, the number of things I need to buy in a given week can be staggering, but I would say that, as much as possible, I am a minimalist, too.
I’m not sure I have always been a minimalist, but being married to the kind of guy I’m married to, one must adapt.
I have realized, over time, and, increasingly as time goes on, that I don’t really care that much about stuff. Not for any reason, per se – just naturally. I’m pretty content these days.
Can you become more of a minimalist? Sure, it’s possible. (Leo Babuata has a how-to book on it.) But I think, at the base level, you either are one or you aren’t one. You are high maintenance or you are low maintenance.
Either way, of course, it’s okay. It’s just nice to be reminded sometimes that you have a choice. You don’t have to care about having a bunch of stuff. It’s perfectly normal and a perfectly healthy choice to not care much about it at all.
There’s a great deal of freedom in choosing a more lightweight lifestyle for no other reason than the fact that it leads to a whole new peace of mind. One where you can feel content, right now, slowly, where you sit. You can look around and say, for right now, for me, this is enough.
“I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and not a hundred or a thousand… We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.”
Henry David Thoreau.
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