I can't afford to travel: and other myths

A former woman friend, used to say to her kids “you can do things or you can have things”. The motto being that as a more or less middle of the road earning American, we only have only so much money and resources to spend in this life and choices need to be made. The most precious thing is time and after that maybe money. Of course these things can be broken down further and you could say that time spent with loved ones is the most precious single thing on earth.
I frequently use the “death bed scenario” when discussing the myriad choices facing the eager young faces I run into. I ask them “hey, if you are lying on your death bed and are recounting your life and all the things you did and didn’t do; what will be important to you? Will it be the time you spent several hours haggling to buy the new Lexus and the drive home? Will it be the time you sat on top of the great pyramid in Egypt? The first time you made love to the love of your life? Will it be watching the Seahawks on your 56 inch television? Or hiking into Machu Piichu?

This is the juxtaposition of experiencing things and owning things. Buying expensive shiny gewgaws gives very little satisfaction once you actually have them in your hot little red hands, while memories of fantastic experiences keep giving and giving, paying interest, throughout your life. Some of these experiences can in fact be so profound they can literally change you and thus change the direction of the rest of your life. In this day and age of almost great-depression-like economic turmoil, many people I know are losing things they worked very hard for. They have had to declare bankruptcy, sell the “dream house” that is irreplaceable, get divorced (because they sold the “dream house”), lose all those things they were proud of and bragged about. Some people feel these things sadly defined who they were. Have you heard the bullshit about “you are what you drive”?
In that case I am a 1996 Chevrolet Lumina, white with dings and coffee stained carpet, almost 100,000 miles, non-descript, looking like an old rental car (because it is of course), reliable and forgettable. I prefer to think it has nothing to do with who I am it just gets me to work on time. However when I see people showing up in the morning in that brand new Lexus SUV and I look at them I think…it is too expensive for me, too much overtime, too much of my life’s blood. That car would cost too much of my very limited time on this earth. Henry David Theroux described it in his great book Walden as being “tools of our tools”. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=walden

A movie that I have heard many people quote lately is the “Bucket List”. Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are old men confronted with their eminent and yes imminent, mortality. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825232/ They decide to make a bucket list, all the things they want to do before they die. Notice it is things they want to do, not things they want to buy or things they want to own. It has touched a chord with many baby boomers as they grow older, and look in the mirror, discovering to their dismay the grey haired, turkey necked creature peering at them, is not them, but some old, world- weary person sneaking around in their house and wearing their clothes! The horror!

So other than the fear, http://425traveler.blogspot.com/2009/07/travel-fear.html the fake fear that has been manufactured and shoved down our 9-11 throats by the fear-mongering media, (and Republicans), it seems money is the main reason people give for not living out their travel dreams, of not scratching out items on that precious “bucket list” of childhood dreams. These are the dreams we had as children when we still dreamed really big dreams, before we got smart and our world shrank down really small with so many limitations. We tell ourselves that we will travel when we retire and we have earned it. We know in our hearts though when older we will be even more afraid, have less money, and failing health.
“Recent studies have suggested that merely thinking about money makes us more solitary and selfish, and steers us away from the spending that promises to make us happiest.” http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/23/happiness_a_buyers_guide/?page=full

The time to plan that thing we have always wanted to do is right now, to research it and start to make the budget for it. If you have the big car payment ask yourself if that is really how you want to remember your life, as working overtime to pay car payments and buy things that you won’t remember even owning ten years down the road. It might be time to write a list of ten things you really, really want to do and then focus on the least expensive easiest one out of the ten. Could you plan that thing now? Could you actually do that particular thing, could you live that dream, next year? I think you will find if you start to make those concrete plans it will improve your mood to have something so wonderful to look forward to.