We are both fond of Henry David Thoreau. After all, we lived for decades in a house not far from where he did. One of his favorite quotes is his explanation of why he lived simply along the shores of lovely Walden Pond; in a cottage he built himself. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and when I came to die discover that I had not lived.” In a previous Blog post (June 2011) I had used this quote to support my desire to simplify life.
Now, inspired by this quote, we have upended our comfortable retired life in a leafy suburb of Boston to live the life of a nomad with no fixed address. We have sold our house and disposed off most of our stuff. What remains does not even fill a small container. There are a few pieces of furniture and a number of boxes containing some precious books, memorabilia and things we found difficult to part with. We want to “live deliberately” to see what we can learn from traveling the world and make sure that when we come to die we don’t feel that we had not lived.
We are not pretending to be Thoreau, nor are we pioneers in this mode of living in retirement. There are others who have been doing it and writing on the subject. We draw inspiration from these folks. Also, we are not sure how long we will live this way. There is always the choice of stopping the experiment and planting roots.
This experiment does not have a well-defined success or failure. It is the journey that counts. We feel that we have already learned a lot in the process of getting rid of stuff, selling the house and the first few weeks of living the nomadic life.
The list of tasks that need to be performed in order to successfully achieve this transition has been unending. We have worked on four parallel work streams over the past few months. The first was to decide what we wanted to keep and how to get rid of what remained. The second was getting the house fixed and selling it. The third work stream was related to putting our joint retired life in order (health insurance, estate planning and such), and the final, which we are deep into is planning for the journey ahead.
We have decided to stay with family and friends where we have them and it is convenient for them to keep us. All other places we will stay in hotels and Airbnbs. We hope to travel lightly---one suitcase and one backpack each. The first major trip, to Asia for a few months, is more or less planned. After that we have ideas but they need to be implemented. We can more or less be wherever we want to be, assuming we keep good health or don’t get tired of living out of suitcases. That’s the beauty of this experiment.
We plan to write a Blog that chronicles our journey. The purpose is not to describe what we did everyday. That would be too boring. We hope to outline the experiences we had, the folks we met, and insights we gained. We will sprinkle in a few photographs.
So, here we go.
