Change of Ideas (The Worst)

We’ve postponed our departure three times now. Our original plan was to leave town in March. Then when March sailed right by and the bus wasn’t done yet, and the house was in no condition to sell. So we moved things back to June. Then June came and went. It’s about to be September, which puts us probably into October. I’m tempted to say that this time I’m reasonably confident we’ll do it, but I’ve said that before.

Some of the delays are a result of things beyond my control, notably clients that didn’t pay on time (a perpetual problem for anyone who works for themselves), which meant I couldn’t buy things I needed to restore the bus. But there were plenty of things that were in my control.

I have a very particular vision of how the bus is going to look. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be The Best. But that old saying that “perfect is the enemy of good enough” turns out to be very true. I started out needing to have everything perfect, but that’s cost us at least a month of time on the road.

I’m about done with perfect. I just want to go.

I’ve been thinking about an old post on Moxie Marlinspike’s blog about something he calls “The Worst.” To understand the rest of what I’m going to say you need to follow that link and read it, but here’s a brief quote to illustrate the difference between The Best and The Worst:

The basic premise of the worst is that both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather than things we live in service to. When that relationship with material possessions is inverted, such that we end up living in service to them, the result is consumerism. When that relationship with ideas is inverted, the result is ideology or religion.

I’m not cutting corners on the bus. I still plan to adhere to my original vision. To me The Worst doesn’t mean half-ass, it means being okay with incomplete, it means figuring it out as you go, perfecting things based on actual experience. I’ve started to incorporate that idea of having the bus be in service to us rather than me in service to it more. We’re ready to go and the bus isn’t done. And that’s okay. We’ll figure out the rest as we go. That’s part of the adventure.

Currently there’s no floor, no water tank, no propane, no solar power, and all the seats still need to be recovered. Of those though only two will likely get done before we leave. We’ll recover the seats and we’ll put in a floor. Everything else can be done as we go.

Everything has costs. In this case it’s money and time. If you have to have a water tank before you leave it’s going to cost you money, which in turn is going to cost you time. Or you could grab a huge water jug for $5 from Home Depot and make do until you can get a proper water tank. In some cases not only does embracing “good enough for now” get you on the road faster, it can also save you money.

A lot of the expense of a water tank is the shipping. The tank we want is only about $400, but it costs another $250 to ship it to us. If you’re willing to hit the road without a water tank you can drive to the water tank production facility and pick it up yourself. This is also true of awnings, windows and paint jobs, all of which we long ago decided we’d do as we go.

Because if you have to have everything perfect you’re never going to go.

And deep down I suspect that my need for perfect is a kind of excuse to not go. A way of avoiding all the fear that comes with leaving. Fear that if it’s not perfect it won’t work. Fear that something will go wrong. Whatever. Something will go wrong anyway. And you know what? A lot of times it’s the things that go wrong that turn out to be the most fun. Maybe not at the time, but later.

It’s impossible to overcome that fear of discomfort. It’s natural. You can’t “get past it”; you have to learn to live with it.

It helps that, at this point in the evolution of our culture, I think those of us in the privileged position of being able to do this in the first place could all use a bit of discomfort. Countless people all over the world are living in situations that make our worst moments seem like the petty, insignificant discomforts they are. It helps to put things in perspective, and no matter how you frame it, we’re incredibly lucky to be in the position we’re in. We didn’t even earn most of the privilege we enjoy in this country. Our comfort and possibilities are largely accidents of birth.

Even in comparison to our very recent ancestors we have it easy. My great grandmother raised eight children alone in a one bedroom 800 square foot house with no air conditioning in Tucson AZ. My wife’s mother picked cotton from the time she was a little girl.

We are soft. We don’t even know what discomfort is, let alone the host of horrors visited upon innocent people all over the world every day.

We are incredibly thankful to be able to embrace whatever discomfort we might encounter. To chose to be uncomfortable is a luxury, perhaps the greatest luxury. I’m pretty sure my great grandmother would have taken a 4000 ft home with central air if someone had given it to her, and I suspect my mother-in-law would just as soon have not spent her childhood picking cotton. They weren’t choosing discomfort, it was just life. I’m less sure that either would have exchanged the experience though.

There’s a line in that piece I linked to earlier, “the best moments of my life, I never want to live again.” I have feeling my great grandmother would agree. It goes on say:

The best means waiting, planning, researching, and saving until one can acquire the perfect equipment for a given task. Partisans of the best will probably never end up accidentally riding a freight train 1000 miles in the wrong direction, or making a new life-long friend while panhandling after losing everything in Transnistria, or surreptitiously living under a desk in an office long after their internship has run out — simply because optimizing for the best probably does not leave enough room for those mistakes. Even if the most stalwart advocates of the worst would never actually recommend choosing to put oneself in those situations intentionally, they probably wouldn’t give them up either.

If you have the luxury of being able to embrace discomfort, take it. Forget perfect and just go, even if “go” is purely metaphorical. You’ll figure it out along the way.