What Are You Going to Do?

We’ve started telling people about our plans to live full time in the blue bus.

After the eyebrows come down and the puzzled frowns flatten out, the questions come. Most of them revolve around some form of, but, but but… what will you do without a house? What will you do when that thing breaks down? What will you do when…

Rather than answer everyone individually I thought I’d answer all those questions here, as best I can: I don’t know.

And I’m not particularly worried about it. I don’t know what we’ll do without a house, because we have a house. It’s just somewhat smaller than the average American dwelling and comes with an engine.

And when it breaks I suspect we’ll stop by the side of the road and spend some time sweating, swearing, scratching our heads, failing, asking more experienced people questions, failing some more, sweating some more, and maybe even end up taking a near bath in gasoline. And then we might even have to walk somewhere and find someone smarter and more experienced to help us. Then, eventually, we’ll probably get it running again.

Then again it could totally break down into an unfixable hunk of fiberglass and metal that has to towed to the nearest scrapyard. It could burst into flames at a stoplight. It could drop a transmission trying to downshift its way up a hill. A million things could go wrong.

But a million things can always go wrong, the only thing you get worrying about them is an anxiety attack. I find it more useful to carry a reasonable amount of tools and deal with things as they come. In my experience so far the future is seldom as grim as our fears¹.

What if though? That’s the action-killing nag at the back of all our minds. I have it too. You don’t think I worry about these things? I do. I know of a Travco that really did burst into flames at a stoplight. It is what it is though. It’s not going to stop me from going on this trip. Because you know what? I know of hundreds of Travcos that haven’t burst into flames. That one is scary, but it’s only one.

A whole lot of houses burst into flames too, yet most of us don’t sit around worrying about that. Instead we do what practical things we can, unplug appliances when we’re not using them, install new breakers, keep an eye on the candles and so on, and get on with our lives. In the end we manage to ignore the fact that seven people a day die in house fires and just live.

It all comes back to comfort, the ultimate comfort, the little lie we tell ourselves: if I just stay where I am, physically, metaphysically, metaphorically, then I will be safe. It’s a nice fiction that helps get all that potential anxiety out of the way, but it’s still a fiction.

My problem with that logic is that clinging to a life of “security” at the expense of living the way you want will fail you twice. Not only are you missing out on the life you want to have, but even the security you think you’re getting in exchange for foregoing that life turns out to be an illusion. The extra irony is that there’s never been a safer time to be alive, yet we’re all worried about the lion that might be lurking in the grass. Old habits die hard.

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild quotes a letter Christopher McCandless wrote to a friend in which he says:

nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

Travel is certainly not the only way to have an endlessly changing horizon, at least metaphorically speaking. I’m not suggesting that everyone should sell their house and travel. But I am suggesting that it might be a good time to stop and take a close look at your life and make sure that fear isn’t holding you back from what you want. For me deciding to travel is easy, but I still have plenty of useless fear about other stuff. I was terrified to have kids. I probably never would have had them if it weren’t for my wife assuring me that we could do it. And we did. And it was the best thing I’ve ever done. Not a single one of my fears turned out to be accurate.

Traveling isn’t the only way to live, but it is one way. And for us it’s one that’s the most immediate and exciting right now. We may not have a house, we may not have much stuff, we may break down, we may get stuck, we may be uncomfortable. That’s okay. I believe we’ll make it. Somewhere anyway.