It’s so good to know our internal voices. Today, I have had several conversations with my closest friends about impulses to make radical changes in our lives. Have you ever had that moment, when you feel like you have to change everything? That has apparently resurfaced in me today. I thought about buying a tugboat.
Hear me out, there is an important background. Shortly after Nancy passed away, through a mysterious Quora connection, I met a man in Texas who lost his wife a couple of years before me. Jonas reached out, and we talked for several hours about his experience, and about where I was. He said (and I paraphrase), “you will have this voice, the ‘tibetan voice’, that will tell you to sell everything you own, and move to Tibet. Do not listen to this voice, but sit in the tension of your new life.”
Awesome advice, and sure enough, it happened several times within the first few months. Now I’m heading towards 2 years in December, and my life feels very different. Alive and juicy, professionally engaged, loving time with Jenifer and my friends, with everything pretty stable. I don’t need to make a sudden or deep change to relieve the unbearable feeling of loss and change, do I?
Yet it’s incredibly fun to let this voice out, sitting with Jenifer and brainstorming wildly alternative lifestyles. Could we create a place where we had flexibility and creativity, fulfillment and solid income, all at once? Such a great question. Where would I like to live someday, where would I most like to travel, how would I like to spend more of my time? Spend a few months touring the US in our Westy? Move to a cottage near the Russian River? What about Arizona, Oregon, a farm in the Sierra foothills, or some place with a vineyard? The big island of Hawaii? Run a buddhist retreat center?
I noodle around on Craigslist, using it as a gateway to possibility. How much are small houses in Sonoma county? What would a large sailboat or house boat in Sausalito cost? And here she is, I manage to find a large and extremely inefficient boat up in Puget Sound, a 110-foot ex-Army tugboat, that would take many thousands of dollars in fuel just to move down to San Francisco. But so cool. People live on these boats, and there might be a way to make a living with a private tugboat. Emergency services, odd jobs moving stuff around the bay, who knows? My ability to fantasize seems to have no bounds.
The harder question is, “why”? Why is this urge appearing now? I love my relationship, my home, my job. There seems to be no reason for the tibetan voice to appear…
Ah. The seventh anniversary of my wedding is coming up in a few days. More unfelt grief. Of course. But still, the voice is so delightful. I need to let it out more, if just to enjoy my dreams.