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Somewhere on the road a couple of years ago, I found myself smiling and thinking, I’m doing it. I am doing something I have wanted to do for a very long time. I am road tripping in a van. I was enjoying life and basking in the glory of achieving a long-term goal when this question crossed my mind: Now what?
What do you do when you finally achieve something you’ve always wanted?
The answer to this question was made clear to me many years ago. While enjoying some pillow talk with a beautiful woman in my apartment in Guanajuato, Mexico, we somehow got on the subject of living abroad. I was relaying to her about the first time I ever really traveled for leisure. It was to Costa Rica. During my 21day stay there in Playa Tamarindo, I noticed that there were people who were actually living there. They weren’t there for just a few days and then off to Volcano Arenal before they headed back to their life in Kansas. They lived there.
I was completely amazed. I mean, there I was on a 21-day vacation thinking I was some sort of longterm traveler. Yeah, right! There were people there who stayed so long they had to leave the country every few months so they could re-enter to get another three-month visa. How did they do this? What about work? What about their families? How could they afford to stay there for so long? I could afford my three weeks stay because I was making a killing as a contractor in Iraq but, I had to get back eventually. I had to get back to making money. I was running out of it. It just blew my mind that anyone could travel like that for as long as they wanted.
This was when the travel bug first bit me. For the next several years I wondered how I would ever be able to live in another country for an indefinite amount of time.
“Holy sh*t!” I said to her. (Don’t forget I was telling this story a beautiful woman… in my apartment… in Mexico… where I LIVED?) It wasn’t until that very moment that I realized I was doing it. I was doing the very thing I had wanted to do for years and had been doing it for about for months. I hadn’t realized it until that very moment, though. “I’m doing it!”
“Yep, you are.” She was so nonchalant about it. It was as if it was not a surprise to her. As if she had confidence in me enough to think, Of course, you achieved a goal you set. You’re awesome.
“Oh my god. I’m actually doing it.”
“Mmm-hm,” she responded with her of course, you are tone.
Then just like that, as if all that excitement was a super, big, deep breath I had just took in, I let it all out. “Now what do I do?”
This was when the tone in my lover’s voice changed from that of pride to that of disappointment. She couldn’t believe I could say such a thing. I wondered what I had done that was so wrong. She clarified it for me with her next five words, “Live in the present, güey!”
For the record, güey means fool.
She was right. I was a fool. How could I, within moments of realizing I was achieving a personal dream, dismiss it and be ready to move on to the next thing. What was wrong with me? I couldn’t even bask in the glory for more than 60 seconds. I really did need to live in the present. I needed to enjoy my accomplishment as it was happening.
Living in the present is great, but you have to think about your future at some point, right?
In a blog post about bouldering a while ago, I wrote how bouldering was a metaphor for life. One of the examples I gave was this:
Once you achieve your goal, take a few seconds to bask in the glory and take pride in what you have accomplished, and then move on to the next goal.
In bouldering, you don’t think about what route you are going to climb next. You focus on your current problem. You live in the present. You climb, and that’s it. Can you imagine hanging upside down from a rock by your toes and your fingertips, your heart rate is up, your adrenaline is pumping, you could fall at any second but instead on concentrating on your next move, you think, I wonder what route I should climb next? This, my friends, is called anxiety.
When I realized that I was living my dream in Mexico, my mind automatically went on to think, what’s next? I could even allow myself to enjoy this awesome life I was living. Years later, while cruising through the beautiful four corners area enjoying my indefinite road trip I again caught myself asking, what’s next? This time I knew the answer. Live in the present, güey.
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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