I'm Choosing Alignment Over Approval
Who's with me?
Nowhere in the world is it harder to be a nomad than it is back in our home country of Canada. I know, you probably think it is hard because this country is bloody ginormous and we don’t have a car. Or maybe you think it is because it is one of the most expensive countries in the world. While both of these things are definitely annoying, it is neither of those obvious reasons.
Canadians are judgmental
Every time we come back here for a visit, we are inundated with questions about our lifestyle choices. You see, we have been nomadic since 2017 when we sold all of our possessions — cars, a house, and many things. We shed our lives of responsibilities, so that we could head off into the world and experience true freedom. And we did.
We are now 46 and 48, of course, we are not spring chickens anymore. I can’t tell you how many people need to make sure they mention to us that the older we get, the less we will want to travel.
“You just get too tired, you know.” They will say.
These small chit chats start out innocently enough. One minute you are discussing the joys of getting older, then the next you are facing an insidious question that I am quite frankly SICK OF!
“When are you going to settle down?” or, “Have you given any thought as to when you will settle down?” or, “Where do you want to be when you settle down?”
I want to scream from the summit of the nearest mountain.
“I DON’T WANT TO SETTLE DOWN! I ALREADY DID THAT AND I DIDN’T LIKE IT!”
Are they jealous?
Of course, there is a fair share of people who are jealous of our life choices. I don’t say this in a boasting way, either. I don’t want to be the subject of somebody's jealousy, but often there is no other explanation for how people behave. Maybe ‘jealous’ isn’t the best word. Actually, I think most people feel threatened. Our on-the-move lifestyle threatens their sense of stability.
“I just can’t imagine doing what you do,” or “The traveling would make me so tired.”
This comes at us a lot also. It’s as if being nomadic comes with a requirement that a person has to move every few days. No, that is not how this lifestyle works, either. We move when we want to move, and we stop when we want to stop. There is no traveling to exhaustion anymore; we played that game back in our 30s.
Maybe that is one thing that age helps us with. We actually respect our limits these days and understand that burnout is real. As stated, been there, done that — lived to tell the tale.
Yes, I can imagine that people are jealous of some things —like our ease in life. How nothing seems to rattle us or stress us out. How we can live in each moment, and not some distant date in the future. How we take the time to do the things we love, each and every day. How we rarely do anything we don’t want to do anymore.
To those living a life that seems difficult or unfair, I can imagine that we are quite hated, actually.
We didn’t like settling down
When we challenge someone's sense of stability, they can get quite edgy. I’ve experienced this enough now to know how to proceed in these conversations.
“Well, you know, we tried settling down and we didn’t like it.” I will sometimes say if I am on my game. I somehow feel as though people think that we have been doing this our whole lives, and we don’t actually know what it is like to live a ‘normal’ life, or be a ‘proper’ citizen who contributes to society.
In my 20s and 30s, I was about the most normal citizen of a 12,000-person community that one could expect. I owned a home, a vehicle and a painting business. I volunteered for community organizations. I helped decorate for dances and parties. I grew a garden and attended local theatre productions and the like. I honestly cringe at the sound if it now. It’s not me. I was trying to be somebody for others. It was never about me and what I wanted.
I could sit here all day and blame all sorts of people for the mundaneness that my life had become, but at the end of the day, it was I who needed to decide what was important to me. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought. That is what mid-life also brings to us. I think we FINALLY get that we are in charge of our destinies, and if we are going to find a better life, we better get at it before it is too late.
Some people act on it. Others subdue it. But I couldn’t have shut that voice off if I tried, and I succumbed to her every desire.
But what did I want?
What I wanted was to travel and explore the world. And I’m not talking about two week vacations a couple times per year. No. I’m talking about REALLY seeing the world. Taking the required time to see the world. No quick trips for me, it had to be all or nothing.
Trying to be a strong member of a static community, being the person I felt that everyone wanted me to be, meant that I was stuck in one place, mostly. It seemed impossible for me to have both. And I think it is. We cannot have nomadic tendencies, AND live in a static world. It is soul crushing.
A lightning bolt moment
It was a lightning bolt moment when I realized that all I had to do was get rid of all of my things if I wanted to travel full-time and find freedom.
“That’s it?” I thought as I looked around the room at all the things on the shelves. All the unimportant junk that was collecting dust. In an instant, I knew what I had to do. I had to get rid of all of it.
Thankfully, my partner was also on board with the idea. This whole story would likely have turned out very differently if he hadn’t been.
Was it a midlife crisis?
wrote a great article on Substack the other day that really resonated with me.Her article starts like this:
There’s this cultural cliché that a midlife crisis looks like a new sports car, late-night regrets, and an ill-advised affair with someone who says things like “Let’s vibe.” But for a lot of us, midlife doesn’t crash in loud. It just shows up one day, whispers, You’re allowed to want something else, and refuses to leave.
It’s not necessarily wrecking your life. I call it self-correction. You’re just done following someone else’s playbook.
If any of that resonates with you, I highly suggest giving her article a read. In my opinion, she nails it. As I read it, I couldn’t help but be surprised that somebody else could put my own thoughts into their article so eloquently.
My favorite line is the last one:
I have been wrestling with the thought that I have had a mid-life crisis since pulling the plug on my life over seven years ago now. But as I move around the world, I can’t help but think, “Wow! What a crisis it has been.”
We have slept in the Sahara Desert, swum in the Mediterranean Sea, stared at erupting volcanoes, fed giraffes, and witnessed the astounding power of the mighty Victoria Falls — to name just a few.
If this is what they call a ‘crisis’, I’m here for it.
Somebody commented on one of my articles the other day. I can’t find the exact comment, but it went something like this:
I’m so happy to read this from someone who is older and living this lifestyle. Most people think that we need to get things out of our system in our twenties, but instead, you are traveling after settling down.
Yes, yes, I am.
I thought 40 was so old
And I know, I look into the eyes of the young people we meet in various places in the world. Some are intrigued by us, but others are definitely thinking, “Man, I really hope I have my life more together than these two by the time I am their age.”
The reason I know this is because I thought it as well. I remember a distinct moment when I was just 23, in fact. I was on a ten-week sojourn through the South Pacific with one of my best high-school girlfriends. We traveled to the Cook Islands, Fiji (where we spent Y2K), New Zealand and Tonga.
We met a couple at a hostel in the last country of our journey. I seem to remember the guy being 40, but I think his girlfriend was a bit younger. They had been staying in Tonga for the past three months, much of the time camping on one of the smaller islands and living off the land.
They weren’t DOING ANYTHING. I didn’t get it. And I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “Man, I hope I have my life more together by the time I am 40.” Bearing in mind that at the age of 23, 40 seems like an eternity away.
I figured that these two were wasting their lives. That they could be accomplishing so much, but here they were doing essentially nothing with their lives.
I couldn’t have been jealous at that point, because I never could have understood how the future would look from that viewpoint. But man, oh man, can I ever see it now! I wasn’t jealous, but I too was threatened. Their behaviour went against everything I was taught about how to live this one life.
And this is what we are taught: that we have to DO SOMETHING with our lives!
Sadly, in our society, doing something mostly means going to high school, getting a job, going to college, getting a degree, getting a job, finding a partner, getting married, buying a house, having kids, retiring, and then dying.
No thanks. I’m done with that script.
In my naivete about life, I didn't know that this man was living his life. He was enriching it with experiences, making the world a better place because he was happy and content. I wish I could find that man again so I could tell him that he was right all along. Life doesn’t have to be so serious. People can choose paths that align with their values; they don’t have to be like everyone else and DO SOMETHING.
Bucking the pressures
We rarely have conversations about any of our life choices while we are out in the world. Most of our close friends, at this point, are fellow travelers that we met for a moment or a while in some place or another. People who can understand us, and we them. People who send me messages to let me know how their lives are and wonder where we are in the world.
When we do have the opportunity to befriend a local, they don’t seem to question what it is that we are doing. They are surprised that we don’t have a home base, but we never have to hear their opinions about it. We definitely don’t feel judged like we do when we get here.
When we are back in Canada, we love seeing our friends and family, but we don’t belong here anymore. Neither of us truly feels as though Canada can be our home again. We don’t fit into the hustle culture here anymore. We know better. We know there are countless other places in the world where life doesn’t have to be so serious. Where people realize that there is more to making something of a life than working your fingers to the bone. Even in the most destitute places, they know that working yourself to death is not the answer.
The key to life is to enjoy it. What the hell is the point if we are miserable?
It was all just a series of choices
Changing anything in your life is simply a matter of choice. If you want change to happen, you need to decide how. Once you make one choice, another will follow it, and before you know it, your life is flipped upside down. Haha. No, it isn’t that quick.
Well, it can be that quick, depending on how you do it. We did it pretty quickly. In nine short months, after we made the fateful decision, we had completely upended our lives and were flying to Costa Rica.
In retrospect, I never felt like I was flipping my life upside down, but from this vantage point, I can certainly see that I was. But it does feel like I had to flip my life upside down, only to have it finally land right side up. You know what I mean?
Through making the choices that we made, and living this lifestyle for the past 7.5 years, we have learned more about ourselves than we ever thought possible. I can’t possibly put into words how grateful I am to have made the decisions that we did to get us to where we are today.
I know I can do this because I am privileged
I am privileged. Yes, I know. I am privileged to have grown up in Canada, to have had parents who gave me incredible experiences as a kid and young adult. I am privileged to have had a childhood where I could ride my bike through the forest, play in the crystal clear rivers, lakes and streams, and never fear for my safety (unless a bear was on the biking trail!)
But privilege alone doesn’t provide the deep urge that some people get to want to travel. Take one of my favorite Medium writers, TRAVEL STORIES BY GABE, for example. He grew up in the favelas of Brazil in a place where most have no hope in life. But he had a dream to travel, and he made it happen. Currently, he is living his best life in Ireland, and has traveled to over 30 countries. Check out his travel stories — you will be glad you did.
I don’t want to be a tourist
I don’t want to be a tourist. And trust me, I mean that with no negative connotation whatsoever. I’ve already been hate messaged on another article about somehow speaking badly about tourists. Tourists are vital to many countries' economies, and as long as they are respectful of the cultures they find themselves in, I’m not faulting tourists. But it’s just not me.
I don’t want to blast into countries, see all the sights and then blast out again. Most of our travels have had us staying long-term in locations for three and sometimes even more months. THIS is the kind of travel I want. THIS is the deep dive into places that we want to take. Although technically I am a tourist, I like to pretend that I am a local.
I like to move across borders by bus, not by plane. I like to see the shifting of the landscape passing by me out the windows while a steady driver carries me to my next destination. I like to listen to the conversations happening around me, usually in a language that I don’t understand. I want to marvel at the architecture, the villages, the people walking about. I want to understand their life and their way of living — as difficult as that is sometimes.
I want to shop in their Wednesday vegetable market, I want to haggle on the streets. I want to be regarded as one of them — just another human being on the planet who happens to be occupying the same space.
Choosing alignment over approval
The other day, I came across a quick post by
.Hot take: Reinventing yourself in Midlife might look reckless.
It’s actually your responsibility.
Staying stuck in a life that no longer fits just to keep up appearances?
Now that’s reckless. Choosing truth over comfort, alignment over approval—
that’s how you Unfuck your life.
Thanks so much, Ashley. You gave me the title for this article and I am very grateful for the inspiration to finally write all of this that has been on my mind.
So this is it. This is me telling all of the people who judge our lifestyle, who think they know better than we do about how to live our one life on this planet. I choose alignment over approval. I don’t need your approval. As long as my life is aligned with the things that I deem to be important, then that is all that counts.
I find it interesting that I have to declare it in this way, but maybe it’s the only way for me to come to peace with the difficulty of being constantly judged by the very people who are supposed to support and uplift us. Our fellow countrymen, our friends, and our families. We come home to find a place to belong, but we don’t belong here anymore, and I’m not sure if we ever will.
In these days of so much division, it is time for all of us to re-evaluate the things that are truly important in life. To focus in on ourselves and heal the wounds that have been caused by a much too busy world. It is time to do the things you love, to stop making excuses, to push your fear back and make bold choices.
And it is time for all of us to accept each other as we are.
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This was amazing Jill! It’s so cool to get to know more about what makes you tick. I appreciated every single word in this article. I love to see you still affirming to yourself that you’re on the right path and this is who you are.
And thanks for the huge inspiration. We’re now <6 weeks from leaving on our sailboat. It feels like there is too much to figure out, and it’s too overwhelming. I had a day at work today where everyone is like, “we’re going to miss you! You’re so good at your job!” And I’m nervous. But your article reminded me what else is out there and why we’re doing it.
Jill, thanks for linking me up to this article. You have reignited an old dream of mine to travel the US backroads with no agenda other than to experience whatever comes up. My wife and I have talked about it, but so far, it's all talk. At 80, it seems an extreme thing to do. But my wife is 15 years younger, and with a trailer and a truck, we could manage a few years on the road. Thanks for lighting a fire with your beautiful essay. Happy trails!