How to change a life

It is my second or third night together with the Earhart group in Croatia. Somehow, I find myself on a beach at a very late hour — past midnight, I’m pretty sure — somewhat drunk and about to jump into the water with a girl.
This is not an ordinary state of affairs for me. I’m sure the Croatian beach we were on sees this and much more every single night. But I haven’t gone drunk swimming in the ocean in … well, ever, that I recall.
It’s exciting. I don’t know what to do or how to proceed. I have a vague idea that I should grab her hand as we run and jump into the water. So I do.
She doesn’t seem to mind.
How long does it take for a room to become a home? Longer than a month; but maybe as short as a single night’s deep sleep.
I need my sleep, friends. That’s one thing that has become abundantly clear on this trip, if I didn’t know it already. (I knew it already.)
There are just so many amazing parties and things happening at all hours of the night every night. Crowded karaoke bars. Boozy chocolate dessert bars. Eclectically decorated bars constructed in the ruins of communist-era buildings.
Enough about the bars, amirite?
I’m on my second week of life in Budapest now. It’s hard to resist the temptation of simply walking the streets and taking in the sights. I want to come to know this city better, inside and outside, above ground and below.
I also would really rather not wake up in the morning feeling tired.
I spent the first couple of nights in this new location fighting with the monstrous fluffy excuses for pillows on my bed before deciding to bite the bullet. I hopped a train to Ikea and purchased myself a down-to-earth firm pillow and a bright orange pillowcase to complement it. This is the closest I can get to the pillow I left at home, I guess. I’ll have to break it in and lug it with me from country to country now — but I hope that I’ll get familiar and comfortable enough with it to be able to sleep better. That’d be worth the effort.
There’s an idea I’m trying to come to grips with and develop the mental and emotional tools for.
It’s the idea that life doesn’t let up — that you never reach a point at which you’re done. If you reach that point, at which you’re no longer striving, no longer taking any sort of risk, no longer putting yourself out there, so to speak, you’re dead.
It’s absolutely possible to reach this point of death while still being alive, medically speaking, but you’re just unmotivated, just coasting. If you’re not consciously asking yourself, “What am I fighting for today?”, in some fashion, you need to be. You need to have something that gets you up in the morning and that you’re hungry for, that you’re willing to take risks for.
The thing you’re fighting for needs to be concrete.
You may or may not attain it. But it’s worth fighting for.
What this means for me, concretely, is that I’ve come unimaginably far over the past two years. Two years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of being on a trip around the world today. I wouldn’t have had the guts to stretch my resources and take the leaps of faith I’ve taken to commit to this adventure. It means that I’ve made choices to leave things and people I love behind, put relationships on hold as much as relationships can be, and forced myself to stretch and adapt to entirely new living situations on a monthly basis.
It means that I’ve left behind my old familiar comfortable pillow, maybe for good.
It also means I’ve committed myself to asking both “What now?” and “What next?” Not only, what am I wanting to accomplish with my time now, during my Remote Year trip, but also what will be my game plan going forward after the trip? It means coming up with a list of options —
- Go back to my home and job in Colorado as they were before,
- Transition fully to the life of a digital nomad (and potentially have to find a new job),
- Join a startup as a full-stack engineer,
- Seek out freelance opportunities and segue into a new type of creative or problem-solving skillset
— and then making a determination to pursue the best option, whatever risks may be involved. Because it’s not acceptable to coast back to the default option. If I go back to my old home, it’ll be because I love it there and believe I’m equipped and able to do good work there. If I carry on with the same job, it’ll be because I have a vision and a plan to work towards and believe I can share that with my coworkers and my company.
Remote Year provides a convenient timeframe in which to reframe a life.
I spent most of the morning underground with a group of strange people.
We’re the members of the Earhart group who signed up for the spelunking expedition — cave crawling — “Budapest Underground” as our tracks coordinator Zsofi named it. We’re the ones who decided that it would be a fantastic idea to watch the horror movie “The Descent” the night before, which is about 4 women who go caving in the Appalachians and encounter cave-ins, compound fractures, hidden psycho killer personalities, Gollum-esque zombie troll frog people, and more cheap scares and gore than you can shake a stick at.
It was great psychological preparation for how to die horribly in a cave. Thankfully there was not a lot of horror during our actual expedition.
We spent a lot of time in what our guide Latsi called the “Superman” position, which is the pose you get into to get you through anywhere that looks like it’s far too small. Right arm up, lying on the right side of your body, using your left foot and left arm to propel you through a tiny hole in the rock.
Who was the first person to explore these passages with no expectation of where they led or if they were safe?
Even in a group, which thankfully didn’t include any major claustrophobes, the experience was slightly nerve-wracking. Our guide would go squirreling away face first down random holes in the rock and yell back a few helpful postures at us, and we would follow much more slowly and carefully.
We strange people spent the morning in the #growthzone — that magical place that is outside of the comfort zone by choice, where you get to know each other a lot better as a group. We figured out who gets loud when they’re nervous and who gets quiet. We figured out just how many inappropriate jokes being in a tight hold lends itself to.
We figured out who passes gas more often in enclosed spaces.
We reached a large cave called the “Theatre.” It has rock formations that look like an arch, with curtains, and a stage door, and a ticket window. We all sat in the “house” and turned off our headlamps as we waited for our guide to introduce us to the “ghost” of the theatre.
It’s dark. We listen to the silence of the vast underground and peer anxiously around at the pitch blackness. This is a situation we haven’t been in before. We don’t know exactly how to proceed with each other.
All we can do is grab the others’ hands, and press forward into the dark.
I think we’ll be fine.