Room to Breathe
I don’t believe every day is a new adventure, and I don’t believe every moment is bliss. Most of life is getting through it: waiting, and damage control.
Take the vacation we just got back from. It was bliss in a lot of ways, and it covered two weeks of the fifty-two. Add a few long weekends and a week in Spokane, and you’ve still got a year that’s mostly Tuesdays. Even the vacation wasn’t wall-to-wall rapture. Most of it was settled before we left: whom we’d visit, where we’d sleep, how we’d get from A to B, which sights deserved our admiration. Bliss with a spreadsheet is still bliss, but it’s a nervous sort.
The best moments were the ones we hadn’t written down.
On Achill Island, I asked the man at a little coffee truck whether Keem Bay was worth the drive. He assured me it was. It was. The best part of the day was something we’d never planned, recommended by a stranger who was busy making a latte.
After Strandhill, we stumbled into Sligo. It’s the biggest town around, a small city really, and we’d researched it exactly zero. Our open day took us out to Mullaghmore, which came from a morning walk and the sudden conviction that the options on the table simply weren’t it.
In Estonia, it was the impromptu plunges, the friends we lingered with longer than planned, the last-minute guests, and a final day we left open on purpose for the spa, a wander, and pankoogid.
So here’s my takeaway. It isn’t that adventure should be the theme, though I’ll keep it near the top of the list. It’s that adventure needs room, and room is another word for optionality.
I’ve come to think a life works the same way. I bounce between wanting to retire early, chasing certain dollar targets, and wondering where I should be by now and which opportunities to leap at. Then I look around and conclude I’m on my path. I get to write and train in the early mornings. My job is steering me somewhere hazy and uncertain, and I love it, because no two weeks look alike. We rent, which isn’t perfect, but the location is great, the buildings are kept up, the neighbors are friendly, parks are a walk away, and there’s room for us, our daughter, and the next one on the way.
Could we want more? Of course. My wife and I both have days when we’d like our own place, with rooms we could paint badly and call our own. But we’re on our path.
Our first goal is to pay off my wife’s student loans before taking on a bigger risk. Neither of us wants to be house poor, for the same reason I don’t schedule every hour of a vacation: we want breathing room. Room to make the right call, adapt, and lead interesting lives, without feeling locked in.
We aren’t trying to time the market. The timing just isn’t right yet. In a year or two, with the loans gone, we should be ready. We’d love to stay in Monmouth County: between New York and Philly, ten minutes from the beach, with farm country, green space, and a pace of life we like. But the area charges a steep premium and has stopped being friendly to young families. Rich people keep second homes here, boomers hold on to theirs, new builds go for $800k, and crumbling fixer-uppers fetch $450k and up. Netflix is coming. A ferry to New York may follow. Prices might climb, or they might settle, and with interest rates where they are, nobody can say. So we’re open to moving somewhere that makes sense for our family. Pennsylvania tops the list, especially the Lehigh Valley, which looks kind to young families. That’s where our heads are today. We shall see.
What I’m getting at is that you have to keep your options open, in adventure and in life. Commitment keeps you disciplined and determined. But with the big decisions, the large financial moves, and the putting down of roots, you owe yourself a look at the other doors. Whether you’re designing a vacation or a life, leave room to breathe. Some of the best-planned things are the unplanned.
That doesn’t make a boring life interesting. It turns the whole thing upside down. It hands you a perspective you’d never have picked up on your own.
So ask yourself: What aren’t you considering? What are you not seeing? What have you ruled out without ever really looking at it? Maybe you aren’t so locked in after all.