Tag Archives: Retiring

Keeping the Dream Alive

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This is the time of year when long-term dreams have a way of sliding helplessly into the black hole of winter rain and darkness, and holiday plans. Some days it’s comparable to driving on black ice: you think you’re tooling along just fine when suddenly you realize the car is sliding backwards. Or maybe a better comparison would be the sudden accidental jibe at night in 30 knots and 10 foot seas in the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, your heading suddenly 180 degrees off.  Been there, done that.  So I approach the coming winter with fear and loathing, knowing it looms just beyond the horizon and wanting to stay the course.

This knowledge really lights a fire under my hiney to get out here and take advantage of every bit of sunshine that is left in this year. It feels, somehow, just wrong for anyone to have to be working inside when there is so little sunshine to enjoy. So I spend as much time as I can on the boat. In fact, I’m sitting on the boat right now as I write this. Of course, it’s at the dock, but I’m still there.  Heck, if I lived here, I’d be home by now. Sitting in the cockpit with a blanket on my lap, computer keeping me warm, my mind tends to wander a bit, probably in response to the cold. I think about what it would be like if we actually DID live on the boat. Is this what happens when people begin to have hypothermia?

It’s pretty hard to type wearing fingerless gloves and shivering to this degree, but no one is going to call me a quitter. Moonrise is a great boat, I tell you. A perfectly great boat! Especially in the summer when the sun is shining. As soon as we get to Mexico, I’m going to love being on Moonrise in the winter. Of course, in order to GET to Mexico, we have to have a bit of money in storage. You might know we have a child in college. We love our boy desperately and we want him to be in college. So we’re thinking we could save money by renting out our house and living on our boat, thereby cutting our monthly expenses down considerably. It’s a good plan if we ever get to that point.

But could I actually live on Moonrise during the 10 months of the year (more, lately) when the weather is disgusting? Moonrise is a great boat for coastal cruising, but she offers a number of drawbacks for year-round living.  Let’s start with the salon with its one settee. This is the land equivalent of having one loveseat available for lounging. I know there are billions of people who live with less than this, but I am in the U.S. of A. here.  If the table is folded down, the person behind the table will not be able to get up without disturbing the person at the end of the table. Am I making myself clear here?

Another issue is the V berth, our ‘owner’s cabin’. It is very comfortable once you get settled, but I’m a woman of ‘a certain age’ and rarely do I sleep through the night without getting up at least once, usually more than once. Getting in and out of this berth is challenging, believe me. You don’t want the details. There is crawling involved, and pivoting on my back while trying not to kick my husband’s delicate parts. Enough said about this.

Then there is the issue of the ‘head’, which is boat talk for ‘the bathroom’.  Again, I’ll be brief, sparing the gentle reader details that may lead to abandoning the reading of this post. Suffice to say that boaters of all kinds can have lengthy and animated conversations about the problems with the head in their boats. There is no ‘stealth’ bathroom useage on a boat of this size.  It’s noisy, smelly, and on some level you just have to accept the fact that you are sleeping next to a container of raw sewage. That doesn’t keep me up at night when we’re cruising, but I’m not sure living with it for several months would be okay with me. Never mind how guests would feel.

In many boats, there is a shower in the head, but there is not one in ours. We also don’t have hot water on the boat. These little modern day luxuries start to feel more like necessities when I think of long-term living. (Again, I refer the reader to the fact that I’m an American.) I really do not mind heating up water and pouring it over my body during our cruising trips. Many is the time my husband and son have openly laughed at me because I insist on clean hair when cruising. (How can I enjoy that carefree, windblown-hair look when my hair is plastered to my head by dirt and grease?) But I admit that the idea of having a hot shower on the boat creates a lot of opportunity for fantasizing. Darker fantasies revolve around how I’ll possibly look presentable for work.

Then there is the galley. On Moonrise we are fortunate that we have actual refrigeration. But let’s be clear: As much as I do enjoy cooking meals on the boat on my tiny little Easy-bake-style oven, I really get tired of having to take everything out of the top-loading fridge just to find the mustard. And let’s not even get into how tired I get of having the only available workspace double as the lid of said fridge. Think about it. I’m chopping vegetables for a stir fry and suddenly remember I left the garlic in the fridge. I have to move  the vegetables, cutting board, etc, then clean out the fridge so I can find the garlic nestled among drinks at the bottom, which I have to stand on tiptoe to reach. At this point the cabin is a complete mess.  You never see scenes like this in a boating brochure. And I have a sneaking suspicion that there would be fewer top-loading fridges on older boats if the boat designers of the 1970’s had been women. It would be manageable if it happened only once a meal, but as I mentioned before, I’m a woman of a ‘certain age’. Read ‘short term memory’ issues. Are you getting it now?

The little propane oven is really cute and we’ve learned how to bake in it, too! We’ve learned that one ignores the temperature control knob since the only setting one has is ‘high’. That’s right next to ‘incinerate’ unless one knows to prop the door open. Prop it open about an inch for 500F, and about 6 inches for 350F.  Baking gluten-free is always an adventure anyhow, so it’s hard to know if the outcome is due to the uneven baking temperature. I can roast a mean vegetable in that oven, though. Hey, I love a nice charred green bean!

I was going to talk about storage, but I fear the reader will be overwhelmed if I get into that.

I don’t want to sound like a complainer. Regardless of all of its shortcomings,  I sit on Moonrise enjoying the last bit of sunshine of the year, enjoying just being in the marina with all the boats, keeping the dream alive somehow just by being here. I know there will be plenty of rainy and dark days to come when I can be working inside the house. And while I’m here appreciating a boat that I love in spite of her shortcomings, I think about how much I enjoy the fact that just being on this boat feels like a vacation. And then whether that ‘vacation feeling’ would last if I lived on this particular boat for months at a time. And if it wouldn’t, then what do I need in a boat in order to make that feeling last? What kind of boat would suffice? Do you see how my mind works?

And as it begins to get dark and even colder, I pack up and head home to my house with a beautiful bathroom tiled in stone, a steamy hot shower, a comfortable king size bed that I can get out of easily, a toilet that takes sewage to parts unknown,  a full kitchen, and many choices of seating.  And I am filled with gratitude that in my life I have this choice.

The owner's cabin I want but will never have.

In Praise of Quitting: Coming to terms with Sunk Costs

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Sunk Costs: Something to avoid in a sailboat

Sunk Costs: Something to avoid in a sailboat

On the way into work this morning I listened to a great Freakanomics Podcast on the economics of quitting. The Upside of Quitting is a great listen if you are new to the Freakanomics team of Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt.  They apply economics theory to a wide range of topics from hitchhiking to child rearing and make the application of The Dismal Science a compelling listen. Their book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, is an entertaining primer on practical economics.

So how does being a quitter and economic theory have anything to do with our plans, cunning or otherwise? Well, at some level, Melissa and I are trying to figure out how to quit doing what we do and living how we live. How does one quit living in a traditional house, going to a traditional job, and living a traditional American life? There are costs, financial, social and emotional, associated with such decisions and I am still struggling with how this is going to look on the other side.

In the podcast Dubner enlarges on the economic idea of Sunk Costs. Sunk costs are expenses that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. As we look around our home, I cannot help but consider what may well be considerable sunk costs for living as we have. The garage fills with more and more items that are destined to be sold at fractions of their original value or donated outright and it is liberating and crazy-making at the same time.

The trap of mourning sunk costs comes when we expend time or effort  to recover some of its value beyond an item’s worth. Anyone that has invested in a losing stock and held on to it as  a company spiraled into bankruptcy is familiar with the idea of the sunk cost fallacy. A purely rational evaluation of a the stock’s value and prospects should provide sufficient warning that the stock should be sold. But humans are seldom rational, and the sunk cost fallacy hinges on our optimistic valuation of the money or time we have already spent.

And so I look at furniture and other household goods being staged out in the garage and optimistically over-value its resale hoping to recover far more than I actually will. Likewise,  I continue with my current job at least in part because I have already put so much time in with this company and would hate to loose all that time and effort. These aren’t perfect examples of sunk costs but they serve to highlight our conflict.

Melissa has written about our furniture collection and the emotional process of letting go of items that she has worked so hard to restore. We both have put most of our adult lives into creating a space for ourselves and our children to grow and feel comfortable. Letting go of these sunk costs is not easy. Hard hearted economists like Steve Levitt might be able to jettison old furniture, but I hope Dr. Levitt will forgive us for lingering a bit over the loss even as we look forward to the the new possibilities our future life affords.

Imagine the Life You Want to Live

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Preparing to Purge: The staging area.

As a psychotherapist I spend a lot of time asking my clients to imagine what their lives would be like if they made the changes they want to make. I ask them to imagine themselves living this new and improved version of the life they have.  I’ve spent much time myself imagining the kind of life I would like to live in the future; where I would go, what kind of boat it would be on, what it will be like swimming in warm water and living where the sun shines. Being warm.

None of this prepared me for reading the question in Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, the book I’ve chosen as my guide for the Great Purging.  He asks people to imagine their ‘ideal lives’. When I imagine my ideal life, the dreams always seem to include leaving my home and going somewhere else. And that probably tells you something about me. But that’s not what Peter is after. Peter wants people to imagine the ideal way of LIVING in their Current Home! WHAT THE F..?  I never once considered that question in terms of HOW I am living in the home I currently own. It was a jaw-dropping moment  when that hit me, I assure you. I had to have a long bath in order to recuperate.

No one has ever accused me of being organized. Creative, yes. Free-thinking, yes. Attention deficit disordered, yes. Organized? Definitely not. It isn’t that I don’t try. I have invented more systems for getting our stuff organized than I can count. But they never seem to last. And now, thanks to brilliant Peter, I know why.  It’s because I’ve always been focused on “the stuff”, as he says. This man, in one simple paradigm-shifting part of his book, (the Introduction, for those of you who are reading along) completely changed the way I think about clearing out all the stuff that clutters up our lives.

He wants me to imagine things like being able to find my keys, having decent work flow in the kitchen, and being able to sit down to a meal at a table without clearing it off first. He wants me to imagine flat surfaces that exist for their own sakes, a closet where clothes can breathe and I can find things I like and that fit me. He wants me to imagine living in my house free of the stress that comes from having to constantly negotiate the amount of clutter just laying around all the time, with no real place of belonging. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about and wanted those things. It’s just that I have not actually imagined what it would feel like, or how it would ‘look’ if life flowed that way at my house.

Peter wants me to imagine what it would be like if I had been able to move into this house with intention, being thoughtful about where things go and how things are done and then keeping those systems in place. This is the opposite of our move-in experience.

Eleven years ago we moved into this house on a holiday weekend. The house was a ‘fixer’. The only updates it had were done by the previous home-owner who apparently had no idea what the term ‘square corner’ meant. And it was filthy. I mean it. When my kids took showers the walls in the bathroom leaked nicotine from all the years of the previous owners’ smoking. It was just disgusting. It looked like the bathroom was haunted. Every wall in the house needed to be sanded, sealed, and repainted, including ceilings. We had to demolish the family room (one of those home-owner specials) and have it rebuilt. We had the master bathroom enlarged and the kitchen updated.  I’m pretty sure our kids hated us for at least the first 6 months as we all slept together on the floor of what would be the family room. It was the only room I could get reasonably clean.

During the remodeling years, (yes, plural) our things got shifted from one room to another. We lived in the house one way, and then lived in it another way, until the remodeling was finished. By that time we had collected more stuff and still had no system for living in the house. Kids grew up, went to college, came home, left again. These are the times when systems should be able to flex and change to accommodate new patterns of living. But if you don’t have anything solid to begin with, it’s pretty hard to get it to be flexible without the whole system falling apart. My attempts at organization were futile. Now I see that part of the problem is that I was always focused on “the stuff” and where to put it in the tiny closets. According to Peter, this will not cut the mustard.

According to Peter, if you focus on the kind of life you want to lead, getting rid of the stuff in your way makes more sense. So, accordingly, my wedding dress is now hanging in the garage with loads of other ‘stuff’ that is in the way of my living the life I imagine. The dress is in good company with stuff like the old sealskin coat from the 1930’s that I bought for 15$ when I was in highschool, two sets of china that are lovely but that I’ve used maybe twice in 10 years, and funky American pottery planters from the 1940’s that I used to collect and that now collect dust.
But what about the cool old Villeroy and Bosch majolica plate with a gnome on it? I love that thing and it’s so… me! I know it’s not on display right now, Peter, but surely you have a heart? In fact, he does. The gnome collection stays, in part. Only the ones dearest to me. And they will be packed away in the tiny house in the attic.Since we’ve now begun this Great Purging as the first step in our cunning little plan, I now understand that I must strike a balance between the vision I hold for living in our current home, and the one I hold for our future life on the boat, and into our next land based home, wherever that may be. As I go through cupboards, closets, and drawers, holding these visions before me, I ask about each one: Does this help me live the life I want to live in my home now?  Does this item belong in the life I will live in the future? If the answer to both of those questions is no, out it goes. Peter would be so proud.

He's living the life he wants to live.