We’ve written before about the need to be flexible when you travel, most extensively in a post about routines. And many of you have written to us to say you couldn’t travel like we do, with no stuff and no end-date. We seem brave, or perhaps just odd. That got us thinking. We hadn’t realized we had a philosophy of travel, an ideé fixe that makes it all possible. But we do, and here it is: be easy. “Being easy” means being kind to each other and others. It involves making the conscious choice to react positively instead of negatively when the unexpected happens. You might think of this as practicing patience.
We’re not normally difficult, or so we like to think. But, still, we do want things to be a certain way, and we can get cranky when they aren’t: sometimes the neighbours are loud, or we buy the wrong milk (again). Or the taxi driver over charged us, or we’re hungry, or we didn’t know the museum closes on Mondays. Often we can’t communicate what we want, which is always frustrating. We often find that focusing on what’s wrong prevents us from noticing what’s right.
Travelling long-term has helped us realize that we aren’t able to fix most of the things that bother us. And it is a great truth of life that if you can’t change the outside, you either have to change the inside, or live with the frustration. So we try to be easy, instead of being difficult. It just makes things, well, easier. There are things that do matter: one of our flats had a bed that collapsed on us! But many of them don’t. So we remind ourselves of that, on a regular basis.
A few things have helped us to get over our concern with all of those unimportant details. The first is to reflect upon the great Heraclitean truth that everything is in flux. (Especially us.) We’ll be moving on in a month or two, so chances are high that we can live with it, whatever it is, in the short-term. It’s just one meal, or one taxi ride, or one rainy day.
The second thing that helps is that, like it or not, we represent all Americans. We are always aware of this, and work very hard to respect the local culture, and to try not to be disagreeable, lest we make it harder for those who come after. (See this post on stereotypes.) Often that means accepting a slower pace of life: long lunch breaks, slow service, late appointments. To our surprise, none of these will kill you.
And the final aid is to remind ourselves that we’ve chosen this, and that on balance, we love it. For every minute of slight discomfort or annoyance, we have ten minutes of pure joy, and another forty-nine of quiet contentment.
But really, it comes down to knowing yourself: once you know what you are easy about and what you can’t put up with, you can focus your energies on the (few, we hope) areas that really matter.
