We return here to our many-part series of questions about whether you are ready to become a meandering minimalist. If the answer is no, or not yet, we offered some options. Part 1 asked if you actually like travel. Part 2 encouraged you to think through your obligations. Then, Part 3 talked about your potential travel companions. Part 4 talked about your health and health insurance options, and Part 5 talked about having less stuff, theoretically and practically. Welcome to Part 6, which thinks about the portability of what you do for fun!
Hobby? What’s a Hobby?
If you are like us, you may not have well-articulated hobbies: we used to work all the time, telling people that we ‘loved what we do’. That was true, actually, but in retirement we’ve discovered that there is a whole world of other fun stuff out there. Some of it fits beautifully into a meandering lifestyle; some is manageable; some requires too much stuff. Any long-term travel plans will have to take this into account. And also – especially if you are a workaholic – it’s smart to prepare for the extra time you will have in retirement.
Let’s take the first category, because it’s easy. Here’s an example of a portable fun thing. We love food!: in restaurants, cooking our own food, spending time in grocery stores, trying new recipes and variants, finding new things to eat. All of this is super-easy to do on the road – in fact, better. And it provides an immediate way to connect to a new culture. For you this kind of fun might be sailing, or architecture, or train travel, or sketching, or live music. Or cat portrait photography (who knew?)! You are looking for at least one thing you love doing that they already have where you are going (which, for us, is everywhere!). Hint: this will probably be what you already do when you travel. In this category, we have food, learning languages, and the fact that we love walking for hours, especially in cities.
Semi-Portable Fun Stuff: You Can Take It With You!
There is also the category of fun that requires accoutrements. Say (for us), books. Books are made of paper, or at least they used to be. And paper is heavy. We’ve begrudgingly adapted to reading electronically, a sacrifice we were willing to make in order to take the trip of a lifetime. So portable! (Books even come on your phone, though that’s not our jam.) We sometimes buy paper books, knowing we’ll leave them behind. Or exercise: we used to go to the gym and heave weights around, but now we’ve got a group of other (semi-fun) things that require minimal equipment. There might be a portable version, e.g. an electronic sketchpad or piano keyboard. John has been thinking about taking up calligraphy, which requires paper and pens, but finished efforts can always be mailed somewhere. And Laurel has a prescription snorkel mask; the rest is easily obtainable at dive sites.
Non-Portable Fun Stuff
Unfortunately, some of the most fun things do not readily pack into a suitcase. For instance, building rockets, volunteering in the community, playing the tuba, growing vegetables, or collecting things. (You can probably get away with stamps.) Still, if these things are meaningful to you, there may be ways to incorporate them on the road. Or you might simply take a break. When Laurel did martial arts, she took a year off during a sabbatical, and discovered yoga.
Whether you plan to meander or not, we encourage you to think seriously about how you enjoy spending your time: everything we’ve read about the future of work suggests that most people will have increasing amounts of free time. So why not think about fun sooner rather than later?
