I was a thirty-six year-old adventure cyclist facing one of my biggest fears. "The Big M." A Mortgage ... as in thirty-year!
It was always my belief that if I so much as put my toe into the Olympic-sized pool of debt that comes with home ownership, my traveling days would be over. A mortgage was a burden that would weigh down my lifestyle - the equivalent of trying to cycle up a mountain pass with my panniers loaded with bowling balls.
...
In our consumer culture, time is undervalued. From the moment we are old enough to watch cartoons on TV, we are bombarded with ads to sell us things. In the good old U.S.A. it seems that you can never have enough stuff, but you can have "too much time on your hands."
For me, time is one of the essential elements of adventure. Would we have learned about Columbus' voyage in school if it had only taken him four days to sail to the New World? Would authors still be penning books about Lewis and Clark if their expedition had spanned a weekend? I think not.
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I had always thought the only way I could maintain my adventure lifestyle was by remaining ... If I entered the mainstream it would be all over.
So years later, finding myself married and sitting in a real estate agent's office, there was every reason to believe I would soon be a homebody. ... (Weir, Willie. Travels with Willie. Seattle: pineleaf productions, 2009).
Willie and Kat (his wife) do solve their dilemma, and I'll let you read about it to find out how. The book seems to offer some good advise for some of us sailors to think about, too.
Having said that, how do we manage to find "Time" to do the things that are important to us? Or what does not having time say about what our actual priorities really are? There can be a difference between spoken and acted priorities. Lent gives us a time to put them in alignment - or at least, to realize where acted/practiced might be binding us from our spoken/dreamed of values/priorities.
Blessed Be,
Joel
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