Costa Rican Diary,
May 24th, 2022
Getting from where we are to where we want to be, with less.
I’ve noticed that the closer you get to a dream the less dream-like it feels. It gets real, real fast.
I love hatching a dream and dreaming it out loud. That’s our favorite thing to do, my husband and I, we love to dream a dream. The tricky thing is that most of the time we then do the dream…so you gotta be careful what you dream around us cause we’ll just do it.
We’ve had some good dreams “let's do our own TV show about the military and travel around the world”, and some great dreams “let’s open a bed and breakfast in the country” that turned into bad dreams “let’s open a restaurant” that then turned into nightmares.
But no matter the bumps along the way, we dream. This next iteration, this dream in formation, consists of a move to Playa Del Coco, Costa Rica. I know, right?
Had we been there before we made the decision to move there? No. Have we lived in the tropics and loved it? No. Are we going there in 10 days to close on not one but two condos we bought? Yes.
The dream this time is to sort of retire but since we are only in our 50s I can’t think of it that way, so I consider it a writing sabbatical. Sounds perfect, right? I think it’s pretty damn close but don't expect it to be perfect, I expect different. High hopes, low expectations.
We made one trip to Coco, and in the course of a few days found a home, signed papers showing we wanted to spend most of our hard-earned cash on it and went back to Texas.
We had seven weeks when we returned to organize our lives (me laughing hysterically to myself as if that’s going to happen) and whittle the things we need to down to what we could stuff in two large suitcases, two carry-on bags, and two duffle bags. Everything else we can’t live without is going into a 5x10 climate-controlled storage unit. The rest is being sold through Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and a huge garage sale which happens in…oh crap, 4 days.
Am I ready? Meh? Sort of, yeah, I mean I’ve done a lot. Not just in the past 7 weeks but going back about 12 years.
We used to live outside of Dallas in a 4000 square foot house with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, a home theater, and a home gym. Kids grew up, left for college, and we moved out of that to a 2700 square foot house, no home theater but still room for the gym. Then to a 1500-square-foot house in the country, no home gym but 70 acres to run around on, mostly running from wild boar and venomous snakes. From that to a 1400-square foot house in the burbs outside of Austin.
Technically speaking I’ve been reducing our stuff for over a decade. Which is funny because you’d think after all of those moves, which consisted of truck beds of stuff going to Goodwill, I’d be down to just the vital stuff.
Nope. We brought home a huge load of boxes from a storage unit we were clearing out and I found tons of camping gear; sleeping bags, fire starter kits, a coffee kettle, and lanterns. Great stuff, if I camped, which I don’t. I’m sure it’s stuff our kids used, I’m unsure how I ended up with it. I found a box full of stuffed animals from my childhood, they didn't do so well in storage, survival food that rats ate, and all of my TKD belts, uniforms, gloves.
So here we are, days away from clearing this house out. I’m overwhelmed and what’s getting me through are donuts. Garage sales are a pain in the ass so we have a long standing rule that we get donuts on the morning of a garage sale. As many as we want! With thoughts of crullers, Boston Cremes, and Apple Fritters rolling through my mind it’s time to tackle the remaining piles of stuff.
The closets are empty, except for the clothes we wear, the attic is empty, and everything we want to get rid of is stacked on either side of the garage waiting for little stickers, $2 here, $1 there, $5 on another.
I no longer want stuff. Knicknacks, decorative plants, fancy pots, cool metal cups that look like they are from the middle east and serve no purpose but to collect dust. We’ve worked to buy things that we have to clean and care for and pay to move time after time only to pile them into stacks to sell to someone else for pennies on the dollar.
Our place in Costa Rica is 750 square feet. A two bedroom, two bath condo on the second floor of a two story building with practically no storage. No room to collect stuff.
I want the freedom of a little. I want a little to be enough. Free from the tyranny of stuff I will have time to be. This is a lesson long in the learning but I’m glad I'm almost there.
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