Gaining a sense of perspective

A combination of things this week got me to thinking a little bit about perspective and perception. How you see things is influenced by how you look at things. Here we’ll talk about how we see things. The first type of perspective came to me while writing an overview blog post of our time in Panama City. It occurred to me that when we share about what we’ve seen and where we’ve gone, not everyone knows where these places are at. 😂 The attached image highlights the location of the attractions we visited while we were in Panama City.

The ‘central’ pin – Studio Coliving – is the hotel where we stayed. For additional perspective, from Panama Viejo to the Bio Museo is about 7 miles straight line distance. The circled areas each have a corresponding blog post on our website and a video on our YouTube channel. We are trying to accommodate the fact that not everyone wants to read a blog post and not everyone wants to watch a video. Feel free to pick and choose. Feel free to comment and ask questions.

The more important perspective came as feedback from one of our followers. We are very fortunate to be able to be on this adventure. We truly hope to inspire other people to travel even if they can’t go full-time. The world is amazing and so much more than your hometown, home state or home country even.

Our nomadic retirement was a year in the planning so this initial stage includes a bit more “It’s about time we got on the road” and maybe a bit less “This is so frickin’ cool” than what is really fair. In related news, I am a very technical/analytic type of thinker so I do have a tendency to present things in a ‘series of facts’ kind of way.

I was reminded by one of our followers that what we are doing is a dream for some. Just like it was a dream for us before we started. And I was reminded also that there are those can’t even fathom the concept of selling off all their possessions and no longer having a place labeled ‘Home’.

I will try, based on that feedback, to add a little more of how we feel about these explorations and whether we had any kind of emotional reaction or deeper sense of connection.

We never want to post about what we’re doing in a boastful manner or to make anyone jealous of our lifestyle – we want to inspire you to come out and explore the world if that’s your dream or live vicariously through our blog and videos if you’re just not into the whole ‘travel the world’ scene.

That is part of the reason our ‘activity’ videos are edited the way they are. On the one hand, we want someone who is never going to visit that place to feel like they’ve seen it. On the other hand we want people who may visit to still feel a sense of discovery when they do. They aren’t the most professional looking videos available because the point of the visit is the visit, NOT the videography. You’ll get awkward cuts and crowd noise and my finger over the lens because the recording is an add-on. Same with photos; we aren’t trying to build an Instagram following, we’re living our life and sharing parts of it with kindred spirits.

We are going to do some amazing things. We will have some once in a lifetime experiences. We’re going to never go and see some highly rated touristy things because they don’t appeal to us – “Oh, you have to go to see <statue/fountain/artwork> while you’re there” No, that doesn’t sound even a little bit interesting. We’re going to do some things that are fascinating for us that will leave some portion of audience asking “Why do you think that’s interesting?”. Visiting the second largest shopping mall in the western hemisphere, for example.

We will spend a fair amount of our days ‘sitting around reading, writing, doing puzzles and playing games’. This isn’t our vacation, this is our nomadic lifestyle. We love to go out and adventure but we have to balance that with a finite budget.

Sometimes our meals are going to be in a fancy restaurant or from a random street cart……..

Sometimes we’re gonna be heating up grocery store empanadas and eating on the couch while we binge watch “Kim’s Convenience”……..

What YOU see, what we share on the blog and on social media, is a fraction of what we are doing. The biggest portion is actually boring as hell because it’s just a retired couple going about their day-to-day life. We’ll try to share some of that as an occasional reminder because we really want to be transparent and authentic as we tell our story. I just looked at our daily expense log for December and 11 out of 18 days we didn’t leave the condo.

For anyone who may be thinking “Wow, I’d love to be able to do that but I’m concerned by all the unknowns” keep in mind; yea, that’s us too. However, we aren’t the first people to go nomadic as a retirement lifestyle. Very little of what we are doing is pioneering. We belong to several online support groups for people doing similar things. We learn from others about ways to save money, gain different perspectives on various locations, how to accomplish the practical things like buying bus and train tickets where you don’t speak the language. We’ll add to that knowledge base through our experience and we’ll share with you, our readers, what we experience whether it’s good or bad.

If what we’re doing is appealing to you and you’d like to connect with some of those resources just let us know and we will share the connections.

So, thank you for following along with us and feel free to reach out with any questions or comments. We’ll gladly share what we learn and we’re happy to learn what we don’t yet know.