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-It would seem that while you can take the travelers off the road, you cannot to some extent take the 
+We underestimate our capabilities. Not in the grand sense. In the grand sense we probably overestimate our capabilities. But in the personal sense most of us have been trained to underestimate ourselves. We underestimate what we can do when we combine vision, will, and work. 
 
-We are camping in our house. It is a long term campsite to be sure. We don't have to worry about where we're going to go next for quite a while, but without meaning to do it, we noticed that we are essentially camping in our house. 
+The strange thing is we seem to admire other people who are able to do this, but never think that we ourselves can do the same.
 
-There is very little furniture, for the first two months the only places we had to sit were six chairs I bought for $30 at a local antique store. We're used to sitting on the ground, so we just sat on the ground. Even now that we've added two couches, we still sit on the floor more often than not it seems. 
 
-It's not that we can't get more furniture, we could. But once you learn to live with less, there is no need for more. I know that sounds kind of self-righteous perhaps, but it's not a conscious thing. We don't sit around thinking, oh, we get by on so little. That would silly. Getting by with less isn't worth building an identity around, but once you internalize it you will find life is much easier. 
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+I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible.
 
-There's a saying that used to be a way of life: use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. Every time you're about to buy something, consider that saying for a moment first.
+The other major task in midlife is to recognize the ciclical nature of, well, nature.
 
-Whatever the case,
 
 
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+"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to." 
 
 
 You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home.
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-We tossed around possibilities. We considered buying a house. We considered buying a boat. But then we stepped back and considered what it was we liked about traveling in the bus. There are many answers to this question, but some of the big ones are: nature, the lack of modern human noises, cars, planes -- I love it when my kids say the birds woke them -- and the self-reliance.
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-Just when we were considering packing it in, a pandemic shuts down the country. Just when were thinking of not packing it in, but carrying on for another year everyone and their mother decides to go camping. When everyone zigs, the only smart thing to do is zag.
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-The joy of living in the bus has less to do with the actual travel and more to do with escaping the trappings of the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world. We're still part of the world in plenty of ways, and propped up by it in many ways -- we wouldn't be able to travel this way without that world -- but out there in the woods we just felt better.
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-If you put these things in a spreadsheet, as I do, the things that jump out at you are that you don't actually need to travel to get all this stuff. So a confluence perhaps. At the time it's difficult to travel by land in the US, perhaps we don't need to?
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-One day a house came up for rent not too far from where we were. It was an old farmhouse sitting on a few acres, but more importantly it was surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. I called and talked to the landlord. We met. We talked. A few days later after he had told us we could rent it, he said he was sorry but his wife had rented it to someone else. 
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-We shrugged. These things happen so much when you travel you cease to worry about them for more than a couple hours. That confluence maybe wasn't meant to happen just now. Other confluences had me thinking.
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-It is very hard to do anything other than travel when you are traveling. To create things on the road is a challenge. The updates I post here is the most I have ever managed beyond notes scribbled in one of the many notebooks I lug around. 
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-If you want to write a book about traveling, you have to stop traveling. If you want to do anything that requires sustained effort over weeks, months, traveling just gets in the way. This is one of the reasons I think long term travelers leave behind very little in the way of written legacy. The flip side of this is that the writers we think of as writing about traveling often haven't traveled all that much.
 
-I always think of *On The Road*, of which the actual time on the road is vanishingly small. The *Air Conditioned Nightmare* is based on a single cross country trip lasting a couple of months. *Blue Highways* takes place over nine weeks. In *Travels with Charley* Steinbeck spends about 75 days on the road. *Wild America* spans barely a season. The only real exception I've found is *Kingbird Highway*, which does record a tremendous amount of travel sustained over many years. 
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-Do I want to write a book about our trip? Honestly, I am not sure. Possibly. But I have an unrelated book I very much want to write (and am). I have some other projects I'd like to tackle that would be tough to do while traveling.
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 Y'all are going to be very close.
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 I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens.
 
 I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations. 
@@ -94,15 +69,7 @@ Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad fee
 
 Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store.
 
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 A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations.
 
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 There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who old opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood.
 
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 How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling?