No-mads

Think. Who´s the mad one? The no-mad riding around the world or us, with our arses on a chair, watching life go by?

A few days ago my mind clicked and I stopped being afraid. In 84 days we´ll start our world tour, so this is good news. I´m now ready to undergo this transformation, shed this skin, become a nomad.

What did the trick? Well, believe it or not, what helped a lot was writing a letter to myself when I´m 80 —a suggestion I saw in this slightly dull talk by Daniel Goldstein in Ted. Visualizing myself at an old age, seeing me in good health and shape, having a cold beer by the beach in my sunny Canary Islands, suddenly gave me the certainty I needed that I will be able to start this trip and even survive it.  If you´re ever scared, write to yourself, distancing from your present you by imagining you´re in a different position in the timeline, either older and wiser or younger and worriless. You´ll often find you don´t need anybody else to find the solution —just you, yourself and a bit of perspective.

I´m fitting the last pieces in the puzzle, as I learned last Thursday that I won´t be a civil servant in the EU after all. As you could read in a previous post, I didn´t expect much of my performance, so there there (pat on the back) —nothing new under the sky. I´m glad to finally turn this page so I won´t need to be worried about prospective job interviews while I´m pedalling away from home.

Another important help to overcome my fears has been the inspiration I found in the words of a true nomad, Álvaro Neil, the biciclown, this amazing guy who left his job at a notary public´s office over 13 years ago to become a clown, and has been riding his bike around the world ever since. The parallels are stunning, because I also left my well-paid and prestigious job as a lawyer 10 years ago when I realised it was sucking the life out of me.

I thought again of him today while I was reading a Yiddish expression in the book What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell:

‘To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish’.

Well, Álvaro is one of the few people that can truly say that ‘the world is the world’ for him, while the rest of us is still somehow living in a horseradish.

Álvaro, I doubt you´ll read this, but I´m writing to you again soon to suggest new topics for your talks. I hope I´ll be able to convince you to prepare a talk for the EU!