It seems our Western culture focuses on the opposite: what you don't have, but still want, and then pressures us to scrape more money together to by more excesses.

I find myself today in a limbo that has become routine: in the temporal space between places. A month in New York has risen in its waves of various spectacles and now wanes to a final day of packing and picking up a few first world gifts for friends in Central America.

Returning for a jaunt to my beloved Antigua, Guatemala makes leaving another beloved city, New York, a bit easier as one life goes back on the shelf for a bit and another is retrieved. Contemplation and reflection are travel par for the course during the limbo days between places.

Today, I found myself today reading the apt article The Truth About Travelers by Stephanie Dandan, which reflects some of my own sentiments of travel.

I meet people often who seem to not really know what to make of my current life.  Instead of trying to explain; I may just start referring them to Dandan’s travel piece. She writes that travelers have been called many things and that in today’s world has, people from all walks of life and every sort of place who are a “growing breed of humans with restless feet.”

Under her assessment “courage weighs more than money when it comes to travel.”

“We’re not rich,” she points out, “and we don’t travel for luxury.”

You can rarely have everything you want in life. Certainly not when you are starting out. So the reason why so many location independent people choose a life of sublets instead of a year-round leased apartment, is because they cannot do both and choose the former as the way of living that they find most enthralling.

As Dandan puts it, “We travel at the cost of sacrifices. We’re happy living with just barely enough as long as we’re on the road.” We also don’t “spend our money lavishly on things we don’t need . . . We learned that the less things we have, the better we live.”

That’s how most of us make this work. This year I managed to cut my luggage by half, and my peace of mind was increased in the process. Our lives are about figuring out what we need, making sure we have that, and not worrying about what we do not have. It seems our Western culture focuses on the opposite: what you don’t have, but still want, and then pressures us to scrape more money together to by more excesses.

To be sure, it is to each his or her own. Yet I still have trouble equating a magical night of beach sunsets backed by

an eclectic group of travelers around a campfire singing their songs, with buying Blu-rays editions of DVDs one already owns.

“We feel the most alive when we’re out there” and “We follow whenever the next sunrise and sunset takes us.” Today’s sunset will lead me in time for a Central America sunset tomorrow. Only six months ago, my day of limbo reflections were more filled with doubts about whether or not I could pull this lifestyle off. Today, these thoughts tend towards gratitude at finally feeling some control in the cockpit of that life.

The world, many have noticed, is a green ball of ceaseless wonders. That, mixed with freedom and a desire to learn and explore added to the realization that the only one that holds you back from the life you want is the inability to recognize its possible, makes for some happy trails. Not always an easy trail, but in most instances a wildly worthwhile one.

New York, you have again been wonderful to me gain. Guatemala, hasta mañana.