Stepping up the Outrageous Scale

How Outrageous can you be?

Taking time for lunch

Getting back from Venice was an adjustment. There was the usual decompression after being away; going through the mail, unpacking, washing clothes and settling back into the routine of normal life. Now after two weeks it is almost business as usual. But not quite.

Business as usual is normally a positive state. It represents an equilibrium between work and play, business and leisure and it is what we were used to one month ago. At that time I thought that what I was doing was outrageous because I wasn’t settling for a retirement lifestyle of leisure and entertainment. I was focused on building a business income to support a lifestyle of extended travel. I had an action plan, a business coach and a daily routine intended to take me to that goal.

Delayed gratification was in play. 

Originally, the reward would wait until the income was produced but along the way we got worried that maybe we were waiting too long for the reward. You can work with the aging process but you can’t stop it. Maybe, we were too old to travel the way we want. We broke the routine and took a trip. It was the best trip we even took (although we couldn’t have known how well it would go) but it wasn’t the trip of our dreams- or the retirement lifestyle we have been working for.

We didn’t play by the rules we had chosen. We took a trip before we had actually earned it according to the plan. It did stop the momentum of my business effort and I am now paying for that as I put the project back together. Still, the memories of those days in Venice give a focus to my work that it never had before. Last month, a travel lifestyle was a fantasy for me with a lot of baggage and doubts about our resilience and energy on an extended stay in foreign countries. I had lots of outrageous thoughts about how we were going to live once I got my business going but I had even more concerns about actually doing it. I had the dream but I was afraid that it was only a fantasy. I needed proof.

After Venice, that is all changed.

I know we can travel for much longer without getting bored or homesick and the vision of spending much longer in Venice, or some other beautiful place just can’t get pushed aside. To be sure, it wasn’t all a piece of cake. We need to plan some down time on the next trip because aging bodies just don’t have the stamina to be on the go 24-7. That is easily accommodated, especially with a longer trip. And down time can be good.

But was it outrageous? 

Back to the idea of an outrageous retirement lifestyle. A month ago I would have said that I was living an outrageous retirement lifestyle. I was working to make a dream happen- creating a business to produce income to support a lifestyle of being away from home as much as six months each year.. It might have been true at one time but the project was taking so long that it turned into a rut. Without something to make the end result seem real to me, I was just going through the motions, making some headway but not charging forward to the finish line and the reward.

Look up! 

Maybe a rut is just part of the process when you pursue a dream but while you push on, it is important that your eyes are on the horizon visualizing your dream, not watching your feet in the muck. Sure I lost ground when we made out trip but I gained something as well. We; thought that ten days in Venice was outrageous one month ago. We couldn’t believe that we were finally making such a trip- the trip of a lifetime. Now that we are back, wonderful as it all was, that trip seems ordinary. We can’t stop talking about how much we would have enjoyed 10 more days or a month. We just scratched the surface of our penetration of the Venetian lifestyle. Doing what we did this month is no longer outrageous but we have many ideas about what our next trip should be whether to Venice or some other place. We stepped up our outrageous scale and we grew the confidence to know that we can handle it.

Back to work.

Now, today I am struggling to put the pieces of my plan back in motion. Picking up the loose ends I dropped when we started packing and getting my feet back in the old rut. But it’s not the work, or the rut that keeps flashing through my brain. I know I have to complete those steps and get my plan in place. But now I know that our dream lifestyle is not a fantasy but a very real possibility and that if I keep my head in the game, we will have it- maybe as soon as six months from now. I have always wanted to winter in the Southern hemisphere where it is warm and sunny.

Anybody got any ideas?