CHAPTER 3

Repacking Your Place Bag

Do you have a picture of where in the world you belong? A vision of where you would like to live? What are the chances there of being able to do the kind of work you want and earn a suitable income? How do your spouse, partner, and family feel about it? What are their images of where they should be?

Many of us have visions of where we would love to live. The purpose of this chapter is to help you focus your vision on where in the world is home. Where is the place you belong? Where do you unpack?

Even if the place in which you’re currently living is truly “home” for you, it’s a healthy idea to develop a “Plan B”: an additional place to consider in the event that circumstances change. It’s fun to break the boundaries of your current thinking and at least dream about the other possibilities. If nothing else, doing so can help you appreciate more fully what you have.

A Sense of Place

If you were given the choice, now, to move to anywhere in the world, where would you choose to go? The mountains of Colorado? The high desert in New Mexico? The heart of Paris? Somewhere in the Far East? The bustling center of Rio de Janeiro?

The late naturalist/author Sigurd Olson emphasized our need for a sense of place. He claimed contact with nature is a necessary part of existence:

It is a long jump from the life of those days to the concentrated civilization of our cities and larger towns, and it is rather hopeless to believe that in the short space of a generation or two, we can completely root out of our system the love of the simple life and the primitive. It is still deeply rooted and it will be hundreds or thousands of years before we lose very much of it.²

Richard has personally seen changes come over many people he has guided on wilderness trips. They go, for example, to Africa, to climb a mountain like Kilimanjaro, or to see the great migration of animals. And they come back hooked on sunsets, silence, staring into the fire’s coals late at night, sleeping beneath the stars; on touching the basics again.

Most of our lives are no longer tied to the sun, the tides or the changing seasons. We see hunger in the eyes of so many people today, a hunger for contact with the earth … a sense of roots, of place. Our sense of place is so tied up with our evolving background and traditions that it simply cannot be ignored. As Sigurd Olson goes on to say, “Wilderness … is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.”

We are rooted physiologically and psychologically to our wild past. Because of the speed of change, we haven’t had time to shift gears. As a result, no matter how successful our lives, we can’t seem to shake our past. Without some kind of contact with the earth and its simple rhythms, we feel a lack of roots; literally, a lack of grounding.

Always Going Somewhere, Never Being Anywhere

Generations of us have grown up under the influences of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. It should come as no great surprise that many see the good life at its best as beautiful people in beautiful places. And what do we do when our own life doesn’t match up?

It’s easy. We go faster. Or move.

Of course, that doesn’t always work in the long run. But who in today’s television and computer culture has much to say about the long run?

There never seems to be enough time. We have less for ourselves and far less for each other. We are impatient with people who are reflective or who talk too slowly. We drive fast, make love fast, and expect our Starbucks latte in 15 seconds. A full calendar reflects our importance; time is money. Our weekends are scheduled weeks in advance. We rarely have time for real dialogue or for just “wasting time.”

We’re more organized but less spontaneous, less alive. We’re better prepared for the future, but less able to enjoy the present. We’re always going somewhere, never being anywhere. Just where are we going anyway? Where is there?

When will I enjoy my friends? When will I be at home in my home? Will there ever be a time in my life to attend to my family’s priorities? It’s not just the physical location we’re concerned about; it’s also the emotional places and spaces we find ourselves in.

Richard met Dan Petersen on one of his African safari treks many years ago. Dan was in the middle of a two-year sabbatical from his orthodontic practice near San Diego. After dental and orthodontic schools, a stint in the Air Force, and 20 years in a joint ortho dontic practice, he says, “I felt I needed to do something different. I was dying from the inside out. My partner and I had created our ideal master plan where we each worked six months and then took six months off. It worked great for 18 years. I had it all except for one thing — inner peace. So I left.”

Dan shifted his attention from dental work to spiritual work — with himself. He decided to create new and deeper relationships with “people who are committed to waking up and improving themselves.”

For a while, he worked a “comfortable two to three days a week” in his repacked role as holistic orthodontist. During that time, he became a serious student of body/mind psychology, and took inventive new approaches to treating face, jaw and teeth injuries and development problems. He says, “People came to me to consult with them and I always stopped to talk. They couldn’t believe the time I spent with them. By keeping my own needs to a minimum I had the time to ‘be present’ with my patients at a deeper level.”

To create a sane oasis for his clients, Dan moved his office to his home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The office itself reflected Dan’s sense of place and his natural way of helping people to heal themselves. The simple, natural setting that looked out through verdant grounds to the ocean rolling in offered a sharp contrast to the stark lights and machinery that keeps most dental patients away from treatment as long as possible.

Dan’s clients visibly changed while listening to the ocean and being listened to by Dan. His appreciation for a sense of place made them feel as if they belonged there, too.

As his work deepened, so did Dan, and he began to develop his practice in the direction of personal and leadership coaching. He established Open Focus, a practice to coach people in personal and professional transition. He bought property and built a simple, ecologically friendly home in a pristine canyon outside Cortez, Colorado,

People now come to Dan’s place to do three to five-day “vision quests,” and to receive coaching guidance. He has established the Sage Canyon Project to expand and deepen the study of human consciousness, and is attracting friends and colleagues to live and work near him.

As before, Dan’s work with people is founded in a deep and abiding sense of a place where he belongs, and in his ability to communicate this sense of belonging to those he works with. His repacking journey will continue, but for now he says, “All this makes me very happy!”

Where in the World Is Home?

Our vision of the good life dictates where we live and how we live. When we acquire a home we also acquire its total environment, including the neighbors, community services, climate, taxes and politics. All of these factors interact with our values, and influence whether or not our home is an inspiring, supportive place that allows us to express the fullness of our being.

We invent and reinvent ourselves again and again during a lifetime. Changing place can be a big part of that, providing a new outlook in more ways than one.

Helen Nearing, in Loving and Leaving the Good Life, writes:

When one door closes, another opens … into another room, another space, other happenings. There are many doors to open and close in our lives. Some we leave ajar, where we hope and plan to return. Some doors are slammed shut decisively — “No more of that!” Some are closed regretfully, softly — “It was good but it is over.” Departures entail arrivals somewhere else. Closing a door means opening onto new vistas and ventures, new possibilities, new incentives.³

How about you? Are you ready to close a door? Or are you happy and comfortable where you live now? What are you willing to give up for new vistas, ventures, and views?

If you’re considering a new place it’s wise to examine what sort of ideal future lifestyle you have in mind, and compare your thoughts with those of your intimates before you go much further.

Otherwise, after moving to a new place, people frequently discover that they haven’t really wound up with what they wanted after all. Conversely, it’s not all that uncommon for people to re-conceptualize the place in which they’re currently living, or to find something out about it that they weren’t aware of before, so that it seems like a brand-new place, in which they feel more at home than ever.

When Dave and his wife, Jennifer, were first married, they had both of these experiences, as they searched — admittedly in a somewhat haphazard way — for a place to call home. Dave puts it this way:

Immediately after getting married, Jen and I moved out of the apartments we were living in — me in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she in Albuquerque — and spent three months, from June to early September, house-sitting at the homes of various friends and colleagues. It was a rootless existence, but we always felt at home wherever we were, mainly because, as newlyweds, we had each other. It didn’t matter that one week we were living at the almost entirely pink-themed house of a woman I worked with, taking care of her tiny Pomeranian dog; and the next, we were ensconced in a luxurious guest house on the country estate of an old friend of Jen’s parents. As long as we were with each other, that’s where we belonged.

At the end of that time we packed up or sold pretty much everything we had, and moved to France to pursue our literary and artistic dreams. We lived in a tiny apartment on the Left Bank in Paris for six months, and then spent late winter and early spring in the south of the country; first in a basically deserted tourist village called La Ciotat and then in the artistic community of Aix-en-Provence, where Jen studied painting in the natural light made famous by artists like Cezanne and Monet. As exotic and unfamiliar as all these places were, they continually felt like home, primarily because we both were following our dreams. It didn’t matter that you could stretch out your arms and touch both walls in our Paris living room. And who cared that our garret in Aix had only a hotplate to cook on? For us “home” meant a place to write and paint, in spite of whatever it was like.

When our money ran out we moved to Los Angeles, where our best friend was living, and where we knew we’d have work and a roof over our heads. And yet, even though we readily got these things, neither of us, for the entire year or so that we stayed there, ever felt at home. That was primarily because neither of us had a real reason to be there. I had lived in Hollywood a few years earlier and loved it because, at the time, I was trying to break into the movie and television business as a comedy writer. Los Angeles was the place to be for me then, so it was easy to overlook the traffic and crowds and to embrace the Southern California lifestyle. But without the desire to “make it” there, LA was just one vast, faceless megalopolis that we couldn’t get out of fast enough.

In fact, it wasn’t until we moved — to, of all places, Minneapolis, Minnesota — that we once again felt that we’d arrived where we belonged. And this was surprising in a way, since neither of us had ever lived — or had ever wanted to live — in the Upper Midwest. But because Jen had been accepted to art school there, and I had been hired at a job I really enjoyed, we both immediately felt a connection to the place. We quickly made lots of friends, and discovered a number of places to hang out, hear music and dine; and within a remarkably short time we felt like we’d come home. The sense of belonging we experienced had as much to do with what we were doing as where we were doing it. This isn’t to say that the physical and cultural aspects of our city were superfluous; rather, it’s just to note how much our feelings of connection to a place depend on feeling connected to ourselves.

Finally, after four years in the Twin Cities, we came out west to Seattle, where we’ve now lived for going on two decades. Having bought a house and had a child, our roots are sunk much more deeply than they were in all the places we lived in the early years of our marriage. But even so, the sense of belonging to a place, the feeling that where we are is where we were meant to be, still depends just as much — if not more — on our attitude about the place as it does on the place itself. When you have a good reason for being where you are and know what it is and why you are there, then it begins to feel like home remarkably quickly. But if those elements are lacking, even the most beautiful and exciting of places never feel entirely welcoming.

Listening Point

Sigurd Olson, in his book, Listening Point, writes:

I named this place Listening Point because only when one comes to listen, only when one is aware and still, can things be seen and heard. Everyone has a listening point somewhere.⁴

Where is your listening point? Where are your places of quiet where the universe can be contemplated with awe?

Larry Christie, one of the more successful and fulfilled financial planners in the country, leaves for his listening point at noon every Friday. The five-hour drive to his log cabin on Tait Lake, in northern Minnesota, has become a listening point in itself. During the drive he listens to tapes of poetry and classic literature on his car stereo. Larry says of his cabin, “It’s my spiritual refuge, where the good life prevails. My wife Jean and I consider it ‘home.’ We read, journal, listen to classical music and take long walks with our dog.

“I really love my life now, being in my 70s,” he says. “I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time planting; now I’m harvesting. Today love and place get more of my attention than work. I’m putting less pressure on myself. I know I’ll never retire, but I’ll downshift soon to working only three days a week so that I can spend even more quiet time at the cabin. It’s the place that really opens my soul.”

One of Richard’s listening points was his 110-year-old log cabin on the edge of the Chequamegon National Forest, an area of over a million acres of forest, lakes, and rivers that make up northwestern Wisconsin’s “Great Divide” country. Richard comments, “When I was up there, my pace was slow and deliberate, like that of the seasons around me. I didn’t have a telephone, or even electricity. The evenings were warmed by the romantic shadows of the woodstove and kerosene lamps. For years I used this cabin as one of my listening points for writing and renewal. These days, I’ve captured that same feeling in my home on the St. Croix River. Even though it has a few more ‘creature comforts,’ it still affords me the opportunity to tap into that slower rhythm. I can move into the feel of the river, which carries me along at its own steady pace. I’m able to see the gentle flow of the water, hear the wind through the trees, and at the same time, hear myself too.”

At different times in our lives, we all yearn for a listening point — a place to unpack and be fully ourselves — but few act on that yearning. One who did stop to listen to the sound of a different drummer was Henry Thoreau. He explained his reasons for living alone in the woods by Walden Pond:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.⁵

Richard admits that his motivations are similar. “There are many times,” he says, “when I finish my writing, don my walking shoes and hike off into the woods. Sometimes my walk is interrupted by a deer or wild turkey shuffling down the path. On these walks, it often strikes me that the most alive people I know all take some time to be quiet. They know how to be present in most situations in which they find themselves, because they take time to listen to themselves.”

In 1933, Admiral Richard E. Byrd decided to spend the seven dark months of the Antarctic winter alone at a weather station deep in the continent’s interior. “I wanted to sink roots into some replenishing philosophy,” he said. He discovered “the sheer excitement of silence.” During that time, he wrote, “There were moments when I felt more alive than at any other time in my life.” Byrd realized that “half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.”

Of course, you don’t have to seclude yourself away in the Antarctic to hear the sounds of silence. Dave finds his listening point in the heart of the city. “On summer nights especially, I like to get on my bike and tool around the city. I feel an incredible sense of freedom in being able to observe life all around me, but at the same time, I’m not trapped in traffic or on crowded sidewalks or in smoky bars. I listen to the sound of the wind rushing around my helmet, mingled with snatches of conversations I catch as I ride past. The ongoing collage of images sweeping past my field of vision expands my mind. I get my best creative work done alone in the night air, just me and my bicycle, and those half-million stories in the naked city swirling about me.”

Listening Point Postcard Exercise

Having spent — or at least thought about — spending time alone in your listening point, it’s worthwhile to consider who you might include on another visit. Here’s a brief postcard exercise to help you do that.

Where is your listening point?

Imagine that you can travel to any “listening point” in the world for a weekend to consult a wise person about the good life.

Directions

• On the front of the postcard, create or clip an image of the place you’d travel to for writing and reflection — a place where you can contemplate the big picture of your life: a “listening point.”

• On the back of the postcard, write some big life questions on which you’d like a wise person’s counsel.

• Address the postcard to the person whose counsel you’d most like. This person can be known or unknown to you, living or dead, famous or infamous.

• Send the postcard to your Repacking Partner and discuss your “listening point” with them. Where is it? How often do you go there? What life questions do you reflect on, and how?