Never Tell Your Wife You’re Bored! - Dick Rauscher
The last two months have been insanely busy. I apologize to all of you who have wondered what happened to the Stonyhill-Nuggets for the last eight weeks. The answer to that question is we sold our house, moved out, bought a new motorhome, moved in, and are now living full time……again…..on the road. Sometimes life takes some unexpected turns in the road…and this turn was a big one! It gave a whole new meaning to the word “busy”!
It all began one afternoon about ten weeks ago when I walked into my wife’s office and said: “I’m bored”. Who would have thought those simple words would turn our lives upside down? Definitely not me! I was simply sharing a feeling I was having at the moment.
Anyways, she turned to me and said: “Me too!” That was my first premonition that perhaps I had just opened Pandora’s Box. We headed for the kitchen, made some coffee and sat down to talk about our feelings.
We decided we really loved our house in Redmond, Oregon, the house we moved into six years ago when we came off the road after eight years of living full time on the road. It was the house we planned to live out the rest of our days. We installed solar panels, converted the backyard into six large raised bed gardens, planted apple trees, installed a gas stove (looked like a wood burning stove), and in general made our life as “green and sustainable” as we could. We were both busy writing our blogs Stonyhill-Nuggets.com and RVTravels.net, and I was beginning the early stages of writing another book. Between the writing, our blogs, and gardening…life was good. At least it was until we sat down to talk about why were bored.
It was during that conversation that we realized we were missing the volunteer communities that we had been part of when we were on the road full time. We missed our tribe and the companionship of potluck meals, conversation around campfires, and working together as volunteers for the State Parks, the Forest Service, the BLM, Habitat, and Nomads. As we talked that afternoon over coffee, we decided we would continue writing our blogs, but it was time to reconnect with the companionship and friends that were so much a part of a “volunteer” life on the road. The companionship of that community was more important to us than the security we had created in our Redmond home.
I’m sure many of our friends thought we were “crazy”, but I think a few of them were secretly envious that we were willing to give up the security and responsibility of caring for a home and go back to full-time life on the road as gypsy volunteers.
We believe that life is a journey. A process. Clinging to the past, or avoiding change in life are both forms of unconscious insanity. Every moment of our lives is a fluid movement of letting go of what is and moving with uncertainty into what might be. I like to think that we live every moment of our lives on the threshold between the past, and the unknown future. In more spiritual terms, I like to think about life as a never-ending “becoming”.
We have the ability to exercise some choice in the life we would like to create, but life is always a journey into the unknown. We can embrace change and that unknown future, or we can fear it. But regardless of which we choose, every moment of our lives is driven by change and movement into an unknown future. Every moment of our life is lived on that threshold between what was and what will be. Life is a process of never-ending change; so why fear it?
On that day two months ago, we decided that for us, moving into the unknown future was best-done living full time in a motorhome sharing the experiences of life together as volunteers and the companionship of like-minded friends.
