When I am back in the states the most asked question after I tell people where I live is “How do you get to live in The Virgin Islands?”
Well, after long and hard thought about that question, precisely 1 minute: because we wanted to.
Now that seems simple enough right?
I guess step 1 is wanting to be somewhere else worse than you want to be near the people that you love. You don’t have to give them up, but you have to want to be somewhere else and willing to see the people you love a lot less. Oh, and let me light you on fire here, you WILL lose a lot of people, easy, lazy, or convenient friendships or family members are gone. After you make a decision like this, when you go back, you will only want to spend your precious time with the people that you’ll die without seeing. The nonchalant relationships will not travel to see you, because they are going to do what is a priority to them. It is a complete and total purge of people, and those are the facts Jack.
That is not that simple now is it?
After you’ve managed to prioritize living in paradise over time with the people you love the most, we move onto step two: how the fuck are we going to eat?
Money isn’t everything, but it sure becomes everything when you don’t have any, so next we have to decide if we can work where we want to go. From the way I see it, there are few careers that aren’t needed everywhere in some capacity. That said, it is time to decide if what you are doing is what you want to be doing, and after that, you start looking and chatting and INFILTRATING your new place.
The world is so small now, and one of the really cool parts about that is that you can talk to anyone, anywhere, and at anytime, that is why this is so much easier than it was in the days of having to take boats for days to get to the “new world” you’ve never even seen, I mean come on people, that was a leap of faith, this? well, it is a little bitty hop comparatively.
But, it is still scary isn’t it? The unknown, the chance to fail, but there is that voice inside us that won’t shut the fuck up, she nags and bitches, and won’t give up, and we know that she will stop nagging one day, and that day she will start tormenting us with questions that we won’t have the answers to, like, “why not?”, “what if?”, and “how come?”, her name is Regret, it’s me or her, life or death.
That’s the stakes.
Step three, invite that mistake, invite the story of the time that you moved somewhere crazy and hated it, and met some really cool people, and didn’t die. Invite the “Didn’t Die Story”. I want to get to the bottom of my grave with a million “Didn’t Die Stories”, no “Didn’t Live Stories”, and only one “Did Die Story”, that’s my goal.
I’m going to get to how to sell all your shit, and move your baby to an island in the middle of an ocean, find schools, how to eat, and be somewhat of a pirate. I am going to have to interview a lot of people who have lived on an island, and tell their stories, and I’ll show you that the only thing that all of us have is willingness, and the question becomes “How couldn’t I live in The Virgin Islands?”.
