The Virtues of Living Simply

Much can be said in favor of a life lived in a comfortable and quiet existence, punctuated by carefully cultivated routines, making otherwise rhythmic progress through the seasons. Plenty of defenses exist for a life passed in casual pleasures and familiar haunts. Completing a difficult task. Caring for your friends. Persevering at your own humble practice of making and revering art. Being able to buy a pint of beer at your very own neighborhood bar…

My mind was hovering on these simple joys as I packed for three months in Thailand and India. Today I leave for almost 100 days abroad. I’ll be deprived of every familiar comfort and companion. If I get sick, I will not have the ginger miso soup from the Japanese restaurant on the corner to turn to. If I get hungry, it will be noodles and curry that abate it. I’ll not be likely to find a burger as well loved as the one at my neighborhood grill. It’ll be guesswork in ordering beers, at least at first, and if it’s water I’m turning to, I’ll likely have to filter it or check that someone else has. And when I want something new to read, I will face a stunning shortage of books in English. I’ll be among strangers.

Some of my earliest travels—solo only for the flights—were to visit my grandparents in South Carolina. I left all my comforts of home behind for weeks at a time, and found new comforts there, digging up the beaches, learning to dive in the swimming pool. Visiting grandparents sounds innocent enough, but visiting my grandparents was more like a trip to the museum with a lecture series included. My grandmother introduced me to jazz music and club sandwiches, ladies’ gossip over lunch at the golf course clubhouse and homemade meatballs. She let me take the wheel on the golf cart and taught me to think critically and speak my mind. Oh, and that if you can’t think of a decent answer in Scattergories, don’t bother answering anything at all. My grandfather hauled me into a sea kayak when I was young enough to be useless at paddling, but big enough to be a significant amount of dead weight. He took me out to the wildlife reserve to be thoroughly educated in the beach flora and fauna, and continues to humor me when we’re walking on the beach and I have to stop and examine the jellyfish and horseshoe crabs that have washed ashore. He also gave me the motto by which I have tried to live: You will regret more the things that you don’t do than the things that you do.

I owe who I have become to many of my family members (Thanks, Mom, Dad, Grandma Mary, Aunt Betty, Aunt Lisa, Carly, Andrea, Marsha. And Grandpa Jim, do I have to say thanks again? Thank you. And of course, to Grandma Sue) but I think it’s in my adventures with my grandparents that you see the start of who I’ve become now. There are seeds from those summers of this crazy adventurous person who often finds herself on the edge of something kind of ridiculous, slipping into secret hot springs or walking 10 feet over a two-foot-wide ridge so she can literally jump onto a sandstone corkscrew 300 feet in the air, and needing to remind herself, in spite of the “What the heck am I doing?”, that this was her idea.

But I’m going to assume, even as I wait for delayed flights, with little sleep and heavy luggage, swapping last phone calls with friends and family, that I would regret more not going than I will regret going, even on the loneliest and most inconveniencing of days.

The thing that solo travelers know, and never seem to want to tell people who have always toured the world with companions—as if by not speaking it you avoid the jinx—is that it gets lonely out there. It’s dangerous to go abroad. It’s dangerous to abandon all your routines and everything that comforts you. Particularly going alone. Particularly going into the unknown.

But I’ve not been a simple joys kind of person. I tend more toward making a wild decisions and just riding through them. So I’m off. Into the great wilds of Thailand and India to rock climb, kayak, trek, meditate, cook with Thai peppers, do yoga, visit museums and ruins and temples—and forget the bridge, I want to bike beside the River Kwai.

I’ll put photos, video, a map if I can figure out how, and basic details of where I am and what I’m working on.


But, what is a journey without a quest?

The summer I was 11 years old, my Grandma Sue (of the jazz and the meatballs), gave me a copy of The Book of Virtues, a collection of fables, poems, parables, speeches and letters designed for children to read that they might become more virtuous adults. It’s laced with the works of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mary Wollstonecraft, Ralph Waldo Emerson—some pretty thick stuff for an 11-year-old.

It is from this book that I have lifted a list of virtues: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty, faith. And I go, in addition to everything else I’m working on (we know that’s not a very long list, right, Dad?), I’m looking for the place these ideas find in the modern world, or perhaps, from a Westerner’s view, where they appear in a third world country. And, because I view cliff jumping as courage and padding out against the tide as perseverance, probably a hint of how we live virtuously without even realizing we are doing so.

So. Here we go.