What comes next

February 13, 2018February 13, 2018 Joseph Lyttleton17 Comments

I’ve done unconventional things in my life. Generally dumb, maybe a few clever choices, but mostly, just odd. For instance, have I ever mentioned that time I moved to ten different cities over ten years? Oh, I have?

Well, in the midst of those ten years, I tried something else that many of you might not know about, especially if you only started reading this site in the last few years.

As my sixth year – Nashville, Tennessee – passed the halfway mark, I wanted to try something to shake-up the proceedings of a project that had started to have predictable beats. That far into the project, I was locked in to completing the whole endeavor, or die trying (sounds dramatic, but honestly, there were more than a few months where my next meal wasn’t guaranteed).

So, in order to liven things up and keep myself from getting too bored, I introduced a new gambit. I opted to put the power in readers’ hands: They voted on my next city.

I was prudent enough to know that giving the internet unrestricted options would wind up with me being sent to Bedford, Wyoming or some other desolate ink dot, so I gave voters options: Austin, TX; Denver, CO; Portland, OR; and Seattle, WA.

I didn’t have a lot of readers in those days (some things never change), so there wasn’t a deluge of votes, but there were enough to make it interesting. The voting lasted about two months, and though Seattle and Portland pulled ahead initially, it wound up being neck and neck, with Denver, Austin, and Denver duking it out for first place (Portland, to my surprise, fell far behind and was never much of a contender after the first couple weeks).

In the end, as I’m sure you can deduce, Seattle won the vote, beating out Denver by one vote. Fortuitous that it did, as well, because my year in Seattle was one of the best of the entire project and the city remains among my favorites in all of the US. Conceivably, it’s possible I would have come to love Denver or Austin or Portland just as much; we’ll never know.

All these years later, I can admit, letting internet strangers vote on my next home does seem a bit out there, even more than 10×10. It was a period in my life where I had no preconceptions or directions for what would come next so I figured I’d let the winds decide.

I feel like I’m at a similar place in my life, now.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting at one of Madrid’s many spectacular cafés with three friends and I asked them that cliché question that everybody hates, but which I think is worth contemplating from time to time: What would your ideal life look like?

It’s something I keep asking myself because I’m not entirely certainly. In part, that’s because, as I age and pursue certain avenues, other pathways that I had previously contemplated are closing to me. Some people will say that you can still be anything you want at any age, citing some septuagenarian grandmother who went back to college or a celebrity who didn’t became famous until their 50s. Those people are morons. Don’t feed them.

Life is finite and if I had only one dream, it’s true, I could dedicate myself to it and in time I might achieve some level of success. But I don’t have one dream, I have many. Just like I don’t have one home, or one passion. I want to master every art form, I want to live in every city, I want to taste every whiskey.

I want to live on every continent. Yeah, Antarctica, too. And then I want to fly to Mars.

When I answered my own question with my friends, I said that I didn’t care so much what I did for work so long as it allowed me to keep traveling. I wish I could be a renowned author (never going to happen) or a world-famous photographer (probably not going to happen), but those pursuits aren’t likely to change the course of my life.

I’ve gotten to an age where it would be damn near impossible to go back to the US and work my way up in a traditional career. That bridge is, if not burnt, then covered in gasoline and being occupied by a bunch of smokers.

I’m not sure any of it matters. I’ve never made much money in my life, always just skirting by. But skirt by I have, and I’m now living in my thirteenth city on my second continent. Somehow, I’m still going. So, I guess I’ll keep going until I can’t. That’s pretty much the point of life, verdad?

I don’t know where I’m going next, or when, but there are more destinations ahead, of that I’m confident. So, just for fun, as a bit of non-binding but informative polling, I’m putting the question to my readers again: For my next continent, where should I move?

❏Africa
❏Asia
❏ Australia
❏ South America

Answer in the comments.

Travel Living

January 17, 2017May 17, 2017 Joseph Lyttleton2 Comments

Yesterday, my online course with the International TEFL Academy officially began. This is the first step in my long term plan to live and work abroad indefinitely. Over the next ten weeks, I will be reading lessons, taking quizzes, and completing assignments, the first time I’ve had to do any of this since I graduated college back in 2005. Never too late to try a new path, right?

I don’t know what type of teacher I’ll be; it’s never been something I seriously considered. Not that I’ve ever given serious consideration to any sort of career – other than writing, of course. One of the major forces behind 10 Cities/10 Years was my aversion to chaining myself into a job and settling for a traditional career plan. Eleven years later, can’t say I’ve changed much in that regard.

It’s why teaching English as a second language interests me, and why I’m willing to put down a sizeable investment for this certification. I’m learning a skill, developing a marketable tool that can take me anywhere – anywhere. If it weren’t for the lousy weather, I’d spend a year in the South Pole teaching penguins the indicative mood.

Spain is just the first stop for me. And yes, yes, I hear you asking: The first of 10? In 10 years?

10×10

The goal going forward is not to bind myself to yet another schedule. At 22, I needed the structure and form of 10 Cities/10 Years because I was a traveling rube. I had only ever lived in small town Kansas – other than a summer in Washington D.C. – before I moved to Charlotte. Having a rigid plan kept me on track and gave me a finish line to reach for so that I kept striving, especially when the bottom fell out, which it did often.

By the time I had reached the final few cities, though, 10 Cities/10 Years had become a career in its own right. It wasn’t like any career you’ve had, to be sure, but as I swung through many of the same touchstones each year, it grew just as confining and limiting as if I had saddled up to a desk and filled out TPS reports. It’s not something I want to lock myself into again.

All the same, I’ll be forever grateful for those experiences I had through the decade, and more importantly, the skills I gained. I ended the project an infinitely more adaptable person. Traveling was an abstract idea when I set off on my decade tour, but now it’s a fundamental part of who I am. 10 Cities/10 Years was the scaffolding upon which I built my life; now I can stand without it.

One of the most vital adaptations I gained throughout those 10 cities was the ability to compartmentalize time. Everything was temporary – everything is temporary – which was a good reminder to enjoy what I had while I had it. Even more important for my mental survival, though, was the knowledge that if I had landed myself in an untenable situation – a crappy job, a messy living arrangement – there was a finite amount of time with which I would have to put up with it. All things would pass.

The whole endeavor made me profoundly aware of how long and how short a year really is. We divide our lives into years, both in terms of the calendar and our birthdays, but they’re largely arbitrary distinctions, the difference from December of 2016 to January of 2017 being negligible at best. Unless some major life change occurred in a particular period of time, months blur together, and then years.

From my 20s to my early 30s, my memories and associations have distinct time and place markers. There’s no blurring together of Chicago and Nashville, or Seattle and New Orleans. Even when engaged in similar activities in each city, the different backdrops and new companions shaded each year in its own, unique hue. Considering my affinity for whiskey, it’s helpful to have the memory aids.

Travel Living

If I’m not launching a second round of 10 Cities or, more ambitiously, 10 Countries in 10 Years, why keep the name? Because it’s who I am now. Everything that I went through and everything I overcame during that decade of itinerancy not only developed me personally, but shaped my understanding of what it is to live.

As I pursue my dream of prolonged expatriatism, my intention is for this website to be more than just another travel blog, more than tourism porn to make people jealous of all the cool things I’ve seen. (I mean, yeah, hopefully it’ll be at least a little of that, but I want it to be more.) Ideally, it can illustrate travel as a way of life.

Over the years, as I’ve read travel blogs, I’ve felt deep jealousy towards those people who just hop from country to country – probably you have, too. Every blogger inevitably writes a post about “How I Do It” and once you get past most of the boilerplate “Just do it” aphorisms, the answer generally boils down to a mix of having lucrative employment (and/or a trust fund) and some form of company sponsorship. I always leave those posts feeling defeated, not inspired.

There’s a great deal of implicit privilege built into the whole travel blogging sphere. Even though I had neither reliable income or sponsorship, I still recognize that without my own privilege as a white male, 10 Cities/10 Years – an already arduous endeavor – would have been so much harder.

With that in mind, here are my goals for this website as I embark on my next chapter of travel:

Provide useful tips on how to travel, not as a sentient billboard but as a real person
Offer more than postcards; experiencing cultures has greater value than taking the quintillionth picture of the Eiffel Tower (you better believe I’ll take a picture of the Eiffel Tower when I get the chance)
Inspire through practical and actionable information; no vague platitudes
Acknowledge where my privilege benefits me and use it positively
Be more than a travel blog; exemplify Travel Living
Enjoy the journey

The next eight months are going to rush by, especially once the summer arrives and plans start to firm up. I hope you’ll follow along with the process. Perhaps it will give you the inspiration and guidance to finally take that trip or make a needed career change.

Here we go.

An Empty Passport

March 11, 2015March 11, 2015 Joseph Lyttleton4 Comments

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I applied for a passport.

Before I was born, my parents lived in Sicily and Bermuda. My father fought in Vietnam. My siblings have traveled to Jamaica, Germany and a host of other nations throughout this world. But other than a couple of family trips to Tijuana, I have never left the United States. This has always been a point of embarrassment for me.

I have visited 40 of the 50 states, lived in 10 (plus one district) and driven across vast swaths of this nation’s undeveloped land, yet I’ve never even been to Canada. The world is so much bigger than the United States, so much wider than North America, and for all my travels I’ve always felt exceptionally shallow in the scope of my experiences.

It’s beyond time to change that.

What’s Next?

I’m going to keep getting that question. It’s inevitable. Every week somebody asks me what I plan to do after the end of 10 Cities / 10 Years, and then a month or so after I’ve answered, “I don’t know,” they ask again. I don’t blame them. I’m asking myself the same question.

I know that my travels aren’t done. I can be proud of what I’ve accomplished (even if it’s an accomplishment with no obvious results), but I’m also acutely aware of how much I still have to see. For these first 6 months of my year here in Brooklyn, I was seemingly surrounded by foreign-born residents, like French, Belgium and Italian students studying abroad, or the European/African roommates I have.

For as much of this country that I have seen, for all the places that I have called home (and I’d imagine I’ve lived in more cities than 99.99% of the people who can be labeled American citizens), I can’t deny that my experience of this globe has been confined to a decidedly small portion of one hemisphere.

Even if what I’ve experienced would be sufficiently diverse for the vast majority of the population, it isn’t enough for me. I’m not done traveling. I’m not done seeing the world. I’ll travel Europe next. And Asia, Africa, South America, Australia. Heck, maybe I’ll lay a flag on Antarctica. And I’ll get around to the other 10 states, too. Count on it.

I’m not sure what the next phase will look like.

I don’t know how I’ll get to all the places I want to see. I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see all 7 continents. I don’t know what any of the future has to hold. For the first time in pretty much my entire life, I don’t have even the faint outline of a plan.

But in a few weeks I’ll hold an empty passport and I think that just might be better than any plan.

the Road is Life.