Mikes Thoughts

here to there

Here we are back to where I started. Writing is this forever searching yet wanting to write things for me. I can sit with a beer and decide writing should be this way. Right there. Like lots of words spent in careful observation of life. Instead it becomes this careless and knee jerk proponent of wanting change. So this and that. Here to there. From short posts to long. To stories and desires to find truth. There is no underlying reality like one of my favorite authors once said. We want it because life is not enough. What we see never seems enough. So we forever search for underlying reality. We want the grounding. The feeling we have this sure thing.

The path to the bad place is paved with sure things. So what is our imperative? Our solution. We have none. Thoreau may have said once we should strive for less. Find our life not surrounded with things that only multiply. We need more and more. Things. None of them satisfy us. Satiate us. We are on the cruise for more. At some wooden shack by Walden, Thoreau told us that life is not about material wants. Nor is it about asceticism. It is about wanting what we have. We need no more.

In my case I found really there was nothing. I replaced home and car and things with nothing.

happy with nothing or less

There’s a sense to me about what is really needed in life. I left it behind before. The real thing is we need little or nothing in life to find sweet spots. I read about people that accumulate, need, want. Life is not like that to me folks. It is about finding what little I need and just accepting that. Reveling in it. We don’t need cars, homes, land, fancy things to make life good. We just take those things because we see this path toward them. Instead, my argument is we need nothing. So take a step back. Look at what it is you think you need. We go through life wanting subscriptions and features and things. Instead, life is out there waiting for us to let them go. I’ve come to realize with some years living here and perhaps some talk with various expats here and there, we do not need all that crap. We do not need the status thing. Car and house things. What we do need are the things that keep us going, make us feel good about our lives, give us reason to move on. Are these things house and cars and land? I don’t think so. So what we should do is be happy with nothing. Then when we get some more, we can be ecstatic. But life is not modeled on more. It seriously could care less if you have more or less. It is us that makes these pronouncements. What if you,

In a way that’s this blog. My message here is to not accept some status quo you had no voice in creating. You don’t need any of that. What you do need is to find some measure of things that make you happy, make you see the Now in things and not the before or then, give you each day just what it is you need.

for me Cambodia

For you something else. What is there out there you want. Need. Desire. Don’t you want a life that gives you some pleasure in the final acts of times. I met this expat Mike who told me he was concerned about his final acts. Like what would he do to make a life the best he could have. Don’t we all deserve the same? I think so. Mike could not find an answer. His life in the Philippines seemed destined to spin and twirl and give him little back from what he asked. He had come to Cambodia to see if he could get more. Is this not what we all ask? It has been that Cambodia offers that “more” and you need to give “less”. No reporting. No money in some bank account. No limits. One concern I have heard from expats here is change will happen here. We will be asked to prove a thing or report or do things differently. There have been many changes to visas here over the past year. None of them have touched the retirement visa. I personally think that this one thing gives Cambodia more than just about any other place. And they get a group of people willing to spend money, buy local, support communities. I also was able to help a single person find more. My wife has had more I think with me than ever before. She appreciates, even quietly, what the regular money has meant for her. For me, it means a life. A life in Cambodia.

Give it some thought.