Finding patience in presence: how our truck build has been a practice in chilling out

The last four years of life on the road have looked quite similar for us.  Colorado in the summer, Arizona and Baja in the winter, and anywhere in between as we migrated south and back north.  The problem with repetition is that Mark and I get bored easily and end up craving all that there is to be discovered in the unknown.  Something that can’t be achieved when you’re constantly residing within a routine.  This craving is what led us to Baja and for three consecutive winters the 1,000 mile long peninsula kept us satiated with another beach, another town, another backcountry road to be explored.  While there will always be more to experience in Baja, the familiarity we now feel has caused the craving for the unknown to return.  

This is what led to our decision to venture into mainland Mexico later this year where an entirely new world is begging to be explored.  The plan to explore new territory, however, caused us to reconsider how we travel.  Allow me to explain how things have looked for us these last four years so that this all makes sense.

We live on the road full-time and travel in a variety of rig configurations.  We own a Four Wheel Camper truck camper that never leaves the bed of our truck.  In addition we own a 21’ travel trailer and a 13’ homemade utility bed trailer.  Our primary home-on-wheels is our 21’ travel trailer.  In order to access Baja’s most remote beaches and backroads, we put the 21’ trailer in storage for the winter in Arizona and tow the 13’ off-road capable utility trailer to Mexico with us.  

In consideration of the steep mountain grades and very narrow town streets of Mexico and Central America we decided that we no longer want to tow a trailer when traveling outside of the US.  For many years we have dreamed of marrying the functionality of our utility trailer with the truck, meaning we dreamed of putting a new bed with cabinets on the truck thus providing us extra storage.  The prospect of this change was an exciting one but I had no idea what a project it would become.

There are thinkers, feelers, and doers in the world.  While Mark thinks and I feel, the doing doesn’t come easily for either one of us.  It can be difficult for us to collectively pull the trigger on a new idea.  After months of research, once we were finally ready to commit to moving forward with a truck bed swap, little did we know, there was an avalanche of decision-making to follow.  

There’s a cascade effect that Mark and I have both been well aware of as it relates to home projects.  When we owned and lived in houses, we both shied away from home improvement projects because we saw how one would lead to another and another.  New floors would cause the cabinets to look outdated, new cabinets would be a cause for new appliances and so on.  Costs would add up, the goal post would keep getting pushed back, and we’d have no idea how to break free from the trap.  This was clear to us and so we simply avoided home improvement projects.  We would rather spend our time and money traveling in our truck camper and that’s exactly what we did.

This is in no way a dig against homeowners and all the work they put into improving their homes.  I’m jealous of my friends who work tirelessly to create a haven that in turn makes them wildly happy.  It’s simply that Mark and I saw home improvement as something that would likely bring us more stress than joy.

As clear as the home improvement trap was to us we should have seen it coming with this truck project.  In July it felt like huge progress to be purchasing and installing the new bed.  At the time, I never would have guessed that this project would just now be wrapping up in mid-November.  There was the avalanche of decisions that had to be made, the cascade of unexpected needs after changing beds, unpredictable delays, new gear that had to be purchased to fit in the new spaces, and I have yet to mention the laundry list of truck maintenance projects that Mark took on, all while I was working on buttoning up our wedding photography business for the winter.  In other words, the last couple of months have been, to say the least, very, very busy. 

At the end of October the overwhelm set in.  The weather was beginning to turn on our property in Colorado and it felt like the truck was nowhere near being ready to go.  As someone who has a tendency to stress, the overwhelm began sending me into a spiral of anxiety.  From the anxiety seeped guilt because this was hardly an actual problem.  I’d not lost sight of how unbelievably fortunate we are to be taking on such a project in the first place, not to mention be able to set aside 4 entire months of our year to travel around another country.  

With our wedding photography business being active for only six months out of the year, winter is when we slow down and focus on being more present, no matter where we are.  In the summer we grind.  My to-do list runs the show, my eyes remain connected to a screen for the majority of the day, and aside from a morning walk, recreational activities are few and far between.  Ever since getting our Four Wheel Camper twelve years ago, winter became our time to slow down, recharge, and relearn how to enjoy the here and now without stressing about what task needs to be tackled next.  A few weeks back, when the overwhelm set in, and my stress reached a tipping point, it occurred to me that I was stressing out about something with zero consequence.  Our winter of leisure would begin whenever it began.  Sure it wouldn’t be all that fun to pack in freezing temps, and yes of course we would like our timelines to match up with our friends who are also headed south, but we weren’t committed to any kind of deadline and my stressing about when everything would get done would have no bearing on how quickly things got done.  

In my late twenties, perhaps early thirties, I had a revelation.  I was always thinking to the future.  “I’ll be happy when” was a prominent pre-cursor of my thoughts.  I’ll be happy when I graduate and move out, I’ll be happy when I get a degree, I’ll be happy when I commit to a career path, I’ll be happy when I get married, I’ll be happy when I buy my first house.  And then it hit me, those four words are a trap.  I’ll be happy when is never I am happy now.  If you can’t find joy in the process, you likely won’t find joy in the outcome.  Because the outcome doesn’t last long before you find another thing to chase.  The goal post is pushed back, and with it that ever elusive feeling of being happy.  I believe that’s because a future thinking mindset teaches our brain to always be seeking something that’s just out of reach.  When you stop relying on future events to bring peace, joy, or contentedness, is when you learn how to find those things in the here and now.  They’re always accessible to us, it’s our mindset that create pathways towards or away from them.  

The internal “I’ll be happy when” dialogue is now a red flag for me.  It’s the first recognizable sign that I’m not present.  Presence, I believe, is the only antidote to stress.  At the end of October I made the decision that I’d no longer be stressed about how long the truck build would take to complete.  I acknowledged the fact that we’re preparing to spend the longest duration of time we’ve ever spent living in our Four Wheel Camper and that in a few months I’d inevitably be craving all the comforts of our travel trailer that I was currently taking for granted.  That realization allowed me to feel gratitude every time I turned on the faucet, every time I took a shower, every time I settled into our comfy couch to watch a show at the end of the night.  All comforts that we were preparing to leave behind.  Almost immediately after choosing to make this shift in my mindset, a palpable sense of calm washed over me.  

The future is and will always be a figment of our imagination.  The here and now is the only thing that is real and therefore the only time that we can experience true joy and inner peace.  If we attach our positive emotions to future events, we’re bound to be caught in a trap of perpetual pursuit of those emotions.  

In the last week all the pieces of the puzzle that is our new truck configuration have finally come together.  While it’s been a process and we could not be more excited to begin our journey south, the opportunity for this mindset shift is  one that I’m grateful for.  If I didn’t take the time to remember how to be present I easily could have carried my anxious mindset in to the winter and as a result been unable to fully embrace all the experiences that we’ve worked so hard to have.  Though, even more important than that is this…  If our ambitious plans for traveling around Mexico this winter don’t work out for some reason (because you never know when life has another thing coming) I won’t be resentful for how much time, effort, and money was put into planning and preparing.  Because in the planning and preparing I found so much to be grateful for and I know I’ll continue to have that ability even when life takes an unexpected turn.  That’s the beauty of being present.