Following on from my last post about Looking For Utopia, here’s what else I’ve learned about myself during this exploration:

1. I’ve noticed that no matter where I am, when things get really difficult (kids, health, food – i.e. sourcing healthy food and cooking from scratch, exhaustion, etc.) my knee-jerk reaction is to get out of there and go to the other place. If I’m in White Rock, then I think, “Well if I was in Playa del Carmen, this wouldn’t be happening because x, y, z. So I need to get to Playa and everything will be okay.” And then vice versa. When I get frustrated, exhausted, or angry here in Playa, my automatic assumption is that changing the location (going home) will bring relief, solve the problem.

2. I’m here in the Caribbean Mayan Riviera and there are atill times when I’m cold.

3. The kids are no easier to take care of here in Playa where they are able to go outside all the time. You see, in White Rock, the kids are so much easier to take care of in the summer, than in the winter. Because when they get ratty in the house, I take them outside to the yard and presto, everyone is great.

So I had assumed that if we lived somewhere the weather was nice, the kids would be so much easier to take care of and my life would get a lot easier.

But now I’m realizing that one of the reasons they’re so happy outside in White Rock is that our yard is very well set up; trampoline, swingset, slide, monkey bars, garden for planting things, mini soccer field with nets, rope swing, and a next-door neighbour with kids similar ages who also have a trampoline – so they can jump in unison. Plus the kids can just climb over the fence and go back and forth between the houses.

Our Big Backyard (trampoline is now in the back left corner)

Here’s The Tramp – the safest one on the market, well worth the money

Here, all they can do is wander around the common area and swim in the pool. Granted, this is very fun and special. However, they can’t just swim for six hours a day. So they get bored. And yes, if we built our own house here on a double lot, we could reproduce what we’ve got at home – the construction of which would take about two years.

Playa Rental House Backyard

Here’s the bottom line: No matter where we are, the kids need a MIX of activities and pace to keep them from getting bored and fighting. For example, on any given day they need a mix of all the following activities: play inside, play outside (or even just a walk to the shops or through the forest), playdates with other kids, or a play-based activity, downtime (videos, books, Nintendo DS), helping with food prep (which they enjoy) and eating.

4. The kids are not healthier here, living in the sun, than in the rain and dark of White Rock. Again, I had assumed that if they got lots of exposure to sunlight every day, it would prevent them from getting sick. However, changes of weather here – from hot to cooler and windy – produce colds just as quickly as weather changes back home. In fact, due to the poor diet, swimming in chlorinated pools and not sleeping as well, the kids have actually been sicker here than they are back in White Rock. In one month we’ve had two of them with colds, three earaches (probably would have developed into full-blown infections if I didn’t have my miracle eardrops with me), and a fever with gastritis. Geez, now that I’ve written it all down – I realize this is about as much illness as we get in six to eight months back in White Rock!

5. Language fluency is more important with kids. Because you need to get everything set up FAST. And you need to get problems solved (i.e. no gas, hot water, etc.) immediately. Or else life is extremely difficult and NOT fun.

6. Two weeks after we arrived, the kids told me that home, their bedrooms/stuff, friends, soccer, school, gymnastics, etc. are more important to them than warm weather and being able to go outside. Again, yes, we could re-create all that here. But realistically (having moved countries several times), this would take about a year. Yesterday – four weeks after we first arrived – my eldest son, Oscar, said that it’s way more fun here because you can go outside all the time and there’s so much more to do here, so it’s better than all the stuff we have at home. Uurgh. So this morning I asked both Oscar and Zara, “Ok, where would you rather live full-time; here in Playa or in White Rock?” They both said White Rock, because it scored higher for them than Playa del Carmen.

At the end of it all, it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that it’s impossible to try out living somewhere. Business gurus and success coaches always encourage you to eliminate the word “try” from your vocabulary – because it’s meaningless and just sets you up for failure by giving you an easy out. Either do it, or don’t do it.

When I think back over all the countries/cities I’ve lived in, I wouldn’t select any one of them to live in if I’d tried them first. We get back to my previous post about the deal-breakers. Every place has at least one big deal-breaker. It’s what you then do with it that determines your experience.

It’s like living together to see how it goes before you get married. That’s never made any sense to me, since the two states of being have very little in common. It’s like saying, I’ll try on this pair of pants to see if I like that sweater. Huh? Exactly. Trying things out, whether it’s marriage, or living in a place, have very little in common with actually getting married or moving there.

Because without the commitment, there is a completely different energy, attitude and thought process that accompanies the activity. Since thought creates reality, your thoughts/energy/attitude will seriously impact and determine the outcome of any given scenario.

So, having said all that, do I wish we had just bought a house and moved here, rather than renting this house for six weeks first? No. Because here’s the nebulous, wriggly thing that’s really mucking me about: I cannot identify the reason why, but Vancouver/White Rock is some kind of spiritual home for us. Whenever we go away, there is this annoying, persistent energetic/spiritual pull back to the place. For seven months of the year, for about ten years, we’ve done nothing but moan about living there (because of the weather). But whenever we leave it, we feel a longing to return and nothing feels ‘right’ about trying to live elsewhere.

Anyone have any insights? If so, please post your comment below…..

Jini

Vancouver

I live in a place that is absolutely fantastic, except for one big problem: the weather. Here in Vancouver, Canada it is rainy, dark and depressing for about eight months of the year. For me, that is a long time without sun and no, I’m not one of those hardy Canadians who gets on all the rain gear and goes hiking and mountain biking in the midst of it anyway.

So, for the last eleven years, I have been trying to find a way to escape Vancouver during the dark, wet winter months.

I started by selling my telecommunications company and setting up a new company that was completely Internet-based. My husband later joined me in this company and then he also started another Internet-based company. So we are both fully mobile. All we need to live and work anywhere in the world is a phone and high-speed Internet connection.

What amazing freedom! people say. You can live anywhere in the world, why do you live here? Yes, why indeed?

We then moved about an hour east of Vancouver, along the coast to a smaller town called White Rock. Ten minutes from the U.S. border (where our warehouse is located), White Rock receives substantially more sun than Vancouver and being further away from the mountains, the pressure from the cloud cover is also not so strong.

White Rock

Okay, great, now we were down to only about… seven months of rain and darkness per year.

Well shortly after that, I became pregnant and started having babies. Along with that went homebirths, extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, unprocessed organic meals and all the other fundamentals of raising emotionally and physically healthy children.

Every time we would get ready to leave Canada, I would get pregnant again. So three children and ten years later, our youngest is now two and a half and we are finally in a position to get out of White Rock.

But we have not been idle in the meantime, oh no. We have made one to six month forays to a number of hot places to research and see if we could live there; Kaui, Hawaii, Barbados, Antigua, Turks & Caicos, Singapore, Arizona, Florida, California, Puerto Vallarta, Loreto and Playa del Carmen.

But guess what? Every single one of those places had something wrong with it that was serious enough to be a “deal-breaker”. Either there wasn’t any decent schooling, or no organic food, or rampant pesticide use and pollution, or undeveloped infrastructure (i.e. no decent Internet connection), or too expensive, or overcrowded, or unsafe guns, drugs and politics (hmmm which ‘civilized’ country could I be referring to here?), or any combination of the above.

As I write this, we are visiting Playa del Carmen, on the Mayan Riviera in Mexico (about one hour south of Cancun) for the fifth time. However, the longest we have stayed previously is three weeks and each time we have stayed at an all-inclusive resort. So this time we are staying in a house that we have rented for two months, so we can live like locals. Playa del Carmen came the closest to our requirements out of everywhere we’ve been, so we came down here to give it a trial and see about buying our own house here.

Playa Del Carmen

There are not one, but two Waldorf schools here to choose from – one of which promises an unprocessed organic lunch for the kids every day. There are gorgeous white sand beaches, cenotes, nature reserves, wireless high speed Internet (so you get the speed, but you also get the radiation), oodles of restaurants, Sam’s Club and even a massive Wal-Mart. What more could we want?

Well, here’s the big problem: I don’t know where the school is getting it’s daily organic lunch from, but I have been unable to find organic food anywhere in this town. Thinking I was being really smart, I went to a restaurant called 100% Natural and asked them where they purchased their food – are they buying from local farmers, or have some sort of special arrangement set up? Their answer: We buy everything from Wal-Mart.

As a health writer, I know that our food intake is the cornerstone of health and wellness. And I have always fed my family unprocessed, organic food, cooked from scratch. Yes, this is a tremendous amount of work, but I feel strongly that it is crucial for both optimal development in children and ongoing health.

I’ve been here two weeks and to be honest, I don’t think I want to subject us to this level of chemicals for more than a month, maximum. For example, it is impossible to buy bread that doesn’t contain preservatives and dough conditioners – let alone organic and whole grain. You can’t even buy unprocessed tortillas – oh, scratch that, I finally did find non-chemical tortillas in the freezer section of one store. The ‘butter’ is some strange hybrid of butter and vegetable oil and all the milk is all UHT pasteurized.

The largest organic food supplier in Playa is indeed Wal-Mart and it offers one whole shelf of organic food, which consists mostly of bottled, concentrated juices.

High-speed Internet is everywhere. However, this is my first experience with wireless Internet as I have purposely avoided it due to the detrimental electromagnetic radiation (the same reason I rarely use a cell phone).

If you build your own house, you can get it wired for cable during construction of the cement walls, but otherwise, you are mostly stuck with wireless. The hotel three minutes away has wireless access – we can get on the web there and download emails, but for some reason can’t send them. The restaurant ten minutes walk away also has wireless and from there we can send our emails. But in both places the speed and reliability is nowhere near that of my cable Internet connection back home in White Rock.

Then there’s the cost. Part of the lure of a place in Mexico was the idea that we could live here for a fraction of what it would cost us in North America. And indeed, there are places in Mexico where that is true. But here’s the catch-22; if the infrastructure is well-developed (roads, sewage, water, electricity, schooling, internet, telephones, cable, etc.) then the city is no longer cheap. In fact, our monthly bills here would be pretty similar to what we’re currently paying in Canada.

My Mum and Dad are visiting this week and my father said something very interesting to me: “The problem is not where you live,” he said to me, “the problem is your discontent. You’re never contented, no matter where you are.”

And he’s right. No matter where I am, there is always a “deal-breaker”. In White Rock, it’s the weather. Otherwise everything – and I do mean everything – is perfect. So I guess the better question might be: Which “deal-breaker” am I going to compromise on? Which deal-breaker am I going to turn around and find a way to make it work, regardless?

Do we want to build our own house in Playa del Carmen and have it wired for cable? FedEx all our organic, grass-fed meat, eggs and raw dairy in every two weeks and start an organic vegetable garden, or contract with a farmer for the rest? And what would that cost us?

Or do we want to continue taking lots of vitamin D and cod liver oil during the winter? And turn our front living room into a solarium; with a wall of full-spectrum light panels, an infrared sauna, lots of tropical plants, a fountain and separate heating system so it mimics a hot, tropical place we can visit for an hour or two per day and reap the health benefits? And then we just go away to hot countries for three weeks at Christmas and three weeks at Spring Break (thereby not mucking up the kids’ schooling). And what would that cost us?

Utopia may not exist. But I have always lived and thought “outside the box” and pursued an extraordinary, exciting life. Granted, with five different people now in our family – each of us having our own needs and desires – this has gotten a lot more complex. However, we do have enough similarities, along with the respect and intimacy necessary to figure it out.

Watch this space….