September 28, 2011:
Skipped today – took mom to
Philly, spent the day in the car! Listened to 1/3 of Eva Gabrielsson’s book
about Stieg Larsson. Sat in the car and got inspired by the This American Life episode on the
un-reality of money while mom got her MRI in Collegeville. Inspired me to do
the Dane story with that angle – no money, lots of passions. Speaking of which…
Angle #1 (?): If money is imagined, then what is the point in chasing
it…?
I’ve known Dane my entire life.
We played Little League against each other. Both of our dad’s were our
respective team’s coaches. Dane and I spent high school together. Freshman
year, 4 weeks into our first high school experience, Dane convinced me to quit
the Spanish class and come join him in Herr K’s German class. My school was small,
and we only had two options for languages, and only one teacher for each. Dane
just said ‘there’s something different about Herr K, you have to take his class.’ It took a meeting with the guidance
counselor, who was confused, as I was getting A’s in Spanish. I could only tell
him it ‘felt right.’ He let me switch, on a hunch.
Dane and I went on to enjoy
several year’s of Herr K. We learned German, for sure, but his class was more
about life. It was about discipline (he once gave the ‘silent treatment’ to the
other German 2 section for over a month, speaking only German to them, as he
felt they had disrespected him). It was about hard work. It was about passion.
Dane and I learned all of these
things in spades, and the lessons stayed with us. We left high school, andboth
graduated from Penn State. Dane was heavily recruited to play football at
several Division 2 and 3 schools, but chose PSU to join the track team. He was
state champ in shot-put and a defensive end on the football team our senior
year. I was captain of the golf team.
Neither Dane nor I followed a
typical path in college, instead choosing subjects that interested us. After
several semesters ‘finding myself,’ I ended up with a minor in history
basically by default. I didn’t choose to major in it simply because I ran out
of interesting classes to choose from one semester and picked something else.
Dane was also a history buff, and combined this with religious studies,
philosophizing between practices with the track team.
I got the travel bug. Summer
after my sophmore year, I took off and went to Costa Rica for a month to travel
and do volunteer work. It was a test of sorts to see if I could spend a lot of
time away from home, which I hadn’t done to that point. Spring of junior year,
after deciding that traveling was indeed for me, I went to Australia to study
tourism management in Brisbane, at the University of Queensland. On the way, I
stayed 10 days in New Zealand, vowing to return to what quickly became my
favorite place on earth.
After college, Dane and I lost
touch. We’d meet for the occasional beer when we were back in Leesport, but
went months or even years without saying a word to each other. But we read each
others blogs, and this is significant.
Then, I was writing for pleasure,
for myself, just about my experiences. I went back to New Zealand in 2006,
after graduating from PSU with a BS in Tourism Management and a minor in
History, and before starting a ‘real job’ as a sales agent for a company in
Annapolis that ran a sailboat for tourists, and for which I had worked on as
sailing crew for a while in the summer. That trip, two months this time, was
when I met the woman who is now my wife, a 6’ tall, blonde Swede named Mia.
Dane hitch-hiked across Canada.
He had a dream of making the Olympics as a shot-putter, and wanted to train
with [name], who lived in Kamloops, near the west coast. His stories of
catching rides with guys halfway through a case of beer are both scary and
enlightening. When not training, or talking about it, Dane was a bouncer at a
local pub. He chuckled when a girl tried to pass off a fake PA ID – he denied
her, she complained, and he promptly produced his real PA ID, at which point
she politely asked for hers back and left the premises.
Dane’s pilgrimage to Canada and
mine to New Zealand did not change our lives, but they solidified our
worldviews and gave us the inspiration to chase our dreams. In the five years
that followed, up to the present, Dane, after failing at his Olympic bid, has
carved a niche in the athletic training world, opening the world’s first and
only gym that raises and sells its own food. The gym, called Garage Strength,
after first opening in his parents garage, is now house in an 18th
century barn, with climbing ropes hanging from the ceiling, kettlebells lining
the walls and high school freshman girls doing pull-ups and powerlifting
exercises. Out back, his 130 hens lay eggs daily, and Dane stores them in a
large wire basket you’d normally see at a golf driving range. Dane has over 70
regular clients and hasn’t had a job since 2009.
I started writing professionally
a year after that first trip. Thanks in part to Dane’s encouragement from
having read my travel blog, I started sending articles into magazines, and they
started getting published. Mia and I worked professionally on sailboats, doing
yacht deliveries up and down the east coast and running adventure travel
programs for teenagers in the Caribbean. This summer, we sailed our own boat –
our only possession, and our home – from the Chesapeake Bay to Ireland,
fulfilling a dream and getting a lot of writing material in the process.
Both Dane and I have interesting
stories, but it wasn’t until today that I realized how I was going to pitch it.
After listening to the money episode of TAL – which only confirmed some notions
that I have held for years – I realized that there is a logical continuation on
that thesis – if money is inherently imaginary, what then is the point of
pursuing it? Dane and I seemed to have figured that out long ago, and yet were
never really aware of it. We just did things we were passionate about, and the
money (though not a lot of it) followed.
