I enjoyed reading travel writer Paul Theroux’s recent NY Times piece, “The Hard Reality American Expats Quickly Learn” about what it’s like being alone and far away. Theroux says the experience of being an expat early in his life “liberated me, humbled me, revealed to me who I was and what I wanted my life to be, as a writer.” I can relate as I originally decamped to Mexico before we knew The Donald would be our President. I wanted to live there to give myself the room for my writing career to expand (little did I know I’d have a “Baja-aha” and create the world’s first midlife wisdom school).
Theroux continues, “Anyone with money can live abroad. It’s a sort of an extended holiday. The true test of an expatriate is holding down a job, learning a language, paying taxes, passing a local driving test, negotiating the culture, truckling to unbudgeable authority and now and then enduring the gibes of co-workers…There is also an existential, parasitical, rootless quality to being an expatriate, which can be dizzying: You are both somebody and nobody, often merely a spectator. I always felt in my bones that wherever I went, I was an alien. That I could not presume or expect much hospitality, that I had nothing to offer except a willingness to listen, that wherever I was, I had no business there and had to justify my intrusion by writing about what I heard. Most travel, and a lot of expatriate life, can be filed under the heading ‘Trespassing.’”
I think part of the reason I opened MEA right in the middle of my new beachfront home in El Pescadero, Baja California Sur was because it helped me to feel like I was at home. It was both foreign and familiar since 75% of those who joined us at MEA Baja were from the U.S. Having these visitors also solved one of the chief complaints of many Baja expats: it’s an intellectually-stunting existence for many as they lounge on the beach or by the pool day-after-day.
In sum, I love splitting my time between Old Mexico and New Mexico as both places have a vibrant culture and hospitable people.
-Chip