Episode 054 – You Gotta Go To Know

Change. I’m not talking about the currency. I’m talking about the event. The moment in time. You move into a new house. You become a parent. Attached when you’ve been unattached or the reverse. 

Movement. Adjustment. Expected and unexpected. The Transition Process that comes before, during or after the change. 

How do you manage the upheaval? Do you find yourself accepting or resisting?

Welcome to episode 54, the last of season 4 and man, I don’t know how to begin this one. 

Change is in the air. 

Baja summer is making her graceful exit. October is just around the corner. It’s happening so fast but that seems to be how it works. 

That’s how it works with us as well. 

Once we decide to do something, bang… we’re in it. 

There’s no grace period. No long, drawn out discussions; let’s wait and see what happens. 

It just happens. 

A switch gets flipped. As if, while I was focused on the bright shiny object, pushing the boulder up the hill, use whatever analogy you like – things on the periphery – the things that really matter – begin to conspire to get my attention. 

And all of a sudden, what made no sense makes perfect sense. What I viewed as chaos was really transition. 

The transition leading up to the moment in time; where we said things like, stay the course, things’ll work out. It will all work out. 

Once things start to ramp up and the tectonic plates of life start to actuallly move; it’s only at that point, I’m able to glance back and say, ah… that’s what that was all about. 

Context: Back in 2012, Melody and I quit our jobs, sold the house and almost everything we owned to move onto a 35 foot sailboat. We wanted simpler. Something completely different. 

There was a lot of uncertainty. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of uncertainty, it was all uncertain. There wasn’t an ounce of certainty to be found anywhere. Not only were we jumping into the abyss with both feet, we were bringing a dog. We had no safety net. 

But, it worked out and we set sail into our new life, unsure of everything except one thing. We knew we were headed for the Chesapeake Bay. That’s all we knew. 

Now, I won’t bore you with the stories of bad weather, shredded sails, tears and unexpected breakdowns that exhausted our emergency fund in less than 6 months. It’s the same story as every sailing couple before and since. 

And… just like every other sailing couple, we started a blog called mondovacilando.com to chronicle those same stories of triumph and tragedy.  

In February of 2014, in an attempt to answer the pressing questions from some of our followers, a longwinded blog post turned into a 50 page book called, You Gotta Go To Know. 

I was simply trying to explain to people that we weren’t trust fund kids and we didn’t hit the lottery. We were still working while, at the same time, trying to live out a dream while we were young and crazy enough to try it.

I wanted to do then what I’m still trying to do today, inspire people to follow their dream. However that looks. Sappy… I know. I’m guilty. 

The premise was this: 

We can all speculate about the things in front of us. We can all say, geez, I wonder what would happen if… fill in the blank. If I opened my own business. If I went back to school. If I got back into photography. 

And if your not careful, I wonder can lead you to one of my least favorite words, Someday. Someday I’ll open my own business. Someday I’ll go back to school.

Feel me?  

You see, you’ll never truly know the outcome of the thing until you do the thing.

You gotta go to know. 

I had never written and self-published a book before and I remember telling Melody, if we sell 50 copies, I’ll be stoked. 

Well, we sold 750 copies the first month and it was an Amazon best-seller for about 7 months straight.

But this episode is not about the book. It’s about the premise, You Gotta Go To Know. 

Because that kinda became the mantra. Whenever I’ve been faced with a big decision, I usually end up falling back on that sentiment…We gotta go find out for ourselves. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll adjust the course. We’ll make a change. 

Change and transition have been our bedmates for the last 10 years. I used to tell people when I did my speaking engagments, pre-Covid… that we were really good at handling change. And… that wasn’t a lie. We are good. 

But it never gets easier. We are just better at ripping off the band-aid. And we’ve had to do it a couple of times in the last few years. 

In January, 2019, we moved back to the states after living in Guatemala and Mexico for a few years. My father’s health began to decline. We talked about getting an apartment and settling down, changing everything we were used to which, in hindsight, what we were used to was operating in a mild state of chaos all the time. 

Chasing wifi. Meeting deadlines. Working all the time in less than idea environments. Adjusting for the challenges that come with living and working in remote locations. 

In April of 2019, we lost my dad and spent the summer on the boat on the bay. A lot of things were changing. Dad was gone. Mel’s parents were gone. Our dog was almost blind and we didn’t want to sail with him anymore. It wasn’t fair. 

So we put the boat on the hard for winter and in November, just prior to the election, we drove to Baja. 23 days. We saw family and friends. We camped in National Parks, we spread Mel’s parents ashes in the Grand Canyon… I don’t know if that’s legal…

It was amaizing. 

We got to Baja and made fast friends, good friends. Genuinely beautiful friends. 

March 2020. Covid. 

Our friendship circle in Baja remained tight. The community rallied around each other. It was incredible to be a part of. We loved it so much, we stayed and we’ve been here ever since. 

The chaos kinda settled. We rented our place and you know how that goes. Landlords get kooky and sometimes you gotta make another change but nothing big. Nothing like the changes we’d been coping with for the last ten years.

We could do this in our sleep. It’s just an apartment. We’re not transiting international waters with a dog… now, you wanna talk about hard shit… it just might be easier to get a full-fleged nuclear weapon into Mexico than a Dutch Shepherd but I digress. 

All of this to say, back on March 1, in Episode 27, I talked about the power of story with a capital “S”. Your story, my story. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves. 

We tell these stories to make sense out of the chaos. They organize our experiences and shape our reality. 

March 1 was also happened to be the day I began to change my entire life by changing my habits. I began walking every morning and completely changed my diet. I stopped drinking. I actively started to rewrite my narrative. 

In April, Episode 33: The Essentials, focused on the shift that occurs in our lives every seven years. Philosopher Rudolff Steiner created the map of human development to explain it more clearly. I confessed that I was feeling the effects of current shift I was in and said, quite openly that I didn’t know what to make of it. I’ve been thinking about that episode a lot lately.  

This transition… I can use that word now because it’s clear to me that it was indeed the beginning of the transition, started on way back on Christmas Eve and it’s continued without wavering. 

On May 24, I posted the last episode of season 3, episode 39: The Pain of Progress. I was convinced the show was done. I wasn’t going to make my year anniversary. I was uninspired and it just felt like everything I was doing was crap. There was nothing subtle about the upheaval I was experiencing.

If I was entering into a period of enlightenment as Steiner suggested, if this was to be my intuitive phase, I didn’t feel it. 

I took the break between seasons believing there wouldn’t be a season 4.

But… I kept walking. Every morning. I started working with a voice and acting coach. I keep telling myself that there had to be something I was missing. Something right in front of my face that I wasn’t seeing. Analyzing and critiquing. Every day, telling myself, you’re just not working hard enough.

That’s why this isn’t coming together. Book more coaching sessions. Do more outreach. Write better scripts. Work harder. 

This is my story. The story I tell myself. 

You know, I’ve spoken a lot on this show about how I personally believe that when we’re in times of need or searching, the universe tries to help us along with subtle and not-so-subtle clues. 

Trouble is, most of us miss these clues because we’re mired in whatever personal recession is hitting us at the time. I’ll admit, I’ve missed a few but, thankfully, I haven’t missed them all. 

These past nine months have been amazing. They’ve been frustrating, illuminating, perplexing, and honestly, terrifying at times. 

I’m reminded once again of my soccer coach who I’ve mentioned before. The one who told me that we didn’t need three goals to win, we needed one goal, three times… 

He used to walk along the sideline spinning a shiny chrome whistle around his index finger, and when we made a mistake on the field during practice or if I got scored upon because I was out of position, Coach Winfrey would yell, when you forget the lesson, the lesson will be retaught. 

Well, it appears I’ve forgotten the lesson…  

You see, we can all speculate about what’s in front of us. But speculation is just procrastination disguised as action. 

We have to decide. Is it one day or… day one. You gotta choose or it’ll choose you. 

And to truly discover the outcome of a situation well, you gotta go to know. 

And… sometimes – you gotta go back. 

Hey, thanks for listening. 

We’ll take a short break and be back with Season 5. If you miss me, don’t be a stranger. Leave me a voice message or shoot me an email. I answer all of ‘em.  

And in case you didn’t know, all past episodes live full time at themindunset.com. If you wanna listen again or hear something you missed, that’s the place. 

And while you’re there, if you’re not on the email list, click the big orange button. If you like the show, tell your friends. That’s how we grow.

I’ll be back before you know it. I hope you will too. Until then, be nice. Do good stuff.