Vanlife Vignettes

New Podcast, nomadic living & working on wheels!

Hello everyone!
I’ve just landed on the North tip of Spain after ferrying Donna (my camper van) across the Celtic Sea to Santander.

I’m nestled in a little gully in Mioño and desperately finishing off some Reels for the new podcast with Arvid Kahl.

1. TODAY’S PODCAST

In today’s Podcast we explore Arvid’s story; from securing a million-dollar exit for his business to social isolation to reinventing himself through creativity.

With two books released and an audience of 120,000 Twitter followers, Arvid shares everything he’s learnt, packing this episode with life lessons.

In other good news, the Podcast is continuing to exceed all expectations, and this week charted in South Africa on the Apple Podcast Charts!

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2. VAN LIVING AND WORK-CATION

Like many of us, I’m grabbing onto this final chapter of summer, and wondering where on earth the time went.

My love of the van is its capacity to slow time, and yet processes already set in motion are chasing me.

On Tuesday I have a podcast with James Victore, who wrote Feck Perfuction - one of my favourite books on creative process.

Then in Berlin, I have three back-to-back music videos to shoot for clients in early September, meaning that this will very much be a workcation.

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

Søren Kierkegaard

One of the wonders of the van though, is that it necessitates a different way of life.

Each day comes with its own calling, and your “busyness” will just have to fit around that.

The hierarchy of things is clear and the basics require a little more attention than in everyday life:

• a place to stay

• supplies to gather

• a van to maintain.

Having disembarked after the 20-hour journey, I’m ready to give myself over to “Being”.

I was about to write “being vs doing” when it struck me how we make a competition of the two; as if each must be compartmentalised.

My journey in life is an effort to deconstruct the notion that to be ambitious you must carve off part of yourself.

Every manual about “success” is packed with the need for sacrifice, the need to “grind”, and the implication that you are “not enough” unless you are torturing yourself.

Codswallop.

Yes, the riches of the world may be won with a nineteenth Century playbook. But the question you have to ask is if you’re willing to use another’s playbook.

What about writing your own?

What about that power in you which can’t be accessed through expedience?

Some things cannot be yielded through pragmatism alone.

It is this space the legislators of the world have forgotten.

And it is this space which calls me.

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3. EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY

What about not knowing?

It’s in the times without purpose that life fills with meaning.

I know this when I see my family, when I spend time with friends, and when I ask nothing back from the mystery.

And then my thoughts pivot, and I think different; as if I’d drunk from a different version of myself.

To grapple with the void, our lifeline is often our purpose, our mission, our goal.

It’s also a defence mechanism; defending us from being here.

How funny, that we build our values on being anywhere other than here…

And so, in the first miles of a new journey, I will sit back a while. And watch while my mind see-saws, arguing with itself over its competing approaches to reality.

Once it’s done, an old friend will arrive.

Peace.

That state between the this-ism and that-ism.

And which reveals the things I live to taste:

The icy shock of the Atlantic.
The thrum of the guitar as a chord strikes.
The taste of a cool beer after the sun passes its point of melting.
The unexpected pitter-patter of rain on the roof as you drift off to sleep.
The taking of a road because today no maps are needed.

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As ever, thank you for your support, dear friends. I hope you’re having a beautiful summer.

Please give yourself the gift of unplugging. The light doesn’t go out, just finds a way to burn of its own nature…

With love,
Jim

“It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.”

Alan Watts