Life is indeed short. Take the vacation.
Being frugal is exhausting.
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To enjoy life is infinitely easier than to live a life of regret. I am now of a certain age where I can look back and identify a few, but I’m also of an age where I can still be in control—not of life itself, but how I decide to live it.
While driving back from a visit with one of our kids this past weekend, I turned to Mark from the passenger seat and said, “it’s exhausting being so frugal all the time.”
He just nodded quietly, eyes fixed on the road. “Yup.”
We had just gone grocery shopping. One month into being childless at home, I was curious to see where our monthly spend in food would land so I could readjust our household budget. I started doing calculations in my head, but I stopped myself and screamed internally, enough!
Frugality is usually born out of necessity, but it’s also a lifestyle choice. Sometimes you grow so accustomed to living this way that it becomes second nature to constantly comparison shop, to deliberate in front of grocery shelves, to pull that item from your cart and place it back wistfully. Twenty years of stretching our dollars with mindful, careful spending and in that moment in the car, I felt like throwing it all out the window.
But I know I won’t because I still need to live in reality, and the reality of now is that being employed after 50 is an unpredictable rollercoaster of a journey (more on that soon). After more than twenty five years of frugal living, I suddenly felt tired of the mental gymnastics of it all. Don’t we deserve to enjoy life a little more? Wasn’t that the whole point of pushing ourselves through multiple jobs? The scarcity mindset that ensnarls with its tentacles, however, often has a grip that is stronger than you can reason with.
At the farmers market on Sunday, I bought an heirloom tomato for five bucks. It was one of those gnarly, knotty tomatoes that, when you pick it up to inspect, nearly oozes from ripeness in your hand. Five dollars is an absurd price for a single piece of produce, but I didn’t care. I was going to savor every juicy slice, cut as thinly as possible with a knife, to satiate my current obsession: slices of tomato placed on pieces of good bread, slathered with mayo, and generously sprinkled with ground pepper and salt. It feels like an act of protest from my typical frugal instincts. It sounds stupid, but I think about this as I stand there in the kitchen, eating my open-faced, $.75 cents per slice, tomato sandwich.
The golden years of travel
Watching our parents age is a forecast into our possible future. This is likely why it’s so hard to see our parents grow old because we’re confronted with a mirror that reflects back at us, a glimpse into our future. I have to keep reminding myself that to some extent, we can steer a path towards avoidance or embrace acceptance of what we witness as we watch them age. The choice is ours.
After taking significant trips last year, both our mothers have decided their traveling days are over. Trips that were planned were canceled this year. Having spent the better part of a decade caring for their spouses through illness and death, they now find the physical and mental strain of navigating airports and travel too taxing. While our mothers have generally made peace with it, there are some regrets that items on their bucket lists will never be checked off.
I don’t want to have regrets that I didn’t explore the world enough.
When I think back through the years, the memories that are the fondest always involve travel. We didn’t do that as a family much when I was a child—just weekend trips a few hours away by car where we rented adjacent motel rooms with extended relatives, but as a kid it didn’t matter. The memories made from those vacations had little to do with where we went, but how we spent them.
When I reminisce about their childhoods with my kids, we remember the plates of pasta that we inhaled in Bologna or the fancy drinks with the tiny umbrellas by the beach in Hawaii. Travel destinations that didn’t involve visits to see family were few and far between, but it was enough to make them curious about the world and pine for more.
I'm already seeing that there's a sweet spot for travel, after the kids are grown but before physical limitations make it harder to do it the way I want—which is walking miles and miles to immerse myself in nature or city, concrete or dirt, and taking every bit of it in. But now, even at 54, I notice I get tired more easily than before. It doesn’t matter if I’m planning a day at the museum or running errands around the city—it all takes a toll too fast now. I no longer have confidence that I can comfortably do a day-long hike; I feel like my body with my ruptured discs would betray me.
All three of the fathers in our family died in their mid-70s and battled various illnesses for the last ten years of their lives. That is just twenty years away from where I am, and only ten-ish years when they were still healthy. Ten years! That is all that separates me from the age when they started their physical and cognitive declines. Suddenly, I feel the edges of my mortality sharpen like knives.
I open a browser window and punch in dates for a flight that I’ve deliberated endlessly for months, a trip that we had to cancel during the pandemic, but never rescheduled.
I hit the purchase button.
Rather than panic at the amount of money spent for four airline tickets overseas, I feel relief.
A sort of related past newsletter
Weekly drawing
I took a break from drawing this summer because I wasn’t inspired at all, but weekly drawings may be back. I don’t know. I’m still uninspired. I think I periodically draw to make sure I can still do it, which is a dumb reason to draw.
A few things of interest this week
Travel could be the best defense against aging (Science Daily)
Oh, what’s that you say?Culinary Class Wars (Netflix)
We’re completely hooked on this Korean reality show. I haven’t watched a cooking competition in awhile, but there’s enough fresh takes on this genre that I’ve never felt edge-of-my-seat suspense over a cooking show before. The caliber of chefs is impressive and the production values and sets are truly mind-boggling.Doug Wheeler: Day Night Day (David Zwirner Gallery)
If you’re in NYC in the next few weeks, it’s worth a visit to Doug Wheeler’s new installation in Chelsea. I don’t want to give anything away, but my sense of spatial perception was totally challenged and surprised. I’m still thinking about it.How Our Diet and Culinary Heritage Informs the Way We Speak Iheoma Nwachukwu on Food, Language and the Immigrant Experience (Literary Hub)
“Food can act as a receptacle of memory and language, drawing one back into early childhood.” It’s no wonder we speak about the food when we remember our past vacations.
So excited for your upcoming travel, Jenna!
We recently booked flights for my mom to stay with us in California for a six weeks. She was reluctant to agree to it at first because we just saw her back in China a few weeks ago and she was in California this January. Then my husband said, we need to free ourselves from the mindset (that we had while we were still in school) that we only see family once a year - just because we live across the ocean.
My mother who has long been deceased dreamt of seeing so many countries and foreign places. She wanted me to tag along because of my average speaking Spanish, and my use of technology. She passed at 55, and I still check plane tickets of where she’d like to have gone.
If you do go to Korea with your family, I highly recommend flying on Air Premia business cause it is pretty solid flying for how much leg room you can get. (Sister flew out of New Jersey last minute to Korea for 1200 on economy!) Trade off is they don’t give you as many meals vs Asiana/Korean Air.
Whenever and wherever you go, you’ll have a wonderful time. ❤️