right here right now
Why have you decided to stay longer in the US? - a question we've encountered many times as of late and I'm sorry if I haven't been as informative and personal here in the blog this past year, but real life has gotten some well deserved attention. I owed my life that attention after too many years of flaunting my life in the open nothing. To keep things straight and simple, I can go ahead and tell you that the main reason to why we have decided to stay in the US for at least another year is …… (drumroll please) :
$$$
Not so surprised are you.
After four-five years of living and traveling in our floating home aka a sailboat, we felt it was time to get back into some sort of stability mode. Financial stability I'm talking, the sort of stability that comes when you generate enough money to support the life you love living. There has been many ways we've made our living during this journey so far (after we ran out of savings some 1,5-2 years in), but the temporary ways were often only good for a short while. Even though they were fulfilling in their own regards, neither the blog incomes (made approx. $15k annually when blog was most active), or Alex's carbon fiber design and construction ($40-100/hour) were jobs that we truthfully loved doing (blogging full time and having sponsors and daily traffic to promote adds stress to life, and working under scorching hot sun with toxic chemicals has its toll on your health), and so we knew that the only way for us to be able to happily continue sailing around the world or whatever we later decided to do, we definitely needed to find a way to get back to earning dineros in ways that sat good with our souls. Cause we didn't only have us to feed, we had a new/old boat to renovate.
Alex missed the mastering, and I started to get fed up with having to blog when sometimes I had nothing to blog about and all I wanted was to be free from sponsors and ads and live a more discreet life. If you've followed, you know how I slowly began removing one sponsor and collab after another.
Money is not everything in life, but it is needed, period. So when we found ourselves in the neighborhoods (Panama isn't thaaat far from America after all), we figured the US would be the best place in which we could make a decent living, finally fix the boat up completely, and also be able to save up for the future. Because if it's one thing we've learnt during these years on the go, it is that it is not very comfortable nor pleasant to be broke. Especially not when you also live on a boat that is in need of a major renovation. It was the right time to reintroduce financial stability into our lives. And working with the things you love rather than slaving for something you do not quite believe in as much, is a human right and need imo.
Even if New England doesn't offer the best of climates (actually one of the worst places if it's weather we're talking), it just so happened that it introduced us to the perfect set of opportunities. Alex got a splendid deal with the mastering studio from which he freelances today, a studio owned by Jonathan Wyner who's an associate professor at Berklee College of Music and one of the most renowned mastering engineers in the world.
And for myself that always have had a dream of one day opening my very own personable restaurant, I have got the greatest opportunity to explore that field and begin practicing and testing my way to my unique style. You might know it already, but our dear friend who actually was the first one to lure us into coming to visit in New England a couple years ago, is the owner of a larger incubator kitchen space of 4000 sq ft. A place that rents to caterers, chefs and start up food companies, and in which we have built a section for my very first food business. This is how it looks, don't you just love the old fashion maple tree baker's table that we just installed?
I will tell you more later on, but my first intention is to offer simple but healthy, homemade, vegan, organic and non-gmo meals and sweets for take out and delivery in the Southern Boston area. Menu testing, website building and marketing is what I'm up to day and night at the moment, and I can't even begin to explain how wonderful it is to be working on such a meaningful personal project, in such a beautiful, inspiring environment to that. It does (most of the times) make me forget the fact that the vicious cold winter is knocking on the door.
Having seen and felt what life feels and taste like in approx. 50 countries in total (Alex's, mine and our mutual travels combined), America would not be at the top of our dream-locations-for-living list. But again, do we have the same set of opportunities any elsewhere at this moment? Answer to that is a big fat no. Even if our ideal place to live still is somewhere in the Mediterranean, we must also consider the national economy and direct abilities for us to do what we wish to be doing. And from that current viewpoint, this area of the US is really the best for us, for right now. America has many flaws, but it is still the land of opportunities.
If you're a human being of flesh and blood you know that anything is always possible, so we're taking it easy on the planning side of life. For now we're just hoping to keep doing what we love doing, and we're working towards having equal amount of entrepreneurial success, as peace, fluidness and comfort in our everyday life. We still live on the boat and will do so until November I believe. If we lived in a perfect world, we'd live on the boat year round cause that is what home is to us, but there's something called miserable New England winter that comes in between. One winter was definitely enough for the boat and us to be bedded under the snow. Duende should then be back in the water again in April next year.
Isn't life amazing the way it moves and spins you around. I think it's healthy to sometimes step out of your fixed ideas and stop yearning for something else all the time, and just surrender to what's thrown at you. Take a moment and look around, and you might well find yourself right where you are supposed to be.
