Debt free, and Yakushima

As of this afternoon, I am officially both dirt poor, and debt free. It feels...about the same. Maybe it hasn't really hit me yet? More likely the fact that I managed to keep pretty well on top of it prevented me from ever having that drowning feeling which a lot of people have described. The relief is real, just relatively speaking my "relief, from what?" question amounts to a lesser evil.

I think we all have different tolerances for the amount of debt we're comfortable carrying. Mine turns out to be alarmingly low. I have real trouble rationalizing spending any kind of money I don't actually have, and even though the school loans were inevitable, my first impulse once I started rakin' in the teacher yen was to throw everything that was not directly preventing me from starving to death towards no longer having that hanging over my head.

But now I do find myself in an interesting position. No wife, no kids, no great material desires, no real obligations of any kind what so ever. I could get fired tomorrow and be totally fine, as long as I could scrape together enough to not starve, a minimum threshold I tend stay above fairly easily. The board just opened up significantly.

I am free to try some really, truly, wacky and experimental ways of going about living. I guess I always have been, but suddenly it seems a lot more obvious.

So later tonight I'm hopping on an 11 hour ferry ride up to the mainland, finding another ferry down to Yakushima, island of giant-cedar trees, monkeys and deer, and spending a week with no reservations, and no particular plans. It's an exercise in unstructured living, something I have always dreamed of, but tend to get mild panic-tremors when actually faced with a large number of unknowns. Time to go get comfortable being uncomfortable.

I'll be taking photos and maybe even some video the whole way along, but am going internet and media free for the duration. I'm bringing a total of 8 kilos of gear. 1 of those is my pack, 1 is my camera, and 1 is my raincoat. Yakushima is wet. I'm also going in my Fivefingers, which may turn out to be a horrible, horrible mistake when it comes time to scramble up some steep trails, but you know what? I'm tired of trying to plan for every contingency. I'm just going to go explore, and let the adventures, good, bad, weird and unbelievable, happen.

See you in a week and a half. I'll hug a giant-cedar for you.