Every other week during 2023 I will be posting an excerpt from my upcoming book, Five Thousand Steps: A Rainy Season in Costa Rica. It is a travelogue of sorts, my journals and observations from my initial three months in Costa Rica along the Guanacaste Coast. I hope you enjoy following the journey. Please send a request by email if you would like to pre-order your copy of the book which will be self-published and released in 2023. Please also consider supporting the release of the book by become a paid subscriber or a donor.
Day 1: The Journey Begins….
My journey to Costa Rica, the Rich Coast, began at 4 AM on a crisp Sunday morning. Like so many of my travels in the past, I was filled with an overload of adrenaline, nerves, lists running through my head of all the things that had to be done, loose ends to tie up, calls and emails to complete. After all of my attempted due diligence and boxes checked off my list, of course I overlooked packing something as simple as my razor. As one discovers, often the hard way, it is the simple things that really matter in Costa Rica, like a razor. Such basic necessities can be hard to come by in such a remote area like Playa Grande, where I will stay for the upcoming three months. I have been asked to manage eight Airbnb rentals for some longtime friends while they travel. As my compensation, I will live on site at the beach during the low season.
As I have discovered over many years, in both in travel and life, less is more. Simplicity is the truest wealth, as Leonardo Da Vinci said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” We so often make life painfully complicated with many things that in the long run just do not matter. When in Costa Rica, I am always reminded once again of how simple and rich life can be with almost nothing.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo Da Vinci
Following a very early wake up and a drive into Austin by my beautiful mother, along with some deeply felt tears and words of goodbye, I was relayed to my good friend Steve, who then drove me on to the airport where we arrived to a very busy scene full of early morning travelers. Already 6am on a Sunday morning, it looked like the end of a Thanksgiving weekend with people and traffic everywhere. I arrived with three suitcases packed to 50 pounds of capacity, two of them full of gear for my friends… drills, grinders, etc. My early arrival did not prepare me for the check in fiasco that was about to ensue. A medical form was needed to enter Costa Rica which I had to fill out on the fly by logging into the website for Southwest Airlines. Three of the attendants at Southwest were helping me frantically in order to make my flight on time.
One of the attendants with Southwest was extremely kind and was very helpful to me and allowed me to check my third bag for free amidst all of the pandemonium. As it turned out, one of my bags was over by 3 pounds and so I was asked to then transfer 3 pounds of luggage into one bag from the other which only added more hilarity in the moment as travelers looked on to the opening of my luggage.
View from the Road
Costa Rica’s English speaking newspaper, The Tico Times, recently began running a column on my travel journals from my first three months in Costa Rica during the rainy season. The column will be an ongoing series through the eyes of my experiences during my first season here along the Guanacaste coast. I hope you enjoy following along.
Field Notes
What our society did to us when we were born was not to allow us to enjoy the nourishing things of life—namely, work, play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind. We were programmed to seek other things, namely approval, acknowledgments, attention, success, status, prestige, accolades, power. We were given a taste for these things like being the captain of the team, president of the student body, homecoming queen, etc. I call them drugs and having a taste for these drugs, we became addicted and began to dread losing them. It turned into the fear of failure, the anxiety of making mistakes, the worry over being criticized or rejected by others. We lost our freedom to be ourselves and now others have the power to make us happy or miserable.
When we are in this state of dependency, we always have to be on our best behavior; we can never let our hair down; we’ve got to live up to expectations. To be in this state involves a never-ending tension. When we are ignored or disapproved of, we experience an unbearable loneliness such that we will crawl back to those people and beg for the comforting drugs of support, encouragement, reassurance. There is rarely a minute when, consciously or unconsciously, we are not attuned to the reactions of others, marching to the beat of their drum.
An accurate definition of an awakened person is someone who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of their own heart’s music. Success, recognition, and approval simply do not mean a thing to them. How do we recover our authentic self?
By developing a taste for the good things in life: the love of work you enjoy doing for the joy of it; the love of laughter and intimacy with people you don’t cling to or depend on emotionally but enjoy simply for the pleasure of their company. It also helps to return to nature. Send the crowds away, go up to the mountains, and silently commune with trees and flowers and animals and birds, with sea and clouds and sky and stars.
-Anthony DeMello
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Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama.
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