Living on the Top of a Hill

There is a free spirit in all of us that screams out to express itself in our lives. That yells out to us to do something that everyone else will tell us is crazy or insane or makes no sense to them. And sometimes, we actually do that thing, whatever happens to be "our thing," because it is something we simply have to do, if our lives are make any sense to us.

A very good friend of mine lived all his life in cities. He was city boy if anyone was. Norman and his family had lived in Houston, Miami Beach, Oklahoma City and Denver. He had been an educator for most of his working years. Sherry, his wife, had worked as an office administrator. As they neared retirement age, they told me that that they had bought a piece of land near San Luis, Colorado, which is in the middle of nowhere somewhere near the New Mexico border. Their property wasn't in town, but fifteen or twenty miles away from San Luis and about the same distance from the next nearest town in the opposite direction.

When the time came they moved onto their land and lived in a mobile home, while they built their house. This was a couple of years ago. The house has been framed in and has heat, but they still need to use the bathroom in the mobile home. And they love it where they are. The live at the top of a desert plateau that they share with a couple of deer and horses that come by from time to time.

Norman and Sherry seem to be very happy with their isolation and their having put some distance between themselves and civilization. We ought to applaud them. They are actually doing what they want to be doing, living well outside of what was their comfort zone during the working years of their lives.

I have to tell you, what they have chosen to do makes absolutely no sense to me. I am as urban a person as you are going to find. I am so used to living in a noisy, crowded city with impossible vehicle traffic that I would feel completely out of place in a small town, much less on an isolated, lonely hilltop. I need that fix of hearing people about me and being able to go down the street to the grocery store or the drug store if I need something. A lot of people are like me and need the fix that an urban environment provides. To tell you the truth, I feel alive in a busy, noisy, impossible to live in city. I feel that way here in Houston and I felt the same way when I visited my daughter in London. But that is just me.

Truthfully, how many of us would be willing to give up so many of the creature comforts of our lives? How many of us would walk away from the certainties of our lives and trade them for something unknown and risky? How many of us could deal with the almost absolute quietness and solitude of where Norman and Sherry live? And how many of us would not be completely freaked out by knowing we were at least fifteen or twenty miles from the closest human being?

What they have had the guts to do has forced me to think about things outside the box that I would like to do in my wildest dreams. Taking a couple of years to just travel the world with my wife, letting the wind take us where it does and not planning where we will be two weeks from today... that would be nice. I haven't asked my wife what she would like to do, but I already know she wouldn't even give the question much serious thought. She is, you see, a very practical person. But it has occurred to me, that all things being equal, it would be exhilerating to just set aside all the responsibilities we take on as we get older and just do our thing, without thinking about it too much or asking ourselves if this is the right thing to do. Just thinking about that possibility makes me want to get a little crazy and just sail off into the sunset to see the world, as I have always wanted to do.

In essence, that is what my friends, Norman and Sherry, did. Hats off to them. And, you know, it just might not be so bad to live on the top of a hill, far away from the maddening crowd.