You know when you’re down in the dumps? The feeling you get when you’re late to your first job interview, or even when you’re simply sitting at your boring desk job thinking to yourself, is this really what I went to college for?
You’re starving, then you’re too full.
You’re sad, then your life is so good you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It is this constant anticipation and pressure that pumps through the blood of humans around us that makes life unkempt, unsettled and completely unsatisfying.
I say, that’s bogus.
My brother and his girlfriend have recently become my realistic, everyday heroes. Over the past six months, they have bought, stripped, and pimped out a van that they have decided to travel cross-country in as well as live in full-time.
Within this spectacular vesicle lies a bed, fridge, electricity, a camp stove, as well as solar panels atop the massive blue beast named “Bessie,” or “Up-Chuck,”—name still being decided upon—which provide not only their electricity to charge all electronics, but their fridge, television (for Super Smash Bros gaming of course) and the fan-favorite (pardon the pun)… their fan.
This van is a tank. It is their fortress in which they travel in, it is their refuge from the outside world that tells them that life is, and can only be, average.
Their life is far from that. They have camped out in a camping site in Oregon, and have begun their own entrepreneurial business in which their collaborative and curious minds have collided to produce “We Are Water,” where they make and sell ice tie-dye t-shirts on Etsy.
My brother is the maker behind the riddled madness. He is like the mad hatter, except with more clarity, hilarious spark and wit… and much better hair. He comes up with little snip-its of descriptions of each tie-dye shirt which only adds to each shirt’s originality and one-of-a-kind flare.
For example, him and his girlfriend have come up with names such as “Space Face,” “Swampberry,” “Morning Nebula,” “Curious Clown,” and “Frog n Bog,” all based upon the ideas that flood their brain when they unfold and wring out one of their new creations.
The names of these items completely engulf what my brother and his gal represent to those who are lucky enough to meet them.
They are goons with an unknown dream. But what they do know is that there isn’t time in this life to be restricted by the societal leash. A leash that tightens on the importance of corporate jobs, lots of money and that marriage is the right trifecta everyone must aspire to seek to be carrying out the “American Dream.”
Let me ask you, what makes you want to work your whole life? Is it because you’ve told yourself you’ve wanted to be this or that since you were a kid? Explain to me how you, in your toddler form, were able to comprehend what you wanted to be chained down to your entire life.
Or is it the fear of being a failure? The idea that not getting that internship will ultimately lead you to unemployment, or bankruptcy? I understand those concerns, as the unemployment rate has been climbing, but you must see that even that rationale comes from the societal plague infecting the minds of almost everyone around us.
To me, it’s surprising that so few people are as awake as my brother. So few people have the courage to know that something like a day job is not what they actually want to do in their lives, but rather, is what they’re forced into doing.
Some people, like my brother, know that isn’t what makes them happy, or will be what leads them to fulfillment. He knows a wedding band and a marital contract doesn’t mean anything until our society puts a dollar sign and a dollop full of Daisy benefits right atop their convoluted and back-handed urge to procreate.
What I see in the faces of people when I explain to them what my brother is doing is sometimes excitement, sometimes confusion and sometimes misunderstanding.
What I find most interesting is that my brother and his girlfriend face those people every day, when they tell them what road they are temporarily traveling down in their long and winding path that is supposed to be our life.
Want to know the most common reaction?
Truthfully, they don’t know. Because they are already moving on with their plans and their journey they don’t stay to watch the reactions of others on what they find joy in. They are that sound in their souls that they are doing something for them, not for the next schmuck that wants to contribute his two cents on why living this or that way is “right” or “wrong.”
I find them endearing. I find them to be the most alive people I know. They have grabbed onto an idea that works for them, and they have held on for dear life and have seen it through. They are living.
I want to know what everyone is doing in comparison. What excuse that has everyone cooped up in a cubicle all day that makes this rotating corporate cycle of imprisonment the basis of our society.
Of course we need people to work, to work for others, to work for themselves. But the latter isn’t happening.
In all the people across the country I see something terrifyingly similar: an inability to give an honest reason why they have made the decisions they have without including the pressure society put on them to either “fit in” or to ensure they’re not going against the grain.
And it’s tough to know if we’ll ever figure it out. If we’ll ever get out of this cycle of feeling like we know why we’re doing something in juxtaposition to actually knowing why you are choosing to live out your life in the way you are at this moment in time.
My brother and his gal are the lucky ones. Something clicked in them that is rare and is pure and certain. They do not know their plan, as day to day things change, feelings change and our needs and desires follow along with them. That’s what’s so great about them, is no matter what they feel one day or another, the acceptance of an imperfect and bumpy road is enthralling in their eyes as opposed to threatening, as it is in the eyes of so many.
I am blessed to know that there are people like this out there, who I count on to shake my being and together we can combat the nightmare of an overarching hand of a suit-wearing shadow strolling off in the night with a bag full of money leaving my heart and soul hollow for my next day of work.
To get a jump start on supporting the van-dwellers, here is a link to their radical t-shirts, check them out!
