This guy lives in his van on the street over from my house. He moves the van from one side of the street to the other every couple of days, but always within a single block. When the weather is nice, he puts out an old wooden adirondack chair on the grassy lawn area in front of an apartment complex and sits in the sun drinking beer. I’m not sure what he does the rest of the time.
I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. Wait, that’s not quite right. Driving by his van every day has got me thinking about myself is what I really mean.
We live these lives that are so stressed out. We have these pressures and obligations and burdens and responsibilities but the truth is that these are things we build ourselves. Bills, appointments, whatever. We think that it is these things that cause us so much stress, but we could easily walk away from all of them. That guy in the van doesn’t have a mortgage payment or five conference calls in one day or a hot tub repair guy who doesn’t return phone calls.
But I don’t think the answer is to be the guy in the van. Then we’d have an entirely new set of stressors. Obviously.
Life is like a see-saw. The obligations and responsibilities make it possible to sit with friends and have a bottle of wine and watch the sunset, to fly to Brazil and stand under Christ the Redeemer. The key, as always, is balance.
