It Does Not Take Courage

Sitting in a café in Poland drinking yerba maté, an enduring habit from my time in Argentina, I remember talking about my life. I had a successful career, a house and two cats. But I left all that behind for this vagabond life traveling the world and have never looked back.

Find what you love and let it kill you! Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.Unknown¹The quote “Find what you love and let it kill you” is commonly misattributed to Charles Bukowsky. It likely originated from a similar quote by Kinky Friedman.

“How did you get the courage to leave your old life behind?”

My dear, I never did have the courage to leave my life behind. I did not have the courage then and I do not have it now. To take a lifetime of experience and walk away from it in search of something new is too much to ask of anyone.

Let me tell you a secret: Find what you love and let it kill you! Dream about it, imagine it and visualize it. Read about it, read the stories of others, and make plans for the day it will happen. Talk to people about it. Let it be an obsession that consumes you. Let your passion for it ooze from every pore of your being until it fills the space around you. Make it so real in your own mind you wonder why you can’t touch it! There will come a day when that vision becomes so real it is harder to stay where you are than it is to walk out the door into that new life.

Courage? No. The courage would have been to stay with my old life. When I walked out the door that day, leaving one life behind to begin another, I simply followed the path of inevitability.

It was never about travel, never about courage, never about changing my life. I simply became consumed by something I love. What is your dream? What do you love? Find it and let it kill you!