byerswithoutborders

Only one knife/spoon/fork/plate/bowl per person. No microwave. One bath towel each. Our nomadic lifestyle is a study in paring down to the essentials.

So how does byerswithoutborders celebrate Christmas without an attic full of decorations? Washi tape, fortune cookies, and our passports of course!

Jen and I began our life together in a drafty apartment above Mungovan and Sons funeral home. Back then piles of textbooks outnumbered decorations and presents. Eating cheap chinese food one night, staring up at our bare christmas tree, we got sick of the sad thing, and threw our fortune cookies at it. They caught in its branches, the cellophane wrappers twinkled just enough, and after a trip to Gordon food supply, the fortune cookie tree was born.

Our new spartan life is reminiscent of those early years. And so upon our return from seeing the lights of NYC we decided to add to our holiday spirit by resurrecting the fortune cookie tree! With homemade ornaments and limbs heavy with eastern wisdom, the kids are quite proud of the tree. Getting the odd cookie off for a snack certainly helps.

Another tradition we decided to resurrect this year was the all night drive to grandma’s. Jen picked me up at the hospital Wednesday, the van packed with presents, egg salad sandwiches and coffee. Her mantra all week long, “don’t forget the passports”. We drove up through northern Maine and across the border, a right-hand turn at Fredericton put us through a stretch of woods so lonely we were the sole motorists for hours. Out of snowy New Brunswick and into Nova Scotia, we arrived a short 14 hours after our departure.

The kids have enjoyed sing-a-longs with their papa, laughed at ducks landing on the ice, and stuffed their faces with everything from lobster rolls to lemon tarts. Nobody seems to miss the attic or any of it’s boxes of decorations. Maybe having a season without the stuff won’t be as traumatic to them as I feared. Maybe they won’t look back at this as a time of privation, but remember it as a time of traditions, family, and love.

At least that’s my Christmas wish.

Christmas time in NYC. The perfect destination for standing in line while blowing through your 401K. What was I thinking.

Paris, Hong Kong, London, Bangkok, Tokyo; If you’ve been with us from the beginning you know that Jen and I have seen many of the world’s well known cities. Rome? Yep. Istanbul? Bought carpets in the grand bazzar. Beijing and Marrakech, yes and yes. We’ve sucked the thin air in Quito and been chased by dogs in Lhasa. We’ve roasted in Delhi and froze in Kyoto.

However, for years there has been one glaring omission. It’s embarrassing considering the destinations we’ve spent so much time and effort to visit. Years of travel, passports overflowing with visa stamps, and neither of us have ever been to New York City.

Recently we decided to rectify this egregious lapse. We took advantage of the easy 90-minute train ride, and headed to the city to celebrate Lily and Isabelle’s 10th birthday.

So much has been written about NYC it’s silly of me to add to the reams of information already out there. However, we did find two blogs very helpful during our 3 days in the city. Cityroverwalks.com has a great self-guided walking itinerary with added history/factoids to bore your children and impress your wife. Their guide to using the subway was indispensable.

NYC Subway Tips, Tricks, and Etiquette: How to Use the Subway Guide

As a foodie I especially love EatYourWorld.com. If you’ve ever dragged your wife past 15 ramen shops to find THE BEST ramen in Tokyo, EatYourWorld is for you. Their NYC guide was super easy to use, and even went into the history of some of the city’s iconic eats. My favorite part of EatYourWorld is the ability for user contributions. So if you’re drunk on the back of a pink scooter in Hanoi, and you’ve just found a life-altering beef tongue Bahn Mi, upload your tale to the site and join the likes of Anthony Bourdain as a travel/food critic.

https://mobile.eatyourworld.com/

By every measure our weekend in the city was a success. Macy’s Christmas windows, the lights at Saks, ice skating in Bryant Park, and the tree in Rockefeller Center. We saw a Broadway show, road the subway, and ate pizza like locals (fold it in half). We even met Al Roker!

The shining jewel of our trip? My pick is a nighttime walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with the birthday girls. Jen and Stella crashed at the hotel after dinner, when Lily decided she wasn’t done adventuring for the day. A quick subway ride downtown and we were across the bridge with the city lit up behind us. After a day of wandering about the feet of the towering buildings, this was our first real view of the skyline. It’s a famous view that we’ve all seen in movies and TV. And it was lovely.

But it’s not the view that made it the highlight of my trip. It’s because we had time then to connect. We are so fortunate to see amazing places in our travels, but it is these quite moments just walking and listening to my kids, that I love most about our lifestyle. It’s why I love hiking with them. It’s why I love walking Stella home from Spanish every Tuesday and Thursday.

My favorite part of this season of parenthood is walking quietly alongside these kids and listening to them jabber on. It is the closest I can be to them now, the only way I know how to immerse myself in their free form style of thought-speech. I try to maximize these opportunities, to hold onto these moments before puberty throws up a wall and cuts me out of their internal life.

At which point, my heart will break a little. But that’s parenthood isn’t it? The slow, exquisite unfolding of the most lovely heartbreak.

Fall arrived late in New England. After a month of 70 degree days, Halloween in New Haven was a crisp 55. Just enough nip in the air to make the holiday feel the way it’s supposed to. After 8 years of sweating in the pumpkin patches of TX and FL, Halloween 2017 was full of leaf piles, rosey cheeks, and whiskey flasks.

Our weekends here have been so busy that our new town town feels more like a base of operations than a residence. In the short time we’ve been here we’ve sampled an oyster festival, gone apple picking, and enjoyed two camping trips (Adirondacks, and Berkshires). There was a Gilmore Girls themed scenic drive, complete with bucolic New England countryside, and a pre-Halloween witch adventure in Salem Mass. This lead to some interesting questions from the kids about fear, hysteria, and how 20 people could be executed for witchcraft. While it did happen in 1693, I didn’t have the heart to explain that similar executions still take place within the borders of one of our closest Mideast allies.

In between all of these adventures we return to our base camp, East Rock New Haven. The community here is a cosmopolitan stew. Our neighbors include a retired fireman, a cardiologist, graduate students, and small business owners. On the bus I’ve heard snippets of Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. I’ve watched a kid conjugate verbs in Arabic and saw more than one t-shirt that I had to google to get the joke. We have an Irish bar, a Mexican restaurant, three Italian grocers, and one falafel bodega all within walking distance.

We attempt to sample it all. To soak up everything we can from this town before it’s time to leave. We’ve been to the Peabody museum, toured the Yale campus, and arranged a private viewing up Harkness Tower. We’ve seen a Gutenberg Bible and a T. Rex Skull. The kids even volunteered as test subjects for the Child Psychology-Cognitive Development Center.

“What did you do today Stella?”

“I went to Yale so they could study my brain!”

We are loving this liberal vibrant community. But are also surprised at a kind of reverse closed mindedness we’ve encountered. People who can’t fathom befriending a Trump voter are weirdly similar to those who want to build the wall. At least when both are unwilling to change their minds. If the “east coast elite” is a thing, we may have seen it’s shadow here. The same people who expect Israeli and Palestinians to hug it out, are ready to firebomb the NRA and snort in derision at the thought of a family going to deer camp. It’s left Jen and I wondering where the middle is? Maybe our mistake is looking for it in a place, maybe we have already found it in you, our friends.

But there is little time for philosophical meanderings for the Byers. It’s the weekend, we’ve packed a duffle and are leaving base camp again. This week’s adventure… New York City.

Everyone in Connecticut calls it “The City”, I’m such a noob.

I’ve read about performers who suffer from stage fright, singers and musicians who battle jitters and butterflies leading up to their time on stage. Sweaty palms and a nervous gut all the way out to the microphone. But as soon as they belt out that first note, the fear melts away, they are in their element, the zone, flow state.

A similar feeling overcame us as we put Texas in the rearview and headed towards the Northeast. For months we had suffered restless sleep, heartburn, and anxiety. Uprooting our life was a big decision, and it came with big emotions. Elation and terror are two that come to mind. However my main impression of our last few weeks in Texas are of a time colored by a constant background hum of edgy nervousness. And just like that, the house was sold, the van was packed, our adventure was truly beginning. A certain sense of ease slowly returned to Jen and I. Its as if we were finally on stage, and that first note was ringing out.

Our first stop was Memphis. Just a quick overnight break from the road, but enough time for the kids to marvel at the street performers on Beale, and for us to put our mark on the wall at Graceland. Pro-tip, you can walk onto the grounds of the estate for free if you arrive between 7:30-8:30am.

Two nights in Charlotte allowed Stella to celebrate her birthday a second time, but now with her two cousins. Beers with a longtime anesthesia friend as we entered Appalachia proper, put us on the doorstep of my childhood home, Roanoke VA.

I moved from Roanoke at the beginning of highschool, how surreal it was to wander a town I had left more than 20 years ago. I’d loved growing up there and had long wished to show my kids the streets I’d biked and the woods I’d played in. I’d spent so much time imagining their reactions that I completely underestimated how these old sites would affect me. After a two decade absence, there was a strange sense of filling in the blanks of half remembered dreams. Streets that were foggy memories were suddenly there in the crisp detail of reality. Most special was taking them on a day hike to Mcafee’s Knob.

It is a hike I had done hundreds of times as a kid. It is also, arguably the most photographed section of the 1200 mile Maine to Georgia, Appalachian Trail. The kids were appropriately impressed and exhausted when we climbed back into the van for the drive up to D.C.

One hopes that your kids will appreciate the deep history and subtle lessons the landmarks and buildings of our nation’s capital represent. But after two days of making the rounds (The Capitol Building, White House, Lincoln Memorial, etc), the lasting impression on the Byer children was the salad bar at Whole Foods. Probably because we let them make their own creations, which typically meant plates of croutons, bacon, and parmesan cheese.

One last drive from D.C. put us at 17 Anderson St. Our new home in New Haven CT.

In 1519, the Spanish commander Hernán Cortés, on arrival from Europe to the new world, ordered his ships to be burned so that his men would have no choice, conquer or die. When I woke up on that first morning in CT, I understood this rationale perfectly. Those excited and uplifting emotions from our Texodus had faded. My only thought that morning… “Oh my god what have we done?” Like Cortes, we have allowed ourselves little opportunity of turning back. The Byers must go forward into this crazy adventure. So we began that morning, with the practice of not digging up in doubt, what we had planted in faith. We have faith in this plan, and our little family.

What if you decided to reorganize your life? I don’t mean cleaning out the junk drawer in your kitchen. Not a trip to Goodwill with the kid’s old school clothes. Not a garage spring-cleaning or finally getting to those boxes in the attic. Marie Kondo and her hoards of suburban decluttering acolytes don’t even cut it. I’m talking about something even bigger and more profound. What if you tore out your life by its roots? Where would you replant it? What would it look like if you could reorganize your life around what is most deep and beautiful in your heart?

These are the thoughts that followed Jen and I home from Bhutan this spring. An itch for something new had grown into a full blown ache for drastic change while there. Certainly, Jen and I never made a conscious plan that ended with me giving anesthesia in Texas and her struggling to convince Baptists that yoga isn’t devil worship. We just looked up one day and here we were, flatlined in a life we had stumbled into.

A very comfortable life to be sure. A  two-story brick house, three cars, subscription wine and clothing services, three televisions, four iPads, and a bedroom just for the kids to get dressed in! So why then were we feeling such a growing sense of tension? Why this ache for change? Because we were living someone else’s life.

We met in Tibet for goodness sake. We’ve meditated with the Dalai Lama and talked kite flying with Deepak Chopra. We once emptied our bank account and started traveling east. And we kept heading in that direction until we returned home again, 8 months later. But somehow we had forgotten all this. Jen literally had to remind me about that mediation in Dharamsala. How could I have forgotten about that? Kids, anesthesia school, paying bills, getting a mortgage, all the things that the American dream is built of had buried that memory of the Dalai Lama and the memory of what is most deep and beautiful in my heart.

And Bhutan blew away all of that. Once again we felt the joy of being our authentic selves. This spring we spent Thai new year with our kids in a city-wide water fight on the streets of Bangkok. We ate yak-cheese dumplings in the Himalaya and hiked to centuries old temple fortresses.  How do we come back from that? What do you do after taking the red pill, after you peeked behind the curtain and seen the illusion of your life? The only answer we could come up with…

Take another step into the wild, blow up your life, embrace the uncertainty and leap.

If you are curious about how our experiment to mindfully reshape our life is going, subscribe to our blog, and we’ll keep you up to date on our shenanigans.