During his TED Talk, New Zealand ex-convict Paul Wood said, “Living in prison is tough, but breaking out of prison is harder.” He is a guy who spent ten years in jail and noted that many people choose not to break out of their mental prisons because we think change is impossible, and we see it as inevitable. “It is much safer to be inside. We do not risk additional failure, and it requires less effort.”

We were unhappy before launching on this trip, and we were lucky to reach a breaking point. It would be worse if we stayed on a slightly melancholy life forever, a “life of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau says. I was lucky; most people never reach a breaking point.

While the possibility of the motorhome life continued to percolate in my mind, I began telling family and friends about my desire to break free from the matrix we call ”normal life”. I found that people were not impressed with the suggestion that I could just walk away from a life they were living too. My rejection of the normal was sometimes being seen as a raid on their way of living. If I had a choice to leave, it meant they were enduring it by preference.

Some of them rationalized, saying that they couldn’t do that because their children were older than mine, and ‘they would never agree’. Others that their children were too young and ‘would be a lot of work’. Others explained that they would do it if they had more money; some said they would do it if they didn’t have jobs where they had to take care of so much money.

They saw change as impossible.

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