Sometimes things just won’t start looking up until you start looking up.  I am now securely moved into my new home and working out of my humble little store where we sell indigenous arts and crafts from various Costa Rican tribes.  The new scaled-down version of my life fits sort of well.  I always thought it was important to think big and be big, a very “American” view of success.  But what really matters is not how “big” you are, but how large an impact you can have. And you can’t have much of an impact if you are always drowning in bills that flow like a river from the “cuenca” of your attempts to be bigger than you really need to be.  This blog has brought me full circle in terms of my thinking and being.  In the course of writing it I have harbored big dreams and visions.  Dreams of being that “go-to guy” for anyone out there interested in Costa Rica.  Well I am that guy, but just in a quieter, humbler and less stressful way.  I hope my love of Costa Rica has shown through these posts.  I mean, I hope my writing has in some ways lived up to the title.  I love where I live, love what I do and love writing with the hope that someone out there will get either a laugh, a message of encouragement, or a hint of what it is like to live in Costa Rica.  My plan is to keep writing. The title of this 365th post is “Nuevo Comienzo” and that is exactly what it brings me to, both in terms of my writing and living here in this tiny little spec of paradise I call home.  Of course, bright and early tomorrow expect Reason #1 all over again.

Pura Vida and thanks for reading me.

Moving again.  I believe I must have one of those multi-personality disorders.  I seem to be a contradiction in terms.  I enjoy the stability of routine, but I am also fond of risk and change.  I try to maintain a healthy lifestyle, but every once and while veer off the warpath with an unhinged eat, drink and be merry attitude.  And so here I sit on the cusp of another move. This will make number four in the last six years.  This move is being driven more by the need to downsize economically than anything else.  And boy do I hate moving.  It is one of the most stressful experiences known to man…well, at least to this man.  But move I will, this weekend to a house about a kilometer from the one I currently occupy!  Go figure.  Actually the move makes sense from an economic perspective, but logistically it seems kind of silly.  All this moving and shaking has me thinking maybe something bigger is on the horizon.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the feeling lingers nonetheless.  It seems like a move is a great time to shed a lot of unnecessary accumulation.  Once you organize the resulting clutter, the heroic effort exerted tends to give one a new outlook.  Maybe that is what I am feeling.  After the dark cloud that has been hovering over me the last couple months, I could use a little inspirational daylight.  Maybe this move will provide just that.  Does anyone out there catch my drift?  With Cash gone to the next life and my company severely downsized by downturn, it just seems natural that now is the time to move on.  To what I am not exactly sure, but time has a way of revealing those things.  One thing’s for certain, whatever it is, this blog will be here to tell about it.  Wish me luck!

This horrendous month has me thinking about my options.  Should I downsize to make future inevitable months like July 2010 less painful.  I can’t control the buying habits of you yanks, but I can at least control the amount I spend to service those habits.  This business is highly cyclical and even more highly susceptible to economic trends.  After all, a vacation is not your most essential expense and when people feel their purse-strings a bit pinched, out goes those vacation plans.  Does anyone out there think even once about ME in the course of this decision making?  The answer, unfortunately, is a resounding NO.  So all that has me caught squarely in the common corporate conundrum of “to downsize or not to downsize?”  I believe often times corporate downsizing is just a knee-jerk reaction borne out of fear….you know, that old “lizard brain” hard at work.  I want to avoid that at all costs.  I don’t want any downsizing decisions to ultimately result in devaluation disasters.  And often times, such decisions have that exact result.  Recalling those adages of “the past doesn’t equal the future” and “right now isn’t forever” (remember those?), I know from experience that things will turn up again.  I realize that by downsizing now I may indeed create a problem for the future when the sun comes out.  And the future in this business could be, like, today!  One thing I know for absolute sure is that the ultimate product I am selling, Costa Rica, is not losing one iota of its appeal…in fact, it is only getting better.  So rather than downsizing, maybe a keener way to look at it is to be more insightful and adept at presenting this incredible product to my viewing audience…you!  And efforts towards  that end may actually call for a bit of UP rather than DOWN-sizing.  Anyway, so goes the thrills, chills and ills of being an entrepreneur. I am sure there could be one or two folks who visit this blog who may have experienced similar dilemmas.  They really do have horns, don’t they?

This has been one of those months for me.  No sales, a ton of bills to pay, my office manager out the entire month and, as if I needed more, my beloved dog Cash murdered by a demon tico driver!  I am thinking at this point, what else?  We often hear that we should live in the present, but what if the present really sucks.  The one place I DON’T want to be in any more is July 2010…I wish I could be transported right now to another month…like, say, August, 2010.  I just want it all to end…I mean the month…not life (don’t worry mom).  Being one to never be short of a word of advice, for myself and others, I believe in times like these one needs to “relax and breathe deeply” into a paper bag.  This has been a month where I have felt on the constant verge of hyperventilation.  But I know in the back of my mind that it will end, the sun will shine again and I will look back on July 2010 with a certain degree of fondness.  Isn’t it always the case?  Those times of our lives that are really hard and that we have to “get through” by the “skin of our teeth” are later seen as great learning experiences.  We pride ourselves in having paid our dues and tell others that they must endure their own July 2010’s in order to achieve the level of super-stardom that we have achieved.  Okay great…yes that might all be true…but it is the 23rd and I still have eight more days of this hell on earth to endure!  The one thing I do take solace in is that I get to endure it in this wonderful place that I have spent the last two years blabbering about.  When things get just about as bad as they can get (and they can always get worse) I raise my gaze towards those majestic mountains surrounding San Jose and know that peace lies out there somewhere.  And with a 4-wheel drive vehicle I can go and look for it…any time I want!  I guess the best way to make it out of a bad situation is to make light of it.  That is the general cathartic purpose of this post and, hey, you know what, it is working.  I feel better already.

As a kid we all hated when that bratty brother or sister, cousin or more distant relative or friend, told on us.  Made you want to do bodily harm to the you know what, now didn’t it?  Right now I have one of those here in Costa Rica.  His name is Nik Clayton and he is “blogging on me.”  Thankfully, everything he has said so far has been positive.  I hope to keep it that way.  In fact, it comes to mind that the best way to get royal treatment (which is somewhat of a pun in this case as Nik is decidedly British) is to blog about your experience.  Something about having the quality (or lack thereof) of one’s services aired to the entire blogosphere that makes you stand a little straighter and be as polite and accommodating as possible.  Just kidding with all that.  Of course we welcome the spotlight of Nik’s blog, entitled, Try Before You Buy.  My company designs and manages Costa Rica vacation experiences, and from what Nik has written so far, his is turning out to be one of those memorable ones that we shoot for.  Sometimes we miss the mark a tad, normally due to circumstances outside of our control, but that is rare.  Why?  Because we don’t simply sell travel sitting in a U.S. call center, passing you off to an airline or discounted hotel room in a place we’ve never been, and not really caring what happens after the chi-ching of the sale has been completed.  We love Costa Rica ourselves and get a real kick out of sharing it with others.  Lately, due to economic woes, there just haven’t been enough “others,” but hopefully the tide is beginning to change a bit in that regard.  Costa Rica is indeed a magical place as Nik is finding out first hand.  I encourage you to peruse the diary of his Costa Rica vacation and then book one of those for yourselves…with Package Costa Rica of course!

Try Before You Buy - Nik’s Blog

Lily used a word this morning that caused me to step back and ponder…the word was “ilusionado.”  Spanish and English do share quite a few words that are strikingly similar, but this is not one of them.  The word means hopeful, excited or eager.  However, it sounds an awful lot like illusion in the English language.  That word means something quite different.  In English we speak of “illusion” as being something that appears to be, but really isn’t.  We also use words like disillusioned and delusion to describe states that are quite the opposite to the Spanish “ilusionado.”  All this can get down right confusing for a gringo, especially one approaching 50 and feeling these days a bit “desilusionado.”  Actually that word has a meaning synonymous with its English counterpart.  Wew, as I often say, “$%#@ing Spanish!”  There are simply too many words for an old dog to ever hope to learn.  So I will just keep drudging along with my 3-year old level of Spanish hoping one day I will wake up fluent, but growing a bit more disillusioned each day that it will ever happen for me.  Speaking of illusions, why is it that as we grow older we lose those youthful delusions of grandeur?  As I was walking with Lily pondering her use of that confusing word and talking about the goings on of the children, nieces and nephews, I began to think about growing older and becoming disillusioned.  Is it really necessary that we allow that to happen to us?  And what is the result…that we become more grounded?  Becoming “grounded” sounds to me a lot like giving in to the gravitational forces that are at work to try to pull me under…six feet under, that is!  I would rather delay that process for as long as I can.  I am sure there are many who would quickly say that Scott (me) is quite deluded.  After all, if I weren’t I probably would not be here doing what it is that I am doing.  No I would be running around chasing the almighty dollar and striving to live up to the expectation of the Joneses, not content unless my house was bigger, my car was more luxurious and my paycheck fatter than the other guy.  Instead here I am in Costa Rica, talking incessantly about how life in the real “jungle” is the only one worth living.  I guess for me, being “ilusionado” about my “delusionary illusions” is the way I escape the trap of becoming “disillusioned.”  Chew on that one for a while.

My last post addressed, or attempted to address, my personal definition of what it means to act sustainable.  However, what is the goal, or the ultimate aim of sustainability?  I believe only in knowing that can one truly bend the bow, release that arrow of ardent action and hit the true target.  This post will therefore focus on the overriding question of “what is the goal of sustainability?”  One thing is for sure, sustainability is not maintenance.  It seems we are much more focused on “sustaining” inanimate objects that we are on living things.  I would rather call actions geared towards sustaining the inanimate (the “Stuff” that was referred to in my “backpack” post) maintenance.  Being a sustainability guy is not the same thing as being a “maintenance man.”  If you are a spiritual person with a belief in a higher power who is the author of all things living, you probably also hold a belief that things were created to be beautiful…to be healthy.  Often human interaction and impact tends to diminish the healthy state that the creator had in mind.  Why doesn’t he (or she or it) just intervene?  Let’s leave that for a different post. Sustainability then becomes an attempt at managing our interactions and impacts in a way that promotes the health of living things…a healthy environment, a healthy body, healthy relationships…get the picture?  Of course, if you are not at all spiritual and would rather hold fast to a “survival of the fittest” kind of philosophy of life, then you probably don’t feel much of a need to act sustainable.  Because sustainability recognizes that the created world is connected and every part must play a role in sustaining it.  You cannot just sit back and expect that living things will sustain themselves and if they fall short, well it was just meant to be. That all that really matters is my own personal level of comfort and the fact that people are starving, animals are becoming extinct, rain forests are disappearing, and the planet is overheating (yes, even despite the current cold snap in the Northeast) just doesn’t enter into my personal picture.  But the hard fact to realize is that oh yes it will, eventually!  If that’s the way you see things, then fine…I am not here to judge, but just to make a point.  And the point is that sustainability is about being concerned that our interactions and impacts promote the health of living things.  And in so doing our spiritual health is also dramatically improved.

This post is apt to be one of those cathartic ones that has me “thinking out loud” (in written form) and trying to answer a question that has been bouncing around in my head.  That question this morning is…what does sustainability really mean?  I think that is important because I tend to see myself as some sort of sustainability guy and in order to be that person I believe it is necessary to have a firm grasp on what it is that I’m talking about.  Because it order to be a “sustainability guy” one must “act sustainable”…and I am not sure I always do that all that well.  Maybe that is because I have yet to succinctly define what it really means, for me.  I did a quick Google search on the term and Wikipedia defined it like this: “Sustainability is the capacity to endure. In ecology the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance of well-being, which in turn depends on the well-being of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources.”  Wikipedia went on to say that “sustainability has become a wide-ranging term“  Boy is that an understatement!  These days you have “gurus” using the buzzword “sustainability” to address a whole host of human activities, like tourism and development.  In fact, Costa Rica is looked upon as a model country when it comes to sustainable tourism and development.  But on a personal level, what does it really mean…to me?  I believe it has everything to do with interactions and impacts.  That is, how I interact with other people, with the planet, and (I know it sounds a little weird) with myself and the collective impacts resulting from those interactions.  According to Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  Probably taking that notion out of context somewhat, it implies that our interactions result in impacts, on others, on our natural world and on ourselves (for example, throw a piece of trash out the window of your car and you have both an interaction and an impact, though not a sustainable one).  If “sustainability” is the  “capacity to endure” it then means that those interactions and impacts should be “facilitative” (as opposed to destructive) of endurance.  On a human interactional level, it means helping others to be more capable of enduring, physically, socially, economically, and culturally.  On the level of interactions with the natural world, it means conserving and nurturing growth, while doing as little harm as is truly necessary.  On a personal level, it entails personal actions that nurture and promote physical, emotional and intellectual health and well-being.  Now that I have a clearer definition it is easier to see where it is I am falling short of my goal of being that “sustainability guy.”  Nevertheless, I believe it is a worthy aim and I will continue to strive for it.  One thing that is for sure, sustainability requires thought before interaction in order to  produce the desired impact.

I wrote yesterday about Ryan Bingham and his lighter backpack theory of life.  In case you’re wondering who that is, he is the fictional frequent flyer character played by George Clooney in the movie Up in the Air.  Bingham’s suggestion, if you’ll remember, was to lighten your pack by discarding things that “tie you down.” Things like relationships and a stable and stationary place that one might call a “home.”  Bingham’s home was an ever advancing jet plane hovering various dull locals at 40,000 feet.  As he peered down at the bored and tired masses he came up with his brilliant idea to motivate them towards a lighter and less languid existence.  Last night I had the opportunity to dine with some of my customers.  It was a group of guys from the U.S. that have been visiting Costa Rica through my company for each of he last five years.  One of them mentioned to me, “you know, I read that Costa Ricans are the happiest people on earth and that they live the longest.”  Another one chimed in, “Scott, how could that be true?”  Well anyone who reads this blog on even a less than frequent basis would likely have an idea as to how I would answer that.  Surprisingly, given my negative attitude yesterday regarding Bingham’s philosophy, the answer really is a “lighter backpack.”  But not lighter in the sense of shedding those non-material things like home and love ones (i.e., things money can’t buy and things that Costa Ricans certainly do cherish), but lighter in the sense of less “stuff.”  Stuff you really don’t need and stuff that is cluttering not only your world, but mine as well…in fact everyone’s.  What I am mainly getting at is the competitive spirit that prevails in the developed world that I am not successful unless I have as much or more as my neighbor.  That drive to fill one’s backpack to unbearable proportions is at the heart, I believe, of unhappiness in the Western developed world.  It is something most folks down here just don’t experience…partly because they can’t afford it, but also because other things are on their mind….like filling the backpack with non-material things that really do impart happiness.  It would seem that some of the most miserable and suicidal people on this planet also are those with the most stuff in their backpacks, wouldn’t you agree?  So in that sense, Bingham is on to something and actually has, with his twisted and warped ideology, answered the question posed by my faithful customers….a lighter backpack! For those of you interested in lightening your backpack in Costa Rica, give me a buzz sometime, or check out one of my own seminars (coming soon to a theatre near you).

“Costa Rica”  I can remember when that name carried an exotic and mysterious appeal.  Where is that place exactly?  Isn’t it DANGEROUS down there? I mean, do they have roads?  Can you drink the water?  Well, all that has changed in large part now as Costa Rica has become a new house-hold word in the U.S.  Hey were you going on vacation this year? “Think I’ll go down to Costa Rica” is a common reply.  It just isn’t all that mysterious any more.  But, be that as it may, it is still one cool place to visit, even to stay a while….maybe for a lifetime, as some folks have decided to do.  Costa Rica is changing.  We have a new “super-highway” that will get you from San Jose to the Pacific Coast in 45 minutes flat.  A trip that previously took over two hours.  We have a new airport, which I have not even graced the tarmac of since I haven’t left this place in the last 4 years, but I hear it’s nice.  We have our own imitation Cancun-Cozumel experience in Jaco beach, a town that just a few years ago didn’t even have a paved road running through it.  We have our Hollywood star sightings, usually in and around the swanky and ridiculously expensive Four Seasons Resort, as that is the only place those types can muster up the adventurous spirit to visit (with the exception of Mel Gibson who actually was sighted in Toro Amarillo…and I have a photo to prove it).  We have our own ICT-funded Saks 5th Avenue marketing campaign that is sure to bring more big spenders who are elevating prices to first-worldish proportions.  Being in the tourism business, of course I will say all of the above is good, to a point.  But behind the scenes of all of the surface noise that is readily apparent to the senses, still lurks the old Costa Rica.  The one that remains wild, exotic and mysterious.  You just have to get off the increasingly beaten path to see it.  That’s the Costa Rica I love.  That’s what keeps me here.  I just hope the other part doesn’t infringe until the Costa Rica I love disappears.  Just in case you’re interested in the “other Costa Rica,” my number is 1-866-424-6439.  Give me a shout any time and I’ll set you up. That part of Costa Rica is still here to enjoy and only one rule prevails…be a respectful guest and do no harm.