If you could do anything you wanted to do for the rest of your life and nothing was standing in your way, what would you do?

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This question has never really been able to inspire me, nor could I ever come up with a satisfying answer. The things I want for myself are all within me and they’re all quite beyond my grasp.

It was my second trip to Colombia that really dialed it in for me, what I was looking for out of life. My first trip was a whirlwind of exploration and experience. I wandered around the country, met locals, learned Spanish, and generally had a great time.

My idea for my second trip was to try to recapture the best parts of what I liked about the first trip. I spent much of my time in the same sleepy little town I remembered from my first trip. But, like every time I’ve ever tried to recapture my past, it just wasn’t the same. For one, the town itself was quite different, far from the quiet I’d enjoyed, it had turned into a bustling little town and I just couldn’t get engaged again.

I suppose I could have found another little beach village, but fate intervened and I had a friend to entertain back in Cartagena. While I was there I decided to learn a new marketable skill, web development. I got so engrossed in it that I spent the remainder of my trip holed up in a hostel, buried in my laptop.

It seemed as apt a metaphor for my life as any. Given the freedom to completely determine my course and activities, I chose to build for the future. I chose to build myself, building something that no one could take from me, that I could deploy at will or not at all. I chose knowledge.

I have since completed that arc of my life, I now make a nice tidy living doing something I quite enjoy doing and am quite good at. I didn’t learn to do it because I wanted more Colombia beach vacations. I sacrificed my Colombia beach vacation in order to nerd out on a laptop. Turns out that nerding out on a laptop is what I do. I choose to do it to the exclusion of things that most people would kill to do. In fact, I could choose to nerd out on a laptop while living on a beach in Colombia. It’s something I’ve quite seriously considered doing. But, well, meh. It wouldn’t be enough of a quality of life improvement over the path I chose to justify the effort, for various reasons that space demands I don’t go further into detail about.

I live in a rich, expansive world of ideas. Those ideas and the interesting interaction between them are the meaning I make out of my life. My daily existence is one that I’ve cultivated for several years and have no intention of doing anything other than building on. I’m a wizard who literally lives alone in a tower, studying the esoteric and arcane. I’m already doing that which I want to do for the rest of my life. So there’s no meaningful answer to your question, sorry. Maybe I could move up a few floors back into a two bedroom? If there were a more meaningful change I’d have made it already.

I saw a hang-up piece of artwork for sale last week that said, “build the kind of life you don’t need a vacation from.” It described me to a tee. I didn’t buy it because I don’t feel the need to remind myself of such things all the time and it doesn’t fit with the decor of my apartment. I’m not the kind of guy who goes on vacation and then wishes I could make my life my vacation. I go on my vacation and I’m happy to come back to my home life.