by Kary Wright

Created on: March 15, 2009

Thanks Tom

Looking back at Tom, I find myself thinking about the temporary nature of everything in this material world, and how difficult it is for us humans to accept. We all tend to crave stability, knowing for certain that tomorrow will be the same as today or yesterday, and that it will include all of the same people and material items that are so familiar. In reality nothing as we know it is permanent, including life.

Even the smallest insignificant things, say a toaster for example, have a finite lifespan. This may seem a trivial and obvious observation at first, but compound this with the fact that we own hundreds of items with a temporary nature, and yet almost daily return home from Wal-Mart with more! One can see how as we work hard to acquire more and more 'stuff' that we must necessarily work harder and harder to maintain it. For instance, if we own 250 items that last on average five years, that means about 50 items a year will wear out. Not surprisingly, our household is constantly replacing worn out 'things', requiring more work (exchanging our time for money). Most of us get trapped in this mindset for the majority of our lives and merrily run along on this treadmill looking straight ahead. On this same note, we work very hard to be able to buy a shiny new S.U.V. (a TEMPORARY item), and by the time it is paid for it is nearly worthless and needs replacing.

For a few years, my wife and I had been noticing more and more people close to us pass on. Was this a new thing or had we just chosen to ignore it? Anyhow, as our age creeps up it seems to happen more and more. Some of these folks were younger than us, and hence our sense of mortality began to grow. We had long ago bought into the program that 'more is better', and had exchanged twenty years of time for a few autos, a house and boatloads of 'stuff' that is now landfill. We hadn't really traveled anywhere as we never had any money left over for that. We had assumed that traveling would come later on once we could 'afford' it. Our big reality check came when my father became ill and died. We were shocked. My parents' traveling days were suddenly over, and we came to the realization that our comfortable lives could be over and done with just as quick.

We sat down, created a bucket list and circled number 1 on it. Leaving Alberta Canada on January 1st , our family drove off in 30 degree below zero weather with our barely used 10yr old trailer in tow. About eight hours a day we traveled, and kept

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