Magic vs The Odds

I’m sitting at a small unfinished wooden desk in my studio—one of the last remaining pieces of furniture in a space filled with boxes—thinking about what I’ve gotten myself into.

I bought a van.

I’m moving the dogs and myself into the van and out of the back house studio.

I have no idea what I’m doing. And yet, I know exactly what I’m doing.

Have you ever felt this way?

I’m the type of person who, when things (or I) have stagnated and I don’t feel content with the way my life is going, I do something about it. It’s why I quit my university job in 2018. I felt myself becoming angry and frustrated with the way things were, and I knew I needed to change my circumstances before I lost myself to a way of being that I find neither personally bearable nor beneficial to others. Quitting that job was a hugerisk for me, but I did it because I had to. I’ve always been stubbornly committed to living life on my own terms, according to my own sense of purpose and values. I’m not willing to live this short life only half awake, and I’m not willing to live it in a constant state of anger. I’m not a machine. I’m not a zombie. I’m a deeply empathic human being who requires deep connections and experiences and [wild] spaces that energize my heart, mind, and soul.

I’ve known for a while now that the only way I will ever leave Lubbock is in a van. It’s the most economically feasible option for me at this point in my life, and it happens to fit my lifestyle and profession perfectly. In the last few years I’ve had several contract jobs that paid enough for me to buy a cheap used cargo van, and each time, I made the seemingly more practical and safe decision to just keep doing what I’d been doing and wait for something to change.

The thing is, change doesn’t just happen on its own. We create it. Despite how scary and stressful it seems, the life we want requires us to take that first step, however big or small.

I’d been talking with close friends about my desire to get a van for years, but I’d been unable to believe in it enough to share it publicly. In October 2023, I announced on my blogs and social media that my goal was to buy an old van and hit the road with the dogs by my 50th birthday. This would greatly increase my options, including doing more and better nature work, getting back into mobile portraits, expanding my contract work, growing a YouTube channel (which still seems bizarrely unnatural to my Gen X mind, yet also wonderfully exciting and full of creative potential), and writing about my experiences. I added a timer app to my computer that began the countdown at thirty-three months to “Hit the Road,” and having no idea how it would all play out, I approached every day after that with one specific goal: get a van.

A few experiences in 2023 convinced me that I’d reached this major turning point in my life. The first was completing The Colorado Trail in August. I returned to Lubbock after the last stretch of that seven-year-long journey and became depressed within a couple of days. The energy I’d felt from being immersed in nature quickly dissipated, and I sat at the same desk I’m sitting at now trying desperately to come up with a way to re-route the trajectory of my path back toward my beloved wilderness areas. Almost seventeen years after I left the Midwest, where I had immediate access to forests and bodies of water, I felt deep in my bones that I’d been away from these nourishing landscapes for too long.

Four months later, a dear friend experienced a brain bleed and died within a few weeks. I had just visited her in the hospital and while she couldn’t speak, I was optimistic when she smiled and enthusiastically waved to me as I left her room. That was the last time I saw her. Cheryl understood needing to live life differently, in a way that truly resonates with who we are as individuals, how we wish to treat others around us, and how we wish to be treated. She and I had the same ideas about what’s important in life, and she embodied those ideas. She was soft and quiet, yet such an incredibly powerful force of life.

A few weeks later, I spent two full weeks in the Midwest for Christmas (my longest consecutive stay there in almost two decades), and I returned to Lubbock, once again, feeling overwhelmingly stuck in time and place. I had no idea how I could possibly change things, so I said aloud—publicly—what I wanted to do.

Remember this post? I was optimistic, but I had absolutely no idea what was coming. A month later I found a van that seemed perfect for me and the dogs. I inquired about it, feeling in my gut that it was “the van” while simultaneously doubting the possibility of it actually becoming mine. Every single thing that has happened since then—resulting in that van sitting in my driveway right now waiting for the dogs and I to move in—is nothing short of magic.

“Not the sort of magic that’s beyond belief, but the kind that already exists in the world around us.”

“The magic of curiosity and love for our world and those who inhabit it.”

I think what I’m really trying to say is that a person can live five decades or more with the odds mostly stacked against them, but those odds are simply no match for the magic in this world.

“Yeah, sure. Ok, Tif. ‘Magic.’”

The magic is us, friends. We create it for ourselves and for each other. Sometimes it’s small and barely noticeable. But once in a while, maybe every five decades or so :), it’s life-altering.

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