I remember feeling optimistic.
Travel Hopefully | 2001
It was late July 2001 in the middle of the North American summer. I was sitting with Melanie, Lola & Roman on the ferry that connects the town of Bayshore with the beachside communities of Fire Island just east of New York. We were heading to a tiny but special place called Lonelyville. Until recently we had actually owned a house within this idyllic beachside community; the first piece of real property that Melanie and I had ever managed to own together. But soon after buying it, and for various reasons, we decided to shift our lives and the young family back to Sydney; so we needed to sell the house in Lonelyville in order to fund the move back home.
We were heading to Lonelyville to “decompress” and say goodbye to some good friends who were still getting used to our recent homecoming decision. Life felt uncharacteristically light and free.
We’d been living in the US for almost 4 years, mostly in New York City, but prior to that in Silicon Valley. I had been working as a consultant Brand Strategist, a gun for hire “guru” working mostly with Internet-related businesses. That was my day job. In parallel to this I had been endeavouring to relaunch the REMO General Store online. Despite a unique vision, my ongoing (very considerable) efforts to revive the venture, and a large number of high-powered advisors & supporters, REMO was still in the hibernation that it had entered upon its untimely demise (for financial and administrative reasons) back in 1996. For more years than I care to recall I had been pitching venture capitalists, corporations and wealthy individual investors with my vision for a next-generation webcentric REMO General Store: smart and profitable … but to no avail. The business was too quirky, the timing was never good. The rejections were countless. However, a meeting taken in California with the founders of Cafepress.com just a few days before had gently fanned my eternal REMO flame by revealing a way that might enable us to get our website transactional with an offering of our much-loved T Shirts for a small capital outlay. Melanie had made me promise that I would spend no more than US$10,000 of our own money on the exercise. Chronic entrepreneurship had not been kind to us financially.
Even so I felt optimistic.
Not only do I remember feeling optimistic, but I also remember coming to the realisation that this feeling of optimism was probably more important than whatever was going to happen. A feeling of optimism about the future (which thankfully Melanie shared) was delivering us a very high quality of life in the present! An optimist lives a life of hope and action (and being open to opportunity, tends to receive more). A pessimist is more likely to live the passive life of a victim. But here’s the main thing: the outcomes are actually irrelevant to the quality of the lives lived.
A few days later I spoke about this personal epiphany over the phone with a great friend and long time REMO supporter in LA who rewarded me with this sage quote from Robert Louis Stevenson (now a REMO T Shirt):
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”
Amen. What do you think?
