When I was a young boy in Wyoming, I couldn’t wait to go places. By the time I had graduated high school, I had gone to Washington DC twice, been an exchange student to Italy, and had visited all of the Western United States. I looked forward to going to a college in a larger city, experiencing the diversity of cultures and a wider circle of worldly perspectives. I decided to go to Whittier College, which is just a few miles outside of Los Angeles.
One of the first things I was excited about doing was going to a mall. We had one shopping mall in Casper, which would not be one I had frequented while I was living in Wyoming. I was enthralled by the number of shops and the hordes of people strolling around the center. I also got a job where I would travel to various homes to help care for severely disabled children in order to give their caregivers a break. Not only was it a blessing to care for their children, but the parents would welcome me into their home by giving me food from their culture and exposing me to a variety of different ways to live. This was pretty much everything I ever dreamed about growing up in my small, very homogenous hometown.
Fast forward thirty years, I have lost all desire to be around lots of people. Maybe because I’m older and have experienced all that I feel I can experience, but now my biggest desire is to be alone in the comfort of my own home. I dream about making enough money to buy a cabin in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming so that my sons and, one day soon, their children, can spend summer vacations near a lake and winters skiing and snowboarding. The place that I so desperately wanted to get away from when I was younger because it was so small is now the place I want to return to in my retirement years.
I now realize that as a young man, I had no identity. I liked everything and everyone because I didn’t really know who I was. Although that person can be nice to have around, that person doesn’t really have much to offer, and that was certainly me in the younger parts of my life. Now that I have a better identity, I still have a broad variety of things I like and people I get along with, but I’ve been able to set up boundaries, offer my opinion, give and accept criticism (although I’m still working on this a lot), and be a more genuine person. It’s just too bad that I couldn’t have done this a lot earlier, but life is a process that refines us constantly. I’m definitely a better person now than I was thirty years ago. And I hope that by choosing to live a simple life, I can help others find that same peace about themselves, too.
Harry L. Estes 