I sit at my computer in a pool of blood and around me are the relics of who I was before this mini-retirement.

To better preface, sometime over the 18 hours of traveling home, carrying mine and my wife’s backpack by foot, taxi and airplane, I tore a hemorrhoid I had develop in few days leading up to our flight home from Mexico.

Yes. Disgusting.

What’s more, my readers, is that the crust and congeal I feel beneath me is a quaint reminder. Of what, you ask?

That the way I was living before Mexico, before this mini-vacation, this mini-retirement, was a vain-foolish effort to push my hell-bent mania into being. And it took the food, people and countryside of another country to pop that sick way of living and leave me embarrassingly bloody.

My readers, this of course is not the most flattering topic to broach with you – but you too are pushing too hard. You are huffing and puffing, sweating even, to make your life into something – and for what?

More money? A nicer car? A larger place to live?

Abandoning the life I had here in the states has brought me to a profound sense of humility. I was sick, my readers, ill even, with the over-reaching ambition to make what I felt in my gut to be true a reality for all way too soon. And for what?

Another achieved accomplishment? A validated sense of self? A holier-than-thou spirit?

Aye… so much pushing and fighting, and now I am left with pain, remorse, and an opportunity to take the time to heal from who I was.

Slow down my friends, we all know that traditional retirement is a scam, that the pursuit of riches beyond measure doesn’t add up, and that the best things in life are free/cheap/abundant. Let the process unfold with you and enjoy every moment of it.

Or prepare to sit in the bloody mess of who you are.