UNCOOPED: BECOMING A FREE RANGE HUMAN

God, I am writing this on a laptop that is so old is has Word 2003 on it. Internet Explorer grinds away and I have had to restart it because of too many open windows at least twice now. But part of being the person I want to become more fully, a Free Ranger, means not sweating the small stuff.

A few days ago in my doctor’s waiting room, I stumbled on an article written by Dr. Marianne Williamson, an author and spiritual life coach (she’s the “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” author). In the article, Williamson talks about the extra 20 years people my age (I’m 60) have added to our lives but she proposes instead of adding it to the end of our lives, we have actually added it to the waning years of our work life and especially to our retirement. That really resonated with me.

Having added these 20 years, Williamson posits, we are woefully unprepared to live them. My generation still grew up thinking we would retire somewhere between 60 and 65 and then we would live another 5 or so years before we died. But our lifespans have increased so much that not only do many of us HAVE that extra twenty years, but many of us are have no plan for how we want to live them. Some of us keep on working – way past the point in which we actually experience pleasure in what we are doing.  Most of us late baby boomers are not really prepared to sit in a rocking chair. Many of us like myself are still physically and mentally very active and have no desire to ‘slow down’ that much.

Williamson’s idea got me thinking about this term Free Range I have been hearing about as it applies to Humans.  I’ve maybe always had a little Free Range in me – I have moved large distances multiple times, I took my 5-year-old son on a 5-day backpack trip across the Grand Canyon, I have chosen a career path which would give me the flexibility I felt I needed. But I am realizing that I have only been dabbling in Free Ranging, picking and choosing among its strategies like a gambler at a Las Vegas smorgasbord, without any real commitment or goals except how to deal with the problem right in front of me.

I spent last night researching everything I could find on the Web about Free Rangers which admittedly is not much. Most of the references to Free Range Humans lead to Marianne Cantwell, who was the first author to claim the title. She describes a Free Ranger as a person who has decided to live his or her life fully every day, not just on weekends. She also credits Free Rangers with figuring out how to make a living by doing what they love. 

One of my favorite sayings, particularly to my overly cautious doctors, is “I’m not afraid of dying; I’m afraid of not living.” I see myself becoming a Free Ranger because I put a high priority on living a really full life instead of ‘being successful.’ Matter of fact, the way I see it ‘being successful’, unless you carefully define your terms, can be a serious detriment to Free Ranging. Success can provide just the right inertia to keep you ‘cooped up’ in a life that no longer is in sync with your changing priorities.

Unlike Cantwell’s view that all Free Rangers definitionally find financially sustainable ways to engage in their passions, I think there are a lot of Free Rangers out there that USED to make a living doing something that at least didn’t make them take anti-depressants but who have broken away from the ‘work until you are ready for social security’ mold and are now doing exactly what they want, picking up work that suits their lifestyle instead of vice versa. That’s beginning to look a lot like me. That’s one of the lessons living in Yellowstone for five months taught me. Sometimes, it’s not about the work – it’s about the lifestyle.

In the past year, now that I’ve been thinking about what I want to do when I grow up and observing how people are choosing to live their lives, I’ve met a lot of Free Rangers. They might not know they are Free Rangers but I do.  Yellowstone and perhaps many National Parks are entire subcultures of them.

In Yellowstone, I met two sisters that left their highly lucrative corporate jobs in a law firm after a particularly scary mugging to move to a tiny burg in Montana and work in Yellowstone National Park. They’ve just retired because in their 70s they realized there are a lot of places they have yet to see and believe me these ladies have seen an awful lot of the world. I also met a couple who work for wages well below their earlier professions, just to live in a traveling home with their dog and spend the better part of the year living in beautiful places. My Meetup Backpack group, Tucson Backpackers, has a heap of Free Rangers although they might not recognize their Free Rangerness unless I have had this very conversation with them that I am having with you.

Free Ranging is not just available to older adults. I’ve met a whole lot of young Free Rangers in Montana doing many different things that support their existence in a place they love even though they may have to work three different jobs so they can bike, kayak, backpack or just step outdoors and say good morning to the towering peaks that erupt from the ground behind their apartments or back yards. They may have been initially forced into Free Ranging because of the lack of positions available in their professions after graduation, but many of them are beginning to view this as an opportunity for enlightenment – a way to escape being shackled by ‘corporate America’. My 24-year-old son Daniel has his own consultancy firm so that he can take part-time work and projects that feed his passions AND his outdoor lifestyle in Montana.

I suspect I was born a Free Ranger and just strayed a bit for a long while. I’m not saying that all Free Rangers are born, but I guess I am saying that Free Rangers have a certain lust for new experiences and distrust of institutions and structure that make them more open-minded about stepping away from what is socially ‘normal’ into new dimensions of how to live. My mother once told me that as early as 3 years old I would scurry out of doors at every opportunity in order to live outside. Fortunately, my Mother had two very kind old spinsters (that’s what Free Range Women were called back in the 50s) living next door that would keep watch for the escaped toddler next door on Saturday mornings when her exhausted parents were still sleeping. They would take me into their warm, sweet-smelling kitchen for breakfast. I was fearless at 3. Or already on to how to train the adults in my life.

I still like to wander outside on Saturday mornings. The best Saturday is one during which I wake up under the heavens, having slept ‘cowboy’ style without a tent. Of course, cowgirls do this, too, but it’s the crooning, socially misfit cowboy that gets the cred for sleeping under the stars. But I digress.

The point of being Free Range is that I no longer feel comfortable being COOPED UP. Cooped up might mean having a corporate job that seemed fulfilling at one point in your life but no longer suits you. Cooped up might mean being a spouse in a marriage that no longer is fulfilling but at least you have two cars and good-looking smart children and a membership at the Art Museum or Symphony where everyone can witness how successful you are. Cooped up could mean sleeping too late after a night of reading a really good book and being concerned you will be fired for lateness. Cooped up might mean having so many bills that you are required to continue your not so terrible but ‘in a rut’ life in order to keep up a lifestyle that you no longer find interesting. Cooped up could manifest in being so tired on Friday because you spent so much energy on being exactly what other people thought you should be all week that you have no energy to fulfill your need to go camping, or traveling, or star-gazing, or fishing or dancing or even taking a refreshing afternoon nap.

I must be osmosing all this Free Range stuff from the eggs I buy at the Farmers’ Market - eggs that are advertised as laid by ‘free range’ or ‘uncooped’ hens. Somehow, the idea that the chicken had an option as to where, when and how she would lay the egg I am going to consume makes a difference to me. The egg is the object but how the egg got into my basket is probably the most important aspect of my egg-buying.  If the chicken was ‘cooped’ in a tiny wire cage or had to trip over hundreds of other chickens in order to roost in a corporate hen house, I am certain I will taste and experience the difference. And if I am cooped up in whatever corporate cages are more typical, I expect I will experience the difference. 

I think Free Ranging is having ideas about what is good for you, without waiting for permission to carry those ideas out.  It is deciding on Thursday you will be spending your New Year’s in Big Bend National Park just because you have never been there and having the plan to do so in place by the following Sunday.  It is taking six months off to live in the wilderness of a National Park, working a job you would never apply for ‘back home’ just in order to watch elk cows give birth and their bull mates go through rut. Free Ranging is being less concerned about the wheres, whens and whos than the hows. It is being more concerned about the quality of your life than the quantity of the years you spend in it or the amount you have saved up for ‘retirement’.

Looking back, I realize I have been planning for Free Ranging for a couple years now. I have been retiring debt; getting rid of ‘things’; trying to go digital in my financial life so I can pay bills, look at statements and balances wherever I am; getting a roommate so I feel comfortable leaving my house for months at a time; refusing new responsibilities once old ones have played out their lifespans. And that is just MY journey. The thing about Free Ranging – only the Free Ranger can determine what has meaning to them and how to get it because the process IS a very large part of the goal. 

So here I am, continuing to restructure my personal and business lives in order to be able to leave whenever and wherever the wind calls my name. It will take some work but I’m worth it. Stay tuned.