My arrival on the path (Dào: 道) to financial independence and early retirement was unnecessarily round-about.  Like walking east around the globe to go west one mile, it can be done, but why would you? But, to be fair, my egg-shell-white suburban upbringing gave me a certain set of values that took awhile to slough off.

Undergrad helped jump-start the transformation, but lots of humanities majors from pricey private schools own pinstripe power suits, so the B.A. can’t take full credit.  The unequivocally un-vocational graduate degree bares a certain amount of the blame for some of my “hippier” perspectives.  However, many of my grad cohort, armed with Derridean post-modernity and third wave feminism have made a vice of knowledge, even if most still brush shoulders with those who carry more commercial values.

No, in the end, it was all those easy days in Asia that did me in.  Making that final turn into the marrow that the likes of Thoreau, Foucault, and their ilk could not penetrate, it was a drawn-out confrontation with Eastern thought that sent me reeling:

知者不博，博者不知

Knowledgeable men aren’t wise, Wise men aren’t knowledgeable.

This sort of palindromic logic is common in the Daode Jing, and this line might be the Cliffs-notes version of East Asian philosophy.

Certainly not all at once, and definitely not the result of any single encounter, the East was my undoing.  As a culture, as a place, and as a thought, Asia unfurled the hems in me.  But, even if you’re coming apart, letting go is hard to do.  Those college buddies want their square footage and season tickets, and all those academic connections demand dazzling erudition.  Wanting nothing (Mu: 無) , or even very little, out of life can be a surprisingly controversial thing, and leads down a solitary path.

However, as things turn out, I am lucky enough to have a spouse that has been with me for much of the journey, and who shares the healthiest parts of my insanity. On top of that, we are both still young and capable enough to let go of many things and attempt a well-examined life.  If living abroad taught us one thing, it was the arbitrary nature of all our values (and yours too!).  In my own self examination, my love for knowledge was (is) the hardest thing to let go of.  Maybe I had to take the winding path to get here, to glimpse what knowledge is like to earn, and see plainly how little it pays back in kind.