YEAR ZERO

Barry and Margaret Williamson
February 2011

Our idea has always been that the beginning of long-term travelling (like the beginning of retirement) should be a return to 'Year Zero': a return to a new beginning. What a person has been or known or has done should be left behind; the mind refreshed and opened to new learning and new experience. Little is more tedious than to meet a former teacher, accountant, shop-keeper and so on. Someone who talks about the job or the car or the house they used to have. Too many people in retirement become no more than an 'ex-', ruminating on past achievements and failures.

Someone (who shall be nameless) described our early retirement as 'running away'. We rather thought of it as 'moving on', 'running towards'. The alternative, as our nameless one demonstrated later (as many do), was to remain static, never to move from a path first joined decades before. Perhaps a path to be followed, literally, to the death. A path leading to a bungalow and the '3Gs' once described to us by a young couple cycling to India. Meeting them in Hungary, they said that we were the first retirees they knew with none of the '3Gs': Gardening, Golf and Grandchildren'. We were relieved but not surprised.

As in mathematics, anything before Zero is negative so anything after it must be positive. Although we do meet people who got stuck on Zero, the trauma of no more work and no known future!

We always hope to meet other travellers on the basis of who we are and what we are doing, at that present moment. Rarely is any interest shown in our past; rarely do true travellers want to discuss their history. Conversations that begin 'What did you used to do?' go nowhere. We would rather discuss 'What are you doing now?', 'Where are you going?'

This website represents what we have become in the 17 years since our Year Zero: our learning and experience; the intellectual, physical and emotional development that has taken place. This is not a continuation or an extrapolation of what has gone before, but an exploration of the potential of our inner world, paralleling and enriching travels in the external world.

The website is our way of sharing this process with others, encouraging and showing what can be done on a modest budget. If anything, the website shows what might become possible in retirement - what else might be achieved in other directions.