Catholics hold a ‘confirmation’ ceremony for its adherents, generally when they reach between 13 and 16 years old or so. The Bishop comes to town, there’s a big to-do, the Bishop makes a declaration, the adolescent says ‘Amen’ and they’re confirmed. It’s almost like a second baptism for when you’ve reached the age of reason.

I attended the ceremony for my sister who is a few years older than I am. And before you knew it, I got older, and my turn had arrived.

Now, I’ve always been a man of logic. When I was in 3rd grade I remember we had to keep a journal that our teacher would read and respond to. I asked her, with childish curiosity: If there were kings willing to offer him precious metals for his birthday, why was Jesus so poor? You would have thought I had written a bomb threat the way it was responded to. The principal got involved, my parents were called in, the local priest was asked his opinion. Nobody wanted to offend anybody else. Finally, they decided the teacher would tell me that the gifts the child Christ received at his birth were only in token amounts, and not of any great worth. Ahh, well that explains it…

- An unsatisfying answer, but even at that age I was wise enough to just let it be so that I could get back to playing kickball.

When I was young I believed everything I was told. I took a lot of things on faith, assuming the adults around me knew what they were talking about, and that eventually, as I grew, I would come to understand how it is that they knew what they knew. I believed the Biblical stories I was told were historical fact. That’s how they were presented to me. But at some point, probably around 9, 10 or 11 years old, I started to figure out that adults don’t know quite as much as I thought they did. That there are things that are unknown or unknowable. I remember a period of several months where I was fascinated with the concept of infinity and the idea that I exist along a continuum of space that continues on forever. And after talking about it with teachers and parents, I realized that their grasp of the idea was no better, if not inferior, to my own.

And then at some point people started to talk about ‘faith’. But there was no graceful transition from presenting the Bible stories as historical truth to me as a 6 year old, and then trying to explain faith, and belief to me as an 11 year old. You presented this stuff to me with no caveats, as known fact, why would I need to believe or have faith in anything? You told me you knew this stuff was true! It was a betrayal of my trust. What else didn’t they know?

And so it came time for me to be confirmed in my church. The church that held out my parents, and their parents as members, the church my sister adored, and the church that all my friends from Catholic school were being confirmed in. And I decided I wasn’t going to participate. I was willing to concede that the story of Christ was possibly true, but I had no belief or faith that it was so. And given that, I objected to publicly stating in a ceremony anything that would indicate something to the contrary.

I had made my decision. But I held off sharing it with anyone for as long as possible. I knew it wasn’t going to be taken well and it’s a lot to ask of a 15 year old to stand up to his parents, entire extended family, and go against what all his friends are doing all at the same time.

My parents were absolutely livid. I was yelled at. I was told I’d be punished. There were attempted bribes. I was threatened that I’d be shunned by my grandparents. – That it would be a mark on me for the rest of my life.

I never yelled back, or gave in. I explained my position a couple times and wasn’t being listened to. So I just resolutely crossed my arms, sat down, and refused to go.

After about a month of argument my parents gave up and it was never mentioned again.

Looking back on it, it looks like I was being a better Catholic than my parents. – Respecting the church and its teachings too much to lie to its face.

We have all come a long way since those days. Living forces us to grow. My entire extended family has become much less entwined with the severity of a dogmatic church, I think for a few reasons: Me being open about being gay at a young age; the scandals in the church; and a kind of calming gentleness that seems to have been slowly draped upon us through the years.

It was with that personal history in mind that I read the following criticism of the American Catholic Bishops:

They are prepared to go down screaming over contraception in health insurance plans handled between patient and insurer. Letters were read recently in every parish. They planned a campaign against any compromise for months.

But ask yourself: where were they on a much more fundamental cause for Catholics: universal healthcare? Were they anything like as vocal?

Where were they when the Bush administration was practizing and authorizing the torture and abuse and robbing of human dignity of terror suspects? The Pope never obliquely mentioned these categorical evils when visiting the US and cozying up to the war criminals in the Bush administration?

Where have they been on tackling climate change – a sacred obligation for Catholics according to the Pope they follow so fanatically?

Why so utterly fixated on sex, especially the sex lives of women and gay men? Why so utterly indifferent to the whole range of public policies which Catholic orthodoxy has strong views on?

…

They have become the Pharisees. And we need Jesus.

It’s easy to forget the most important things when so many trivial things are thrust upon us day after day. We need to be reminded often that we can choose to love, forgive and be unworried, and that it can lead to the happiest of lives. But instead we’re suffocated with rules. There is a road the Catholic church could take that would make me proud to call myself a Catholic. They’re just not taking it.

But most modern Americans have turned to using it exclusively as a positive word. – Companies hope to hire ambitious people, teachers want ambitious students, young singles look for ambitious mates. People who veer from the path of the high school > college >  40-year career track are seen as unambitious loafers. – Criticized for their lack of contribution. – Told they have to grow up, or that they must have psychological problems, like low self-esteem or depression. How could one possibly not desire honor, money, fame and power? Of course, some people want those things more than others, but to not want them at all? Surely there must be something wrong!

Some people point to how I live and label me as ambitious. They point to my academic track record, my growing investments and my unconventional life. And they see someone with ambition. I understand how someone could be under that impression. But I think what ultimately makes me unambitious is my end goal. Which is basically to live modestly, draw on my secure passive income, and spend my days in leisure.

I’m already at the point, at 28 years old, where I could live off my passive income indefinitely. Now I’m just upping the investments a bit to increase my income up beyond my current needs. At this point, with a top notch education and law degree almost in hand, most people would be setting course on the beginnings of a career. Whereas I am ending mine.

I could try to become a billionaire. Or spend my life fighting for civil rights. Or start shaping a bid for public office. And while there are aspects of those things that are appealing, I’ve started far enough down each of those roads to know that they would ultimately be unfulfilling. People will try to tell me I just haven’t found the right job, or have a bad attitude, or that I’ll be unhappy and alone without a career. Who knew so many people derive their happiness from going to work on Monday? And here I am thinking leisure, friends, play, and the pursuit of knowledge make for a good life. I’m apparently in dire need of a career coach to set me straight.

What really makes me happy is waking, at whatever hour I choose, to the morning of a day without plans. A day that I can use to ride a double century on my bike, visit an older relative, perfect my garden, finish a book, brew a new beer, scale a mountain, sit on a beach, create art, admire art, entertain some friends, study, make music, build something, go sailing, catch a sunset, or just attend to the chores of life at a slow, methodic pace.

Is there anything ambitious about that? Maybe you think so, but I don’t.

Once this place is rented out my gross rental income will be right around $2k/month. Taxes, the water bills, and insurance eat up about $250/month (though I pay all these annually up front). Which means I’m netting about $1,750/month. I figure on shuffling about $500/month into a reserve account for future maintenance on the properties. Which leaves me with about $1,250/month net. With education related expenses coming to an end in a few months, that means the $1,250 ought to cover my personal expenses. Which means, I suppose, that I’ll officially be financially independent (FI).

FI is a funny thing to calculate and think about. In fact, the capital I used to purchase these properties has been in my possession since the summer of 2009. And I hadn’t worked from October 2009 all the way up until just about a month ago. So does that mean I’ve been FI since the summer of ’09? The money was in securities and the returns weren’t enough to completely cover my living expenses, but now that I’ve changed my investment into real estate, that same amount of capital is enough to cover my living expenses.

You might be inclined to say ‘no’, I wasn’t FI, because my returns weren’t covering my expenses. Which sounds reasonable. Except that someone could well be FI, living off of securities for years, but then have one or two years with low returns that aren’t enough to completely cover living expenses, then rebound back. Would you say that person is no longer FI during the 2-year bear market? Probably not, you would probably say they were FI the entire time. So maybe I have been FI since 2009.

Whatever, it really isn’t of any consequence other than bragging rights anyway. Not so much of being FI, but of how quickly I did it, in 2009 I was 25 years old.

So now the insured value of my properties is just over $400k (the replacement value, the minimum coverage the insurance company will issue a policy for for my houses). The combined assessed value for tax purposes is $270k. Realistically, if I wanted to sell the houses quickly, I could probably get around $160k for the pair. Which shows you just how nuts the real estate market is right now. I saw a listing the other day for an old farm house on 10 acres where the asking price was $130k. Six years ago it had an asking price of $1.5M.

So I’ve already got my eyes open for a third house. Which I could probably swing on my own, but things would start to get a little tight. Which is why I made an arrangement to go 50/50 with another investor for a short-term partnership where we will purchase a place with cash, fix it up, and put it back on the market, splitting all costs and proceeds. Which will leave me in a comfortable position to be able to purchase a few more rentals on my own.

I haven’t lived in the same place for more than 12 months since I was 16 years old. And when I move I sell off, give away, and throw most of my things out. I’ve never decorated a room. I own two pairs of shoes. I wear plain, solid t-shirts absent of pockets or logos. I have three pairs of pants, and a drawer full of one type of sock and underwear. I have a couple hoodies and sweaters, a full-length black cashmere coat, one winter hat, a couple of pairs of shorts, and that’s it. Oh, there are a few rarely-worn shirts, ties and suits in a closet at my parent’s house for special occasions.

I use these clothes to go to class, climb mountains, go to the beach, sit around the apartment, fix houses, and everything else I do.

If it were socially acceptable I’d just wear the monastic brown robe with a rope belt.

My father has asked me about my lack of variety, “Don’t you care about what people think about how you look?”

My response is, “Yes, I do. I want to be thought of as utilitarian, and confident enough to be unconcerned with the types of people who might think less of me based on my wardrobe.”

I like showing up for a group mountain hike where inevitably everyone’s wearing specialized wicking techno-clothing, boots that cost more than my monthly rent, carrying giant back packs, and usually someone even has carbon-fiber walking poles. Meanwhile I’m there in my sneakers, cotton t-shirt, with my lunch stuffed into the leg pockets of my cargo pants and a big bottle of water in my hand. Guess who’s usually the first to the summit?

My other possessions are few. Some kitchenware, some second-hand furniture I’d be happy to abandon if I was moving again, less than 30 books, some bathroom stuff, a 5 year old laptop, a top-of-the line gaming/media pc that I built, and a desktop humidor for my cigars. I have a small, well-maintained ten year old sedan and an “old-fashioned” cell phone. And a small toolbox for refurbishing houses.

But I don’t keep things simple because I think it’s virtuous or liberating. I just do it because I move so frequently, it’s not worth hauling everything around, and since my number one goal at this stage in my life is freeing myself from the necessity for paid work, I only buy something if it is fulfilling a specific need that I can’t otherwise fulfill without buying it. That winds up being very few things.

Which is why I find a few posts on Leo Babuata’s beautiful site where he writes about minimalism a bit surprising.

Consider what I wrote above, with all sincerity, and then consider Leo’s musing here:

There are people who claim never to want stuff anymore, who just don’t care about cool clothes and gadgets and bags and notebooks, who have moved past desiring things.

Those people are lying.

Unless you’re a certified Zen Master, you never move beyond wanting stuff (and even the Zen Masters have their temptations, I’m sure). We’re humans, and we have desires. When the new iPhone comes out, I lust over it just as most technophiles like me do.

Apparently I’m either a liar or a Zen Master. He writes in another post about his desire for consumer gizmos:

Christmas has come and gone, and in its consumerist wake thousands of people are left holding shiny new Kindles, iPads, iPhones and iPods. New toys that are fun, useful and beautiful all at once.

And while I see the attraction of these devices — I’ve been tempted myself many times — I also know that they are some of the best marketing devices ever.

I have absolutely zero desire for any of the stuff he’s mentioned. But if I did, I wouldn’t have some inner struggle to keep me from getting it, I’d just go buy it.

I once took a history class with a professor who was quite interested in museums, curation, and how people relate to objects. He wanted us to think deeply about why people go to museums and why we value all this stuff. When I go to the Museum of Fine Arts and look at King Henry VIII’s suit of armor, isn’t that kind of a silly thing? It’s just a bit of metal that someone fashioned and an historical figure wore on a few occasions. Yet we build multimillion dollar cathedrals to house all this stuff so that we can all just go look at it.

We admire the craftsmanship of the metal work, the beauty of a painting, and somehow the objects help the imagination and provoke thoughts that might not otherwise ever have occurred to us. There’s something pleasant about being next to something real that connects us to a past that often times can feel more like an imagined novel than an actual series of events that has lead up to our current state of affairs. King Henry’s helmet was removed form his head, placed in an armory, sat in a collection, crossed the ocean on a ship, sat in storage, and then was put on display where it was so close to me I could smell the metal it was forged from. It makes him more relatable, more like a human and less like a character.

I believe beautiful objects in a private home can serve similar noble purposes. Whether they be historical artifacts, pieces of art, or objects with an inspirational level of craftsmanship. – Whether it be a hand-carved humidor or the world’s best designed flatware. They can inspire us to the greatness of their craftsmen and constantly remind us of the beauty that humans are capable of.

When I do finally settle down with some sense of permanence, and when my investments have secured my retirement with some confidence, I would enjoy acquiring some well-made objects of antiquity and works of art. And I would like every object in my home, down to the most trivial of things, to be of the greatest quality available. Whether those be things I make or things I purchase. Though my objection to general clutter and the extra cleaning and maintenance duties that come along with more objects and more space will likely, naturally keep all my possessions to a minimum.

But I certainly don’t “lust” after these objects I’m not ready to acquire. – Never mind lusting after modern productions of consumerism that are marketed at me. That’s something I not only don’t feel, but I don’t even understand. How could anyone desire something that takes them further from their greater goals? – Especially something as silly as a telephone.

I suppose, in sum, my point is that the real value of minimalism might not so much be in the ease of living that comes with having few possessions. But rather, in the ease of living that comes with not even desiring those possessions.

I appreciate that minimalism is largely a backlash to consumerism. And I agree that chasing consumer fads will ultimately leave anyone unsatisfied and worse off. But not all objects and possessions are the result of living in a consumer-based society. And I do think the possession of some objects, even the superfluous ones, has the potential to improve life.

I rode my 250cc Honda Rebel motorcycle from Santa Fe to Knoxville, TN, down to Atlanta, and then back again during my spring break of freshman year. At the end of the semester I rode the bike from Santa Fe to New Hampshire. I wiped out over the summer, breaking my wrist, then rode the bike back to Santa Fe at the end of the summer with a cast still on my clutch hand.

I also once took the train from Santa Fe, to Philadelphia, to Boston. The most pleasant way to travel, I think.

I walked across Massachusetts a couple of summers ago.

I’ve done a few road trips to Quebec, DC and Florida with friends.

I’ve visited California several times.

I lived in China for 3 months over the summer after my sophomore year of college. I spent a couple nights in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. But spent most of time in Fujian and Chenzhou, Hunan.

I’ve stepped foot in 36 of the 50 United States.

I once went to an epic, 36-hour party that began in the United States and ended in Mexico.

And as a boy, some family vacations took me to a few spots in the Caribbean.

I really don’t much care for travel. But every couple of years I forget that, go again, and rediscover my distaste for it. I’m not gone long before I start yearning for my desk, my bed, and my rather pleasant weekly routines, whatever they might be at the time. I don’t think travel is quite as eye-opening as some people make it out to be either. That might be because I don’t think what people rather coarsely refer to as ‘culture’ to be a very valuable thing to know about. So these people bake their bread differently than I do. Or raise their children this way, instead of that way. Or what is considered suitable fashion is different from the fashions of my homeland. So what? I know there are myriad ways to do and think about things. I take that into account when I try to decide how I am going to go about things myself. But I think really, a bit of communication and thought can deliver just as much insight as a ten-thousand-mile plane ride.

For example, it’s fashionable for people in the United States to want to visit the Great wall of China. I remember saying to my travel-mate the night before we were supposed to go that I was considering sleeping in instead because I was so tired. He insisted I go, that I couldn’t miss it. I said, “I’ve already been. I know EXACTLY what it’s going to be like. I’ve seen hundreds of photos of it, I’ve heard people talk about it, I’ve been to similar types of things before. I may as well have already been there. There’s going to be a little welcome area. We’ll walk up some steps. Maybe walk around the wall a little bit. – Look out at the surrounding area. – Talk about how awfully old it is. And that’ll be that.” He convinced me to go anyway.

Turns out I should have slept in. I now call it the not-so-great wall. It was exactly as I expected.

Some people may think my view comes from being too self-centered, believing my culture to be superior to another. That’s not the issue. Though the fact that the United States is made up of various cultures might be part of my apathy towards the whole thing. I could see how it could be eye-opening for a Chinese person to travel internationally since he is immersed in such a mono-culture where everyone is of the same race and heritage. But as an American I’ve been in classes with, worked with and been friends with people from Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Egypt, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and probably dozens and dozens more. I get exposed on a regular basis to people who have come from places with different ways of thinking about how to live. After all that exposure, I think most of the silly stuff people focus on that varies between cultures just doesn’t matter that much.

You may have guessed I’ve never much cared for my anthropology classes either.

That all said, it has been a while since I’ve gone anywhere. I’d say I haven’t left the 100 mile radius around my home for about 2 and a half years now. Once my regularly scheduled obligations are over with in the coming months I do think I’d like to look into RV-ing for a bit. There are some things I’d like to see: polar bears on Hudson Bay, the Grand Canyon, the national parks, some cities and states I’ve missed, some of the massive cave systems in North America, those types of things. I’ve also long thought sailboat cruising on the East Coast and Caribbean would be fun and may give it a go in the coming years.

I’ve been reading about manipulating and juggling multiple credit cards in ways to get free or deeply discounted travel. I’m trying right now to use those offers to arrange a coast-to-coast train ride with a large, private room, about a week of hotel nights, and then a plane ride home, all for free. We’ll see how that all goes. I’m planning it for right after the bar exam as a way to wind down. If it works out I may continue that method in order to visit international locations through the years. Perhaps if I go for short spurts and travel in luxury I’ll be able to tolerate it better.

So in sum, I don’t think travel offers much insight into the world or other people. But I’m going to continue to dabble in it anyway as a way to better enjoy the natural wonders of the world and to break up the monotony that staying in one small area for years can bring on.