I just got an update from one of our Focus alumni talking about some of her experiences since moving to the Lake Chapala area. It made me reminisce about my own move six years ago and how I coped with it. It’s been a very interesting and wonderful journey.
First of all, I had never lived anywhere but Kansas City, MO…I was born there and lived there for almost 59 years. I lived in the last house I owned for 27 years. Obviously, I tend to root where I’m planted. Then I met Bill in April 2002. As our relationship progressed, one day he asked me if I wanted to move to Mexico. Dead silence for 30 seconds, as I assessed my gut feeling about this question…“Will it be okay that he is the only one you know?... “Can you learn to speak Spanish?”…“Will we be able to live on his social security?”…so many questions raced through my mind, but there were no butterflies or queasy feelings in my tummy, so I said, “Okay.” And, that was it.
Bill had heard about Lake Chapala when he saw a show on one of the news programs about a man who moved south to live with his father who had retired in the area. After that show was over, he switched to the Discovery Channel, and guess what?...they were doing a whole hour on Americans retiring in Mexico, focusing on the Lake Chapala area. That got him to thinking. Then a week later he gets a letter from social security telling him how much he would get if he retired now. “That’s not bad,” he thought. But could two live on that? In the United States? No. In Mexico? He thought, “maybe…”
At that time, I was in the habit of writing updates to my friends. I had been through a lot in the past few years, and using email as a journal (i.e., Dear Friends instead of Dear Diary!) had become almost a ritual for me. After he asked me THE QUESTION, I sent out my usual update and mentioned that Bill was thinking about moving to Lake Chapala, Mexico. One of my friends wrote back and said, “My sister-in-law sells real estate in Lake Chapala!” You are kidding me!!…well, at that moment, I knew it was meant to be, and that’s how we lived our lives from there on out…focused on one point on the horizon…moving to Mexico. Everything we did from there on had to do with that plan, that concept, that dream!
I believe it really is true, you know, when you spend your energy focusing on something for an extended period of time, you ‘attract’ it…whether it’s good or bad. Therefore, the more focus a desire gets, the more energy it receives, and, for us, moving to our home in Lake Chapala became a freight train. Everything fell into place so quickly that four months later, we were getting into our packed truck and leaving Kansas City for our new life in Mexico.
Prior to our first trip to Mexico, however, Bill did his research and decided we could live quite comfortably on his social security. Imagine that…formerly, the two of us had the same retirement plan…to drop dead at our desks, and now we were considering a whole new fork in our lifepath. Wow! So a few months later in September 2003, we were headed to Mexico…a place neither of us had ever been. Bill had lived pretty much all over the world, but had never even had a stop-over in Mexico! However, he did speak three languages fluently…English, French and German…so he figured he could get along anywhere. I had decided I could get along anywhere as long as I was with Bill!
We got there on a Thursday, saw one house on a Friday and bought it on Saturday. On Monday, we returned home, decided we didn’t want to work anymore…after all, WE OWNED A HOUSE IN MEXICO! So in four months we sold two houses full of furniture, got married, retired and moved to Mexico! Talk about life-changing events! Any of those can be stressful taken one at a time, let alone all at once. It also goes to show you that once you focus your eyes on the prize, nothing can stand in your way. It never occurred to us that we shouldn’t be doing this; we knew that we SHOULD!
Of course, we got lots of flack from family and friends, but we just knew this was meant to be, and we couldn’t be deterred. My friends also said that if they had made a list of 10 of their friends who would do something like this, my name wouldn’t have even come up! How true that was…but, you know, I never had a doubt that this was what I was meant to do. And, I wanted to move for many of the same reasons our Focus on Mexico participants state: I wanted a temperate climate, a lower cost of living, and I wanted to leave the rat race. It seemed to me, at the time, that Mexico fulfilled all of those requirements. We didn’t even think about the friendly people, the excellent health care or how much safer we feel in Mexico than we did in our home town…those were the pluses. Once I crossed the border, I also developed a daily mantra, “I did not come to Mexico to complain about why it wasn’t like the United States.” Remember one of the 10 Commandments of Travel is:
Thou shalt not expect to find things as thou hast left them at home,
for thou hast left home to find things different.
I expected to have some difficulties, but because of my attitude, there weren’t as many as I thought. My biggest disappointment was that I figured I would be fluent in Spanish in two years! From my lips to God’s ears. Starting to learn a foreign language at age 59 is no small feat! But it’s well worth it.
And, horrors, included with all those other life-altering events listed above, here we were, two Internet-junkies, having to live with dial-up for the first two-and-a-half years in o ur area of Ixtlahuacan! I decided if our marriage could survive that, we could survive anything!
So here we are six years later.
I have learned to converse with my maid and gardener. We are godparents (padrinos) of one Mexican child, and we are going to be padrinos for the “fine clothing” when Vicki & Jose's (maid & gardener) daughter Fatima is presented at the Church in Ixtlahuacan on February 2, Dia de la Candelaria. We are humbled by these requests and are honored that we would be asked.
We have many friends now, both Mexican and Norte Americanos, and I sincerely cannot imagine living anywhere else. We take one day at a time, Bill and I appreciate all that we’ve been given since meeting one another in 2002 and take nothing for granted. We are blessed.