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oh, for goodness sake, if you are so afraid of all those things, how on earth do you function? by the time i was your age, i had been to 20 different countries, all by myself, just to experience the culture, the people, the challenge of fitting in, not speaking the language, having everything be foreign to me. it was those experiences that then led me to live in mexico, london, paris, baja, new york, nassau, and los angeles. moving to costa rica was easy after all of that gallivanting around the planet. how will another culture strip you of all you know? you can’t know much if you haven’t experienced another culture. it will enrich you. fear of no water pressure or no hot water? did you really say that? i lived in the yucatan for months without hot water or any water at all unless i drew it from the well for a shower. no hot water won’t kill you. i know people down here who have no hot water at all in their house and are perfectly happy. get out of your comfort zone and experience the world. costa rica isn’t uganda. there are plenty of better things to eat than rice and beans. but you won’t know that unless and until you come here. i was labeled crazy every time i got on a plane and disappeared for months at a time. who labeled me that? the people who hadn’t been anywhere and were terrified to do what i was doing. i didn’t care what they thought, and neither should you. it’s a big fat fabulous world out there. as the saying goes, leap and the net will appear.
Ladies and gentlemen lets give it uo for Costa Rica’s unsinkable Molly Brown….
Parallel lives indeed…
maravilla, you simply cannot judge DawnVA’s sentiments by the meter of your own experience. She’s wired differently than you, as are we all, and her background is different. That she feels strong ties to her home and family and that she has anxieties about things unfamiliar are both rational and commonplace. Some of her concrete concerns about a move to Costa Rica make a great deal of sense even if perhaps they are not well grounded in actuality.
You, too, have concerns that others find irrational (as I may, as well) but we accept you as you are. You owe DawnVA the same consideration.
DawnVA, you wrote that, “I do realize submerging myself into another culture will strip me of everything I know . . .”
Nothing could be farther from the truth. What you know today you will carry with you the rest of your life (or at least ’til the Alzheimer’s sets in). Whether you remain where you are, move to Costa Rica, or move to Uganda, whatever you do yet today, tomorrow, and forever will enrich that life experience.
I think the question you should ask yourself is whether you’re prepared to give up your present comfort set to try on a different one. maravilla is right. You can live a long, rich and wonderful life without hot water unless that is what is genuinely central to your happiness. If it is, then either find it here, find it somewhere else, or stay put. Think about what’s [u]really[/u] important to you and then figure out where to find it.
There are, by the way, a lot of pretty happy Costa Ricans who live on a staple diet of rice and beans.
i was only trying to point out that living in fear of losing what most people do without all over the world will impact your ability to experience what is germane to other cultures. i guess i am wired differently because i never had much fear of change or what was new and different otherwise i’d have not moved all over the world to experience those cultures. most of what we fear will never happen anyway, and fear can absolutely strip you of any joy you may derive from new experiences. and it’s those people who are strangled by their fears who move here and then move back in less than two years.
maravilla, you’re absolutely right. Many people are paralyzed by what I (and maybe you) consider to be irrational fears.
Nevertheless, fears are feelings and we each have a right to our own. Those which we don’t harbor ourselves are neither better nor worse than those we do. They’re just different. I think there’s little hope of understanding someone else’s fears that we don’t share, but we must still accept them for their significance to the other person.
Sometimes fears can be allayed. Sometimes not. That we can get our concerns about living in Costa Rica out into the open in a forum like this is its greatest value.
i agree david. everyone owns their fears. mine is getting to the end of my life and feeling i missed out on something i wanted to do because of other peoples’ input or my own obstacles. i made the move to costa rica despite my husband telling me he wouldn’t help me build the house, that if i wanted it, i had to do it on my own, which i did. he assumed that by taking this stance, i would not go through with my whim. silly notion on his part. that just made me more determined to do what i wanted to do. but then most of my family is like this. no and can’t are not in our vocabularies, and if they were, none of them would ever have done all the adventurous things they did — including my father stowing away on a boat from wales at the age of 13, with not a dime in his pocket and not even knowing where the boat was headed, or my mom pioneering in alaska long before i was born, or my grandparents coming to america at the turn of the last century. those feats far outweigh my little excursion into costa rica. the bottom line is that any one of us could die today, tomorrow, or next week. that is the big unknown to me, and i refuse to let fear keep me from experiencing the wonders of life and the world. i have been in a lot of dangerous places during my travels; i have narrowly missed being killed by IRA bombings in england, bombings in Argentina, and torrential rains and floods in Brazil that killed thousands. but to me, those things are like childbirth — soon forgotten and replaced by the memories of having been to those places. fear is a gift, but it can also be what holds you back from really engaging in life. somehow i didn’t get the fear chip, although i am much more cautious than i used to be.
Marvy – exceptional post.
One of the best wlcr threads of all time.
I’ll start with “Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we respond to it.”
Fear is one of those responses.
There are fears and there are irrational fears. Fear is a natural response that some people use as a default response to most events. IE: Its new, unknown – therefore I fear it.
Let me take a side bar here: When I came to Costa Rica a couple of decades ago, those with irrational fears or the fearful simply were not here. It was full of Maravillas and their unstoppable attitudes (which I admire). Every one you met that time was a character, an adventurer.
Not so now. CR is morphing. With this change to user friendliness come a different set of people. What is interesting is they still have adventure blood but many are not full-blooded adventurers.
For these types to consider moving here proves they have adventurer in them, but these types have a need to rationalize their moves. The pure adventures of Costa Rica past used Maravilla logic. They didn’t come here for money, for drugs, for sex or gambling. They came here to come here. To adventure and see what happens.
So, to the partial adventurers, Costa Rica is suitable for you because of the domestication of the wild. But to get here you have to overcome your fears – that is, your irrational fears.
How you say? By asking yourself if the stories you tell yourself about your needs, wants and fears are really true. If those thoughts are bothering you after you find they are nice stories but are not really true stories, then ask yourself “who would I be without that thought?” You may find that you would be a happier more adventurous soul once you dismiss the stories that move you into default fear.
Keep the fear of what needs to be feared, just lose the default response: fear of the unknown.
Here is a clue: 90% of life is unknown. 90% of what we think is an assumption. If you question your though as to whether each individual story you tell yourself is true, you really find that most of your truth is based on some sort of assumption. It cannot be proved without a shadow of a doubt that your thoughts/stories are 100% true.
So don’t fall into what I call the uncertainty trap” “I am uncertain therefore I will do nothing.”
It’s all uncertain and if you want to win you have to make a bet: act.
We can only do our best to figure out what the best move is. You can never be certain of the results no matter how much you research and plan. Granted you usually do better with planning, but then there is serendipity. That animal has many heads!
So don’t fault yourself for failing and don’t give yourself too much credit for success. There is a lot of luck and circumstance to it all. However, do fault yourself for letting uncertainty stop you. Fault yourself for not trying. Fault yourself for irrational fear.
Boldness has genius. Providence moves upon bold acts.
I personally resonate deeply with maravilla, but all my life people have looked at me as odd. Being a maverick will do that to you. But Costa Rica was a maverick destination. When I first came here I knew I was with my kind. As of about 10 years ago, the middle America types began to arrive in big numbers. They are the ones bringing the “American Way” with them – unfortunately. The mavericks accepted CR and adjusted to her ways, Middle America wants CR to adjust to its ways.
Now the second generation of mid America types are arriving. Personally, I liked it better before, but that is not what this thread is about.
I strongly encourage “Molly Brownism” but we are not all that way: however, you can develop that if you take the time to examine your thinking. If you do, you will find that most of your thinking will make you hesitate. He who hesitates in martial arts is usually hit. He who hesitates in economics is usually the last guy on the and the first guy off. Life is limited in duration and at some point you got to move (just like mick jagger said).
This is a portrayal of our gradual/unplanned move to Costa Rica.
I’m 66 this March and my partner is 60. She and I have been traveling for the last 15 years. Prior to that I have worked on construction in Japan, mucked sheep in Australia and owned a cattle farm in WI. We both owned several business’s from which we squeezed out a decent living despite our government’s greedy hand. These business’s allowed us to travel for 2-3 weeks at a time every 2 or 3 months. We mainly visited Mexico and even made an offer on a property in Lo de Marcos, which we didn’t get. 9 years ago a customer came into my partner’s tanning/coffeeshop/salon and said what a great place Costa Rica is. We started visiting Costa Rica every couple of months for the next 5 years and crisscrossed the country, backpacking with my 2 older daughters or just my friend and I in better lodgings. 4 years ago (now 9 years later) we decided we needed a permanent place and bought a home in the Southern zone “near” the beach. Now we live here 7 months of the year. We have found a fantastic home a little further south and are planning on buying this now for eventual full year living.
I doubt anyone needs that kind of time to decide on moving here, but a full year of traveling the country and dealing with the Costa Rican “event oriented society”, no time orientation here, you should know if this is your place to settle down. It’s a trade-off of pluses and minus’s. When it’s 30 below zero in WI, it’s never too hot here!Bravo! That’s the spirit!! More mavericks in our midst! I like that! I thought it was only me and 2bncr who plunged headfirst into this existence with nary a thought to the consequences of our decision. Life truly is a great big long adventure!
As I read so many of these posts I am convienced that we put so many unnessacery fears upon ourselves. My husband has a great saying, “If you can’t go with the flow you might as well just give it up!” We are planning a move this fall and still have not been to Costa Rica for a visit! This may sound CRAZY, but with all the wonderful on-line information and great people on this web-site, we feel that this is the place!Yes we will miss alot of this, especially the 15 grandkids, but we will all survive. Yes there is alot of unknown, but we plan to use all the agencies and free information we can. With the economy the way it has been and the ex-wife getting a large amount of the retirement this will be a great move for us.
In 2005, Marcia and I made “the leap” after a brief look and it has worked out very well for us. But we had no family ties to break, we had a steady and adequate income, our house was sold, and we were not leaving our traditional home. We’d moved once already.
Please don’t jump into this too quickly. On paper, Costa Rica sounds like a true paradise, and in many ways it is. But it is not for everyone. Remember, the books and websites all have something to sell, and the participants in this and other online forums are all survivors. The dead (those who bailed out) do not speak from the grave.
We recently met a couple who, never having been here, committed to renting a house here and almost brought their dogs on their very first visit. Well, a couple of weeks here in paradise and they decided it wasn’t for them. Thank heavens they found out before having to figure out how to get the dogs back home!
If your intention is to make a serious commitment to this move, as in selling your home, car and belongings, then frankly your “plan” to move to Costa Rica this fall, without having ever visited the place, doesn’t just “seem” CRAZY, [b]it is CRAZY[/b].
My favorite saying is: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
You cannot possibly do this in a rational way, and hope for a good outcome, without having been here first. Please look before you leap. Please!
omg, you are planning on moving here without ever having been here?? you cannot possibly understand this place by reading internet sites. it just isn’t possible. you need to come down here first. this is not a little america. everything is different here, even how they think. john and david are right. all of us know people like you who thought they could make the hurdle only to find out that it was so radically different that they couldn’t overcome the obstacles. do you at least speak spanish?
Don’t get me wrong here! We have decicded to do this, BUT we have 3 different airline tickets purchased to visit San Jose and Libera before we make the move, each trip being 3 weeks. I’m crazy (according to my son) but not that crazy, well? The house will go up, if all goes well after our first trip down. My point was that sometimes in life you just need to let go and follow your heart. My husband and I are both still young and heathly. Costa Rica seems to be calling to us and for sometime or permantly we plan on adventure, friendship, travel and headaches (I am sure). Spanish is coming alittle everyday, but along way to go. I don’t have rose colored glasses on, but am up to the challenge!
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