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Steven Roberts was a pioneer of the mobile lifestyle in 1983 when he took off on a solar-powered recumbent bicycle—lovingly dubbed the “Winnebiko”—loaded down with computer gear, traveling 17,000 miles across the United States and earning his way as a freelance writer.

Naturally, Steve is a huge inspiration for digital nomads and location-independent types. But it really struck me when I came across this video of his presentation at Xerox PARC in 1989 about his solar- and human-powered journey on a custom-built technobike: he was an eager young guy like myself, extremely passionate about his work and about living life on his own terms, and forging new ways of working remotely from anywhere in the world.

Now he lives part-time on a beautiful, fully-loaded sailboat, a 44-foot steel raised-salon pilothouse cutter called the Nomadness, which is sure to induce envy in geeks and boat lovers alike. You can follow his sailing and digital nomad adventures at Nomadness.com and check out all of his experiments and projects at Nomadic Research Labs.

There has been a lot of talk about passion and responsibilities recently. My friend Jun is someone I know is really intrigued by the mobile lifestyle, but he recently wrote about the challenges of doing what he’s truly passionate about because of his responsibilities to family. Then “Nerdy Nomad” Kirsty asked if it’s selfish to reject the average lifestyle, and others’ expectations of you, to follow your passion.

The below essay from Steve is something that instantly resounded with me. (Perhaps it was the Pink Floyd opening!) In his words, “this little essay from 1992 captures some of the mad, driven intensity that is the engine behind creativity and growth.” Roberts touches on the desire to embrace those serendipitous moments where your life could take you down very different, alternative paths, rejecting the template lifestyle even if it means you go broke, and living life consciously and not falling into mediocre escapes. Steve Roberts is someone who has a few more years, a bit more wisdom, and a lot more experience, and I found this too powerful not to share with you.

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Passion: The Heart of Nomadness

Dangerous Influences

Maybe it’s the music, classic Pink Floyd penetrating me as I write this. Wordless memories overtake the present, obscuring it, rendering the computer puzzling even while practiced fingers perform their familiar little dance.  Perhaps madness lurks herein:  time is inside-out; the swirling vapors of time are suddenly real.  Guitars like scalpels part the callused years, revealing visions of terrible glorious color overlaid upon freight trains rumbling gritty in the night, memories of adventures and obsessions potent enough to raise gasps and gooseflesh… my first astonished discoveries, 20 years ago, that life is a thing of infinite potential.

I recall suddenly a day up Boulder Canyon, long ago, free-climbing far beyond my skills.  The rock, hard and hot against my cheek… my legs, vibrating with the tension of death’s leering proximity… and on top of it all, that crazy moment when reality gets lost among a dozen hotly competing alternatives – each convincing, each alluring, each equally fatal if mistaken for the real thing.  I grinned into the stone and inched impossibly upward, curiously disconnected, vision overloaded, abruptly FREE…

Yes, freedom.  That’s what is behind all this:  the exhilaration of walking empty-handed away from Somebody Else’s Plan and sticking out a thumb, leaning against the superstructure of a drawbridge for a thrumming three A.M. liftoff, dynamiting a love nest with walls where once were windows, releasing the brakes what-the-hell and flying with a shout down a mountain road, releasing reality and flying wide-eyed into the infinity of psychosensory unknowns… it all tastes of freedom.

Try, please, to capture this.  Reach into your past, before marriage and business, and examine the brief gaps between commitments.  Inside those gaps are subtle tears in the fabric – glimpses of wild seductive alternatives to everything you knew at the time… other realities inches away, dancing just out of reach, teasing you with infinite possibilities even as you turned dutifully from one chapter of your destiny to the next.

But did you let it lure you away?  Did you leap into the unknown and hitchhike off somewhere, not caring where, yearning for the sweet sense of movement and discovery?  Did you shock your family and chase a crazy dream, abandoning years of conditioning to let that spark inside you explode into flame?

And what about now?  Is the notion of staying ten years in one place depressing… but somehow inevitable?  Are you doing exactly what you want to do with your life, not only at this moment but at 9:00 Monday morning and tonight in bed?

The most delicious freedom comes from venturing beyond the assumptions that other people have made about you.  The real prisons are those of expectation:  denying the possibilities of your life in order to be what somebody else wants you to be.  I’ve watched brilliance tarnish, fade, and finally disappear in the murk of a stupid marriage.  I’ve seen those capable of pushing the big envelope waste a lifetime waiting for little ones with paychecks, rationalizing lost time with vague dreams of retirement travel and future ventures.  I’ve seen others, constrained by circumstances or interests to a steady job, discard all leftover energy in a nightly haze of television, alcohol, drugs, religion, or dull routine.

I am not a proselytizer for nomadics – or anything at all, really, other than what’s already inside you.  There are countless ways to explore that, and my own peculiar choices are obviously not for everybody.  But damn it, do you have any idea how much brilliance and wit rots away undeveloped?  We need to do away with the numbing influences of this mad age and start developing passion.  What could you teach others if you applied your skills and insights to whatever you love most?  Could you change the world if given a chance, even if only through a tiny increment in the evolution of intelligence?

Today’s assignment:  do something that involves risk, learning, awe, passion, courage, invention, insight, or the sweet sparking of another’s awareness.

Tidal Passion

Let’s talk about passion.  It’s a driving theme of nomadness, of learning, of life in general – it’s the crystallization of dreams, the lust for evolution, the antithesis of comfort.

Without passion, life is spent waiting… waiting… waiting for someone else to make it all seem worthwhile.

With it, growth is a way of life and you are in control.

Passion is not an intellectual notion, nor a psychological abstraction.  It often appears for a while in association with sex, but that’s not what it’s all about either.  Passion is raw and all-consuming, and can’t be replaced with religion, New Age interpretations of experience, academic compartmentalizations of the universe, pleasure seeking, or a romp up the career ladder.  It’s intense, almost violent; it renders everything else in life unimportant while driving you on a quest of personally epic proportion.

Something like that is not to be taken lightly, especially if you once felt it but now sense it slipping away.

The problem is that our cultures, in different ways, discourage passion – although not overtly, of course.  We’re politely encouraged to excel, to invent, to make something of ourselves.  But the people who actually do so have had to struggle past the boundaries of a society that offers up numbing entertainment, reduces education to the level of homogenization, discourages personal risk in its corporate world, applauds conformity, treats the exceptional as aberrations, and rewards the successful with that spectacularly sanitized mediocrity known cynically as suburban bliss.

There’s an abrupt boundary between the haves and the have nots, as far as passion is concerned.  You can’t just dabble in passion – it’s all or nothing.  Suddenly finding it makes you resent Christians for appropriating that otherwise useful term “born again”; losing it makes you feel dead.

No, there’s no such thing as a passion dilettante.  Your life is either driven by a grand, magnificent, all-encompassing design… or it isn’t.

What is possible, unfortunately, is to live passionately for a few years then suffer through the agonizing process of watching it slip away – without even knowing whether it’s recoverable.  It must be a bit like Parkinson’s Disease…  the mind goes, but slowly enough that you witness your own dissolution and understand perfectly well what it means.

I am discovering, however, that passion can be viewed as a tidal, and thus cyclic, phenomenon.  It has been in my life, certainly, with every ebb a slow tragedy and every flow an exuberant celebration of new growth.  I recoil from stasis with the fire of a new project… then burn out and fall back into stasis.  The question is:  how can one short-circuit this process and keep passion alive?  Could we survive nonstop passion, day in and day out?  Is endless passion even possible?  If we see it slipping, can we snatch it back?

One way, I think, is with landmarks.  For me, it’s a strange mix of favorite road music, an amusing juxtaposition of nomadic system design concepts, fantasies of magical encounters Out There, and a few freeze-frame images of intense romance or adventure etched like lightning flashes on my brain.

Another way to hang on to it is by spending time with passionate people – other mad, driven souls who brave the chortlings of the complacent, celebrate risk, and fear not the specter of bankruptcy.  It’s powerfully reinforcing stuff, and when you forget your own passion, a spark from someone else’s can reignite the blaze.

Yet another way is through obsessive learning:  peeking under rocks, exploring different cultures, chasing seductive unknowns, and emerging into the sunlight from the mine of your own specialties to exchange information with those in other mines (a process better known as consulting).  Learning is a delicious addiction, even though schools usually present it as a method of working for approval rather than daring to reveal the terrible secret that education is actually a magnificent form of play.  Satisfying your curiosity at every opportunity is a good way to keep your passion alive.

Now let’s list a few methods that don’t work:

• Making lists of things to do, especially if they represent the intellectualization of something about which you were once passionate.
• Perennially reshuffling your workspace, filing systems, business structure, software choices, circle of friends, or hometown – all in the name of correcting problems that are interfering with your pursuit of the Big Dream.
• Waiting for someone else to come along and solve your problems, or, if you’re wealthy, attempting to subcontract your quest.
• Praying, drinking, getting stoned, swilling coffee, playing computer games, watching TV, or otherwise engaging in any numbing and time-consuming ritual that by direct effect or superstition is somehow involved with soothing your psyche or warding off danger.  (Not that all these things are necessarily bad, mind you, they just don’t have much to do with passion… even though some of them feel pretty good.  Why, one day on a coffee buzz I broke 2 million in Crystal Quest and celebrated with a drink.)

The important thing is recognizing when your passion is slipping – and stopping it before it’s too late.  The trappings and rewards of past brilliance echo sweetly with the magic of days gone by, and it’s blissful to sail upon remembered waves if you ignore the fact that you’re not on a boat anymore.

Remember why you are.  Life is only once, and slips by so smoothly that you can get away with coasting through a whole career and still look pretty good.  Think about what you really want.  Grasp it with unshakable passion and focused desire.   Everything else is secondary.

© 1992, 2004 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs

Reprinted with permission