My thinking exactly... Just not wise enough to write it down. Enjoy.






“Later in life, people often ask themselves how they would like to be remembered on their tombstone as a reminder to choose life’s endeavors mindfully in a race to beat the clock. Rather than waiting for retirement to live life, the Martins have embraced the notion that life should be approached as a blank canvas, to be filled joyfully and with meaning, now. Jaja Martin: ‘It seems that Americans…are programmed to go to school, to go to college and then after college to get a job, usually through the career center, which is what I did, and then we have our job for our whole life, and we save with our social security, and we save for our retirement, and then when we retire, we can finally go out and have an adventure and have fun. And I guess Dave and I didn’t buy into that at all; we decided to go off and have fun while we were young.’ David Martin: ‘That part of the programming didn’t make it into my psyche….I rejected it and retired when I was 19 and started doing odd jobs to keep the cruising going and decided that I would work when I got old instead of working as I was young, and it’s interesting when I was a young man, 19 or 20, 21, 22, starting to build my boat, Direction, my peers told me I was wasting my life and that all this opportunity for advancement was passing me by, and yet when I spoke to individuals who were retired or much older, they told me that they would do anything to trade places with me, and that I was doing the right thing and not to stop, and so I took the wisdom of folks who had lived their full lives and it wasn’t the reason I did the things I did, but it’s interesting for my decisions to be backed up by people who had some more wisdom than my peers, who are now dropping dead from heart attacks and wishing that they’d gone cruising.’ JM: ‘….[W]e turned our back on that conventional lifestyle; instead of building up assets and materials, things such as houses and cars and mortgages, and all the rest that comes with it, we just sailed off on our boat and had our kids along the way and figured out what we wanted to do. If you have a house and a car and a mortgage and a kindergarten and all the things you have, it would be difficult to maybe turn your back on your lifestyle. If you felt like you were giving something up, then that’s what you’d be doing, but we never gave anything up; we just continued our lifestyle. That’s a perspective thing.’ DM: ‘It’s our perspective.’”—Ice Blink