Jamaica Didn’t Make Us Choose

Written by Matt & Linda (empty nesters with a Wi-Fi addiction and a refusal to live on autopilot)

What if the life you’re waiting for is hiding behind the way you’re thinking?

We could have spent our entire time in Jamaica waiting to leave.

Seriously.

We arrived at our house sit outside Ocho Rios and discovered that our accommodations weren’t exactly what you’d call luxurious. No air conditioning. Hot, sticky nights. And mosquitoes big enough that you could hear them coming.

We could have looked around and said, “Well, I guess this is what we’re stuck with until it’s time to go home.”

Then we could have spent our days complaining about the heat, chasing mosquitoes, and counting down the nights until we could sleep somewhere comfortable again.

What a miserable way to spend time in Jamaica.

And here’s the kicker. Nothing about that house had to change for us to have a wonderful experience.

What needed to change was where we chose to put our attention.

That’s something Linda and I have learned over the years. Life doesn’t always hand you the circumstances you want. But the way you think about those circumstances can have an enormous influence on the life you experience.

And Jamaica gave us a pretty entertaining reminder.

Welcome to Paradise. Bring a Bug Zapper.

We were house sitting in a small gated neighborhood in the hills outside Ocho Rios. There were maybe ten houses, shared clotheslines, and neighbors who actually knew each other.

Before accepting the sit, we’d asked the homeowners about air conditioning.

Their response?

“We’re up on the hill about 2,000 feet above sea level. It’s cooler.”

Well, they weren’t lying.

But cooler than 96 degrees can still be pretty damn hot.

The house didn’t have air conditioning. We kept the balcony door open at night to get whatever breeze we could, and we slept beneath a mosquito net.

Now, I don’t know what they feed the mosquitoes in Jamaica, but these things were impressive.

You could HEAR them.

Fortunately, the homeowners had left us one of those electric mosquito-zapping racquets that looks like a tennis racquet.

Every night, we’d climb into bed, pull the mosquito net around us, and start swinging that thing.

POP!

Sizzle.

Swing again.

POP!

We kept going until the popping and sizzling stopped. Only then was it safe to go to sleep.

Nothing says tropical romance quite like lying in bed together conducting an electrical mosquito execution.

Now, was this our favorite house sit?

Not even close.

But here’s the thing.

The balcony overlooked a beautiful jungle landscape. The neighborhood was wonderful. The people were friendly. And the house gave us an opportunity to experience Jamaica in a way we probably wouldn’t have experienced from a resort.

We could dislike the heat AND love where we were.

We could appreciate the people and the experience without pretending the accommodations were perfect.

Both/And.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

But think about how often we do the exact opposite.

Something doesn’t turn out the way we expected, so we decide the entire experience is ruined. We focus on what’s wrong until we can’t see anything else.

And sometimes, without realizing it, we start waiting.

Waiting for the situation to improve. Waiting for something better to come along. Waiting for the day we can finally start enjoying ourselves.

We could have done that in Jamaica.

Thank God we didn’t.

Look What We Would Have Missed

One of our neighbors introduced himself shortly after we arrived. Later, he called and invited us to join him and his eight-year-old son for an afternoon at Spanish Bridge.

We said yes.

When we arrived, we climbed out of his car wearing our very American bathing suits and joined the locals at their swimming hole.

There was this beautiful, clear river running beneath the bridge. We settled into the shallow water to enjoy a soak.

Meanwhile, the locals had an entirely different idea of relaxing.

They were jumping from the bridge while holding an enormous rope tied to a tree across the river.

These guys would swing out over the water, right over our heads, before letting go and dropping into the river.

We sat there watching, wondering if one of them was going to misjudge his release and land on top of us.

Quite the show with our soak.

But what I remember most wasn’t the rope swing.

It was the invitation.

Our neighbor could have gone to the river with his son and never given us a second thought. Instead, he invited us into a little piece of his everyday life.

And because we were with him, we were welcomed right into the group.

What an experience.

We had another little taste of everyday Jamaica riding the local route taxis. These were shared cars that picked people up along their routes, packing in passengers until there didn’t seem to be room for another human being.

One afternoon, we rode home from grocery shopping with five Jamaican schoolgirls packed into the car with us. We stopped to drop each one at her home along the way.

There we were, two Americans with grocery bags, participating in the afternoon school commute.

I loved it.

None of those experiences made the house cooler or the mosquitoes smaller.

But they made our time in Jamaica richer.

And they were right there, waiting to be discovered, while we could have been sitting around waiting for the trip to end.

Locals are fearless. We were soaking and nervous.

Apparently, We Also Had Room for a Little Crazy

Of course, we didn’t spend all our time soaking in rivers and getting to know the neighbors.

We also booked a UTV buggy adventure.

It had rained for a couple of days before our excursion, and the trails were an absolute muddy mess.

Every turn was an adventure. We slipped, slid, splashed through water, and occasionally wondered whether the buggy was going to go where I pointed it or introduce us to a nearby tree.

Linda screamed.

I laughed.

Mud won.

Toward the end of the ride, we even managed a complete 360-degree spin.

I’m pretty sure somebody started calling me “Crazy Matt.”

Fair enough.

Linda screamed. Matt laughed. Mud won.

Afterward, we climbed aboard a little tractor-pulled tram and headed into the jungle to the Secret Blue Hole River, where waterfalls and rushing water provided a completely different kind of entertainment.

One minute we were sliding around a muddy trail, and the next we were standing in a beautiful jungle river getting what amounted to a natural water massage.

Two completely different experiences.

Both wonderful.

And then we decided to experience an entirely different Jamaica.

Jungle spa. No appointment needed.

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Wait. I Thought We Were Doing the Local Thing?

We booked a night at Jewel Dunn’s River Resort.

Not a day pass. An overnight stay.

By arriving early and leaving late the following day, we enjoyed nearly two full days of resort life.

And it was glorious.

Beautiful beach. Wonderful pools. Great food. Terrific service.

Air conditioning!

Nobody needed to explain to us how much cooler it was at 2,000 feet above sea level.

We were living the good life.

And somewhere along the way, after a few sake bombs I hadn’t requested, I even found myself doing some of the cooking at the Japanese teppanyaki restaurant.

Apparently, a couple of days of luxury weren’t enough. I needed a second career as a Japanese chef.

But think about this for a minute.

If we’d decided that we were experiencing Jamaica the local way, we could have convinced ourselves that going to a luxury resort would somehow compromise the experience.

As if there were rules.

You’re either an adventurous traveler who lives among the locals OR you’re a resort person who enjoys a little pampering.

Pick one.

Why?

Who made that rule?

We loved our little Jamaican neighborhood. We loved getting to know the people. We loved the route taxis, Spanish Bridge, the muddy buggy, and that beautiful jungle river.

And we loved every minute of our luxury resort stay.

We didn’t have to reject one to appreciate the other.

In fact, I think experiencing both made the entire trip better.

Nervous system reset. No guilt.

Who Told Us We Had to Choose?

Here’s where Jamaica becomes more than a travel story.

Think about how much of our lives we’ve been conditioned to see in terms of Either/Or.

We can have security OR freedom.

We can be responsible OR adventurous.

We can enjoy life now OR save everything for retirement.

We can appreciate what we have OR want something different.

And after hearing those choices long enough, we begin to believe they’re the only ones available.

Eventually, we stop looking for anything else.

That’s the part that concerns me.

Because when your mind has already decided there are only two choices, it’s pretty hard to recognize a third possibility.

Or a fourth.

Or the possibility that you might actually be able to have both.

Linda and I have spent a lot of years challenging that kind of thinking in our own lives.

We’re not always successful. Sometimes we catch ourselves falling right back into those old patterns.

But we’ve learned to ask a different question.

Instead of immediately asking, “Which one do we have to choose?”

We ask, “What would it look like if we could have both?”

That doesn’t mean we always get everything we want. Sometimes an Either/Or choice is real. Sometimes circumstances genuinely limit what’s possible.

But I suspect we encounter far fewer unavoidable Either/Or decisions than we think.

And here’s something else we’ve learned.

Your brain gets pretty good at finding whatever you train it to look for.

If you’re convinced your circumstances have trapped you, you’ll find plenty of evidence to support that conclusion.

If you start looking for possibilities, you may discover opportunities that were there all along.

That’s not magic.

It’s a mindset.

And like most things, it takes practice.

Are You Waiting for Your Life to Change?

I wonder how many people are living right now the way we could have spent our week in that Jamaican house.

Waiting.

Waiting for the kids to grow up.

Waiting for retirement.

Waiting until there’s more money.

Waiting for the job to get better, the schedule to settle down, or the circumstances to finally become what they hoped they’d be.

Some people have been waiting so long that they’ve stopped imagining anything different.

They’ve decided, “I guess this is just my lot in life.”

And once you believe that, it’s easy to settle into the routine of enduring each day until something outside your control changes.

Now, I’m not suggesting that positive thinking makes every problem disappear.

We couldn’t think the mosquitoes out of our bedroom.

Believe me. We would have tried.

But we could decide that those mosquitoes weren’t going to define our entire Jamaican experience.

We could recognize the wonderful things available to us even while some things weren’t exactly what we wanted.

And we could make choices that gave us more of what we enjoyed.

That’s the difference between waiting for life to change and looking for ways to change the life you’re living.

Maybe you can’t change everything about your circumstances today.

But what if you could change the way you’re looking at them?

What if you’ve accepted an Either/Or choice that was never really necessary?

What if the life you’ve been waiting for doesn’t require everything to fall perfectly into place first?

What if there are possibilities right in front of you that you’ve stopped seeing because you’ve already decided what your life is supposed to be?

I think those are questions worth asking.

Because the life you live is shaped not only by what happens to you, but also by what you believe is possible and what you choose to do about it.

Jamaica didn’t teach us that lesson for the first time.

But between the mosquitoes, the neighbors, the mud, and the sake bombs, it certainly reminded us.

We could have spent that trip waiting for something better.

Instead, we found a whole lot of wonderful in what was already there.

And we didn’t have to choose.

So let me leave you with a question.

What’s happening in your life right now that has you waiting for things to change?

Have you convinced yourself that this is simply your lot in life?

Or could it be that you’ve been looking at your life through an Either/Or lens for so long that you’ve forgotten to look for Both/And?

Maybe it’s time to retrain your mind to see what’s possible.

You might be surprised at what you find.

Helmets optional. Detours allowed. Autopilot disengaged.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.
With love and laughter,
Matt & Linda
No 2 The Quo

Want more adventures?
👉 Aruba: The Day We Accidentally Walked Onto the Set of Cocktail

Or see how all this became possible:
👉 Why We Said No 2 The Quo After the Kids Left Home

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Before We Had the Framework, We Had the Stories

We didn’t start No 2 The Quo with a tidy little life design model and a color-coded spreadsheet.

Shocking, I know.

We started with a few lived decisions. Big ones. Messy ones. The kind where you say, “This is probably fine,” while quietly wondering if you have lost your entire mind.

These three stories explain how we got here before we had the words Declaration of Intendependence™ to describe what we were doing.

These are the origin stories behind No 2 The Quo.

👉 Why We Said No 2 The Quo After the Kids Left Home
👉 It Took Two Years to “Suddenly” Change Our Lives
👉 Yes, We Really Did Pack Our Whole Life Into a Car and Leave

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