{"id":727,"date":"2026-08-31T01:08:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T01:08:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/?p=727"},"modified":"2026-08-31T01:34:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T01:34:23","slug":"would-i-do-it-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/2026\/08\/31\/would-i-do-it-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Would I Do It Again?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Would I do it all over again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is that a trick question? You know how I feel about questions. In many ways, I value the question more than the answer. How many times have you heard me pontificate about people insisting that they have the right answer, only to discover that they were asking the wrong question?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I\u2019ll bite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would I do what again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, as someone more famous than me once asked: it depends on what \u201cit\u201d is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you are asking whether I would duplicate the last fourteen months\u2014or perhaps the last two or three years\u2014the answer is undoubtedly no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would not duplicate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would have tried much harder to make the money we had saved over a lifetime last longer. I would have had a budget. I would have prepared better for medical emergencies, although even in hindsight I\u2019m not convinced that adequate insurance was available to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would have handled some relationships differently. I would have made some of the boys earn my trust, respect and love a little more slowly. I would have been more careful about giving money away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing I was woefully unprepared for was understanding what our money meant in Colombia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We considered ourselves people of modest means, and by American standards we were. To some of our Colombian friends, we looked filthy rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We genuinely thought that we were helping people. Sometimes I still believe that we did. Sometimes generosity got mixed up with affection, expectation and our own desire to make people happy. I don\u2019t have a neat accounting ledger that tells me which gifts were good decisions and which were expensive mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I no longer know if I wish that I did or if I\u2019m glad that I don\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also would have understood that visiting a country for weeks or months at a time, staying in Airbnbs, eating out, traveling around and making friends\u2014with the very best of intentions\u2014was not really due diligence for moving there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was an extended vacay in drag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or maybe just performance art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We called it due diligence because that sounded good. It legitimized the crazy fantasy. I know that I wrote and spoke that phrase more than once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t a lie. We tried. We had a plan. We had goals. We had an objective. We did not want to fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But due diligence is what you do before experience teaches you what you didn\u2019t know enough to ask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t learn a new culture in a few months. I\u2019m not sure that you can learn one in a couple of years. And you certainly cannot know what it will be like to grow old despite your best intentions, get sick again after a lifetime of bizarre illnesses, run short of money and become dependent on systems and people you barely understood when you arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things started out swimmingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we didn\u2019t have was a budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or insurance for a crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our health was pretty good, all things considered. We could get on a plane or a bus and go somewhere simply because we wanted to see it. We never got to the coasts, but we explored a lot of Andean Colombia. We stayed in different cities. We visited pueblos. We ate well. Almost every place we slept had a hot shower, luxurious living for many Colombians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met people we had known only online and discovered that we actually liked each other in real life, too. So many of them remain in our lives\u2014or perhaps more accurately, we remain in theirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life was good. The adventure was incredible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our financial mentor warned me before we left: \u201cIt\u2019s not as much money as you think, Jon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rich people can live on a vacation like this all the time. Middle-class people may get to do it for a week or two every year. People of modest means like us might get to do it once in a lifetime. Truly poor people are lucky if they even get to dream it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And my Gawd, what a lifetime experience it has been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colombia was exotic to me. I don\u2019t care whether that is the politically correct way to put it or not. Exotic is subjective, and to a gay farm boy from Kansas, Colombia was exotic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The climate. The biodiversity. Great cities and quaint pueblos. Modern comfort and rural simplicity. Mountains and jungle and beaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And young people who lived and touched and related to one another differently than I was accustomed to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Especially that last part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere around here, the question started getting away from me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relationships Michael and I formed in Colombia became one of the most important parts of the experience, and one of the hardest to explain in ways that make sense either outside or inside Colombian culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Money was inevitably part of some of those relationships. It created time and mobility. It allowed us to invite someone to dinner who could not afford the restaurant, or say, \u201cLet\u2019s go spend a few days exploring that pueblo,\u201d when the answer otherwise had to be, \u201cI can\u2019t afford it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes we paid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes we helped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, I admit that we overdid it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what mattered most wasn\u2019t just what we bought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was what happened while we were together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affection and intimacy. New friendships. The strange and wonderful ways that relationships here developed across enormous differences in age, culture, money, sexuality and lived experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is much more I want to say about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I promised myself that I wasn\u2019t going to write another book today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let me drag the question back to where it started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would I do it again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wait a minute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you mean, again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m still doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m still in Colombia. I\u2019m still living with the consequences and rewards of decisions we made. The adventure hasn\u2019t ended simply because I am now being forced to see some of the things I would have\u2014should have\u2014done differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the question is whether I would duplicate exactly what Michael and I did, the answer is emphatically no, even if that were somehow possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would have a budget. I would have insurance if I could get it\u2014or an escape plan if I couldn\u2019t. I would keep more money in reserve. I would test relationships more carefully. I would understand that adventure and immigration are not the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would be less certain that I understood a culture simply because I loved it. At least some parts of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if the question is whether I would, again, spend part of my old age on one wild, outlandish attempt to find another way to live\u2014to experience another culture, meet people I would never otherwise have known, and get on an airplane and go somewhere simply because somewhere was still there to be explored\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would. If I could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s easy to say that after the mistakes have been exposed and the lesson has been delivered, if not yet learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with 20\/20 hindsight, AKA second-guessing, is that the survivors looking backward have the advantage of knowing things that the person at the beginning of the story could not possibly have known or even imagined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would I do it again? Ask me when it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P.S. And yes, before anyone asks\u2014the Ko-fi campaign<\/a> is still alive and well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Would I do it again? I would not duplicate it. I would budget better, prepare differently and trust more carefully. But that still doesn\u2019t answer the question I thought I was asking.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kb_optimizer_status":2,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"show","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":736,"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions\/736"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jondbarnett.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}