Welcome to The Prose Filter, where I have a cup of coffee and curate the best bits of a book to pass on the wisdom to you guys!
Today’s quote is from the classic book “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe. The book was published in 1917 and is a fictional autobiography.
This book is about a man living on a desolate island after his boat crashes. He learns to survive and even thrive on the island by learning carpentry, farming and other necessary skills. Robinson Crusoe also finds Christianity which helps his suffering.
That grieved me heartily, and now I saw, tho’ too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the costs and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it!”
Robinson Crusoe had many struggles on the island and many problems that he had to find a solution for in order to survive, regardless he was always focused on exploring and escaping this desolate land. This reflection of Crusoe stemmed from a problem he encountered when he attempted to travel to a landmass he could see from his island in hope to find other Christians that can help him get back to his home. He started building a canoe out of wood that took him many months to complete. In the end when it was ready and he had put hundreds of hours of work into this canoe, he was finally ready to sail. One problem. The canoe was too heavy to carry to water, miles away. After many attempts and a lot of meditation he ultimately decided he had to give it up and use it as a decoration piece as a reminder of the lesson he learned.
Robinson Crusoe isn’t the only one to make this familiar to us mistake, as I cringe to tell you my story.
One day I had this wonderful idea to live abroad and since I come from abroad, I thought what better place to move, than my home country. I started looking at houses and realized there are some cheap, though not in livable condition, homes on the market. I saw the price tag of 30,000 euros, calculated the cost per month it would cost me to own it, and with just looking at the pictures, not seeing it in person, I arranged with the seller to buy a house for myself. Mistake number one. Since the price was just a car payment and knowing I had to save money to fix it, traveling and spending money on a flight and hotels to see it seemed like an unnecessary step. My wonderful idea was to slowly fix it up and live there for three months of the year, either freelancing in America or work a village job there. Immediately I took out a mortgage and in a few weeks the house was mine. The only problem, when I traveled to Bulgaria to pick up the keys from the owner, who had given them to the neighbor next door, my dream quickly shattered. Although the house looked good on the outside with painted walls and a good roof on first look, I now realized why it was so cheap. It had no running water, no cables for electricity and would take me thousandths of dollars to even be able go to step inside and use the bathroom, as the bathroom was in a nearby shed outside, essentially a hole in the ground. At that point I got a different job in America that only gave me 3 weeks vacation a year and my dream was getting further and further away from me.
As it stands now, I have a house that I can’t live in without spending as much money as I bought it for, a small mortgage that doesn’t help my finances and no time to actually start fixing it. From thinking I could paint a few walls and run some cables, I overestimated my strength which gave me an asset that is now worth less than what I bought it for in a country I know little about. It’s not the end of the world though, and it came with a valuable, though expensive lesson that thought me, as Crusoe said, to “count my costs” and judge the situation better as well as research before pulling the trigger on a major decision.
Would have been nice though, to grow my chickens and eat fresh tomatoes in a beautiful remote village far from modern society.