Cash in Your Life, Move to Spain, Buy a Village (May 2015*)

(*Preface: I wrote this in May 2015 at the beginning of my first trip to Spain, with Huff Post ambitions. - Aaron Perlmutter, January 27 2016)

There are currently over one-thousand abandoned villages in Spain. For the last week I’ve been looking for the perfect one. Yes, it’s a long story.

My friendleagues and I decided we want a place to work in nature, to do the hard creative juicing. If it all comes together, we are thinking we’ll call it a “co-working” space, but I prefer to think of it as an artist-in-residence program with a fiber optic connection.

So far I’ve just been bouncing around, trying to learn the ropes of what it takes to find and buy that perfect village. My Spanish level is intermediate, with a strong Mexican accent (explained by my being American). Clearly this is a stretch of reality, and so why again am I doing this, are you asking?

I’ll try to explain. First and most important, of course this is a beautiful adventure, the kind we should all experience at some point in life.

But often times we need something to push us out the door.

Maybe it was too much time on the computer. Half jokingly I say this, but really this may be a greater problem than we usually give consideration. The other day I thought my computer crashed, and rather than panic, I felt a sudden freedom. This mixes with a haunting suspicion of over-education. Whatever the case, a 90-year-old woman in Andalusia giving me directions doesn’t care.

Or maybe it was London; big and enigmatic. The thousandth time made no more sense than the first time I saw someone on the tube strategically dart their eyes toward an advertisement, to avoid human eye contact. In a metropolis of population 10+ million the complexity is inconceivable, and you can never understand the links between people that produce culture and custom. When you can’t understand something it’s often best to let it go. Alone, lost, looking for a village in Sierra Espuña, there’s nothing to understand but yourself.

Near Sierra Espuña

Maybe it was just too many memories accumulated in London over 2 years. Romance, infinite curry, unforgettable characters, seeing construction projects come to completion…it was time to cash in my chips (or crisps?) as you must, eventually, in a big city. No better way to process than staring at the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea.

- Aaron Perlmutter, May 2015