Every year during tax season I return to the US for several months to reassure my CPA that this whole nutty lifestyle of living and working in Mexico part-time is completely legit. I coo reassurances while simultaneously waving margarita-stained business receipts in pesos that scream “One Big Party!”

I also come back to savor my small pie a tierra in Denver, its garbage disposal (they really don’t exist in Mexico) and the company of the few remaining friends of mine, all dual income, who can still afford to live there.

My stays can be as long as four to six months depending on the availability of friends, who travel a lot too. Many times I come home to find that we might pass one another in the airport terminal coming and going. 

At one particular stage of my work and writing, for the first time since moving to Mexico in 2014, their travel plans left me more time to kill. Touchingly, several of them had been extolling the red-hot job market in Denver (this was pre-COVID). I like to believe their urging was based on a fervent hope that I’d get a job and stay in town year-round. More likely it was a deep suspicion of any business plan that didn’t require getting out of bed before ten in the morning.

It was true that I felt self-conscious goofing off most the day when the unemployment rate in Denver was at a record low. Perhaps I could make a contribution, make a little extra money and be of use! I decided to see what all the job market excitement was all about. I applied for a few part-time jobs.

Low and behold. I received an offer after my first interview! Even more surprising, it appeared to be a nice little job. I was hired to screen candidates who applied to participate in focus groups and do a little database work in a small, friendly market research company full of adorable twenty-somethings. 

Ten years recruiting for executive search firms on straight commission developed in me an embarrassingly high level of tolerance for this kind of production work. I could set my own hours and the pay was tolerable. I didn’t feel guilty about taking the job for only a few months since I could produce a solid day’s work from day one. Curious as to how it would feel to be back in an office after six years, I accepted. 

The job was pleasant at the beginning of my four hour shift, providing a place to go other than my apartment kitchen, people contact I often missed working from home and work that had its amusing moments. Like most jobs of this type however, its pleasant nature drained away minute by minute. By the end of the four hours, I almost hoped no one would answer my phone calls. 

Making the short walk home one night, I caught myself thinking thank god the job hadn’t appeared 2013, the year before I moved to Mexico, when I was desperate for work and had run out of ideas. Had I been offered this tiny job before thinking of life in Mexico, would I have taken it full time? Would I have given in to the belief that with the attrition inherent in a young office I could move “up” to a bigger little job and a livable salary and stayed in Denver?

Walking down the 16th Street Mall, that what-if thought felt like a city bus passing in front of my nose. No all-nighters watching tropical storms move in across the Pacific. No animated morning Skype language exchanges with my Spanish friends Pepin, Auxi and Ricardo. No sunset boogie boarding. No besos and abrazos from my Mexican pals Estella, Arecelli and Lupita. No mid-morning lattes with the Intrepid Elise, my young Canadian business associate and friend in Mazatlán. 

Right now, instead of having learned a new language, lived in a foreign country, written four books and watched a thousand sunsets over the Pacific Ocean, I might have spent those years making just enough to get by, living out a life growing narrower every year until it closed down to a blinking sliver of the adventure it had been for 40 years. 

Now back in Mexico, palm trees sway in an early autumn breeze. The sun glints off the Pacific that’s lighter in color than the sky above it, an unusual late afternoon phenomenon. I wake up looking forward to the day. The memory of that short cubicle stint feels like a bad dream.

Like a masquerade ball, life offers opportunities that wear masks and whirl around you. Behind a smiling mask that represents familiarity and security might be your future jail. Behind a scary mask of the unknown might be the situation that sets you free. Before you agree to a proposition that takes what’s left of your energy and life, remember this brief vignette and think again. If a scared, wholly unprepared 56 year-old could dodge that bullet, think what you could do. 

Related links:

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About the author:

Kerry Baker is the author of four books If Only I Had a Place about renting in Mexico, The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico about how to move to Mexico and what to expect, and The Lazy Expat: Recipes that Translate in Mexico for expats and long-term travelers who want to keep a healthy diet in Mexico.