1 Tangier Island, Point Zero

Tangier Island, located a few miles off the coast of Virginia in America, was a tiny and isolated fishing community when I visited it some years ago. Stepping off the ferry was like turning your watch back a full century. No tourist cars were allowed on the island. All the island’s children attended a one-room school. Access to the mainland – and the Twentieth Century – was only by a ferry which acted as a filter, keeping out the undesired elements of modern society. Tangier Island was not an artists colony, nor was it home to a religious cult. It was, quite simply, an American Brigadoon, a place that time had forgotten – and the residents preferred it that way.

A term that has entered our lexicon in recent years is “working remotely”, a phrase that has become linked with expats. In the past, we joked about working at home in our pajamas. Sometimes we called it telecommuting. But very few people were really serious about it, and many bosses were opposed to the idea. It ran contrary to their traditional ideas about micromanaging and expecting an adversarial relationship. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play,” they thought.

So, you may be asking, what does Tangier Island have to do with working remotely and with expats? Tangier Island comes into this story because it was while I was on Tangier Island, I had the realization I could do my writing from anywhere. Ernest Hemingway famously said all he needed to do his work was a notebook and a pencil. For modern writers, substitute a laptop computer for the paper and pencil and you have the same enviable situation. It was on Tangier Island that I understood I was no longer tied to any one location or lifestyle or company. Merely having a laptop computer or its equivalent made it possible to be creative, even from an isolated locale like Tangier Island. Since the days of my visit there, the proliferation of internet access, apps, and services has made research, collaboration, and productivity far easier than before.

Now, I can send files back and forth to collaborate on a book with Torgeir in Norway, have zoom meetings with Miles, my business partner in England, send articles written in Chinese to a website for fast and free AI translation into English, then discuss their content with Lulu while she is on a train to her hometown (her own version of Tangier Island), participate in a literary circle centered around an author we admire, send text messages to Alice or Alex or Karen or Sonia or Liv or many others to keep my online business activities moving forward, make a quick call to my son through his new wrist phone, or order then instantly download ebooks to my Kindle. No, I don’t work in my pajamas. However, depending on where I am during the summer months, I might wear my Hainan Island uniform, purchased on my first trip to that Chinese version of the Hawaiian paradise.

If Hemingway could produce his masterpieces with only a pencil and a paper notebook, surely I can manage with a laptop featuring a word processor, digital voice recorder, transcription software, AI translation, and internet search engines.

Long ago, John Waller Hills offered a glimpse into the soul of a writer when he penned (literally with pen and ink, in his case) the words that lurk unbidden in the breast of every writer, “I hope there are some readers whom this book will interest. As I have written it, and still more as I have read over what I have written, I have been appalled at the thought that it was of no interest to anyone.” Mr. Hills, long deceased, can rest assured that he still speaks for most writers. Storytellers, as far back as spinning tales around the fire in prehistoric times, have always had the same fear and doubt.

John Waller Hills wrote his books using the publishing technology and infrastructure of 100 years ago. But, Mr. Hills, things have changed for writers. The exploding world of self-publishing is a fascinating place a century later. Modern technology makes it possible for virtually anyone, anywhere on the globe, to publish their book. The same is true for blog articles or even childish fluff on social media platforms. The world of published matter has been irrevocably changed - and, mostly, improved. One obvious facet of that improvement is what we now call “working remotely”. Can you say “expat”?

Then, along came a worldwide pandemic with lockdowns and social distancing to reinforce the changes already well begun. These conditions made stories – both reading them and authoring them – more therapeutic and rewarding than ever. It was a quantum leap of social change – both good and bad. Like most social changes, it is unlikely that we will ever completely reverse course and return to the old ways. Or, as James Althucher beautifully states it in his book Skip the Line:

There’s B.C. and A.C.

“Before coronavirus” and “after coronavirus”.

When the entire world shut down, everything turned upside down. Tens of millions lost their jobs, lost their careers, and suddenly realized that nobody was loyal to them.

When the economy came back, so many people were left unemployed. So many businesses had just disappeared. The institutions we trusted – college, government, whatever support systems we thought we had – had all either disappeared or changed and let us down.

Jim Rohn said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” He never said they must be face-to-face encounters. I now have valuable and cherished relationships around the world. Many of these are people I have never met F2F (face-to-face) but they are now part of my Rohn Top Five. If I choose to work from Tangier Island (or Hainan Island) or just the local Starbucks, I’m ready, and I can take my relationships and support groups with me. There has never been a better time to be an expat.