A few days before we left on our adventure, I was on the phone with one of my good friends talking about how nervous I was about this trip. After giving me encouraging words about how excited she was for us, she sighed and said the thing she was most envious of about this trip is that we would have “time.”
Time…
Time to relax… to get away from the rat race… time to unwind and decompress.
Time…
Time is a funny thing – and even after just 10 days on this trip I’ve realized that time is just going to happen a little differently for us this year. Already, we’ve realized that so much of our lives have been spent on auto-pilot – you get up, drive the same roads to work every day, sit in the same office, drive home, have dinner, watch a little TV and go to bed. Maybe somewhere in there you run some errands… do some shopping… spend time with friends. But basically it’s the same thing every day: working your tail off to make money to fund the big house and all of the stuff. Everything is automatic – sleepwalking through our lives.
We knew we were on this endless treadmill – and we knew we wanted off. But it took until we actually got off the track to really look objectively at how we spent our time up to now.
One of the things that has been difficult for us so far on this trip is that everything takes TIME and thought. There is no auto-pilot… at least not yet. No real schedule, no routine. Exactly how did we used to fill 24 hours? And how are we going to fill them now?
It’s just different now… different routines, different stresses and different priorities. We aren’t far enough into this to know exactly how this is going to play out – but I am getting the sense that it isn’t going to be more or less free time as much as it is just going to be spending our time differently. Some things that were automatic before take more time now – getting connected to the Internet, doing laundry, getting to the store… that kind of thing. Cleaning and organizing… trust me, 160 square feet can get dirty and cluttered REALLY quickly! So cleaning as we go, and constantly picking up and organizing is essential.
But that takes time…
On the other hand I have already finished two books this week and we’ve been able to do a little sightseeing too.
Right now it is impossible NOT to compare how we are spending our time now against how things were before. At some point I hope that we’ll stop comparing then and now and just live it. If you are tired, sleep… if you are hungry, eat… do what you want to do. Getting there is going to take time… part of the evolution of this trip and this next step in our lives.
Welcome to Ride Camp Eat 