Whisky, Mindfulness, & Downtime

Whisky:

Newfound splurge

Sometimes we enjoy a good splurge…whether it be on an amazing safari experience or a great glass of whisky, we work hard to manage our travel budget in a way that allows us to do so…and thus far we have been successful!  In New Zealand it has been easy to sign up for work in exchange for room & board which has allowed us to explore a lot more of this fantastic country.  Another quick, and easy way to save has been to cook our own meals, or eat street food…we both enjoy trying lots of different types of food so I would say we definitely end up eating street food more often than we cook, but it certainly still helps rather than going out to a restaurant for every meal…most of the Airbnbs we stay at provide us with a nice breakfast too…

Mindfulness:

When i think of mindfulness, I think meditation, and when i think meditation I immediately think religion…and when I think about talking about any of the aforementioned, I think awkward.  In the next few weeks we are going to explore some amazing temples (Borobudur, Prambanan, and hopefully Angkor Wat).  I hope to extract from these experiences learnings focused more so on the spirituality end of the spectrum rather than the religion side… I do believe it is certainly possible to have spirituality without religion just as Sam Harris (philospher/neuroscientist) talks about in his book Waking Up.  My goal: over the next month and half to two months of our trip (depending on the above splurges) I want to really focus on incorporating meditation/mindfulness into my daily life, and create a system under which I can maintain these practices even when I come out of retirement.  Laurel and I are both on board, and ready to support each other with this…

Awkward talk over

Down time:

Laurel posted a great picture to Instagram today

“behind every post-able selfie there are inevitably a few of these”

What I love about this picture and her coinciding caption is its ability to capture a true moment in our journey…A lot of the pictures we bombard everyone with on facebook/Instagram are the “best of the best” that we can come up with in that moment, the ones that we feel can best express our feelings, and the sensations that come as a result of the place we are currently in…But, with all those crème de la crème shots there are the shots where silly things happen, or we blink, or we are just spending an entire day planning our next move so we do not leave our hotel room…Surely if we posted anymore pictures, articles, etc. we would have no more friends…I took ten pictures of a pile of fire wood just so I could make sure 1. I could remember truly how much firewood we chopped/hauled in one day, and 2. to ensure that anyone who saw the picture would get an idea of how much wood we hauled.

Weird moments happen that you don’t always see…like this? 

And so do “dull” moments:

Pictures rarely capture the raw emotion that we may be feeling at that moment. But, with the hope that one day fifty years from now we will look back at these pictures, and the picture will trigger a string of memories, we take these photos…or maybe one of us is truly just doing something stupid, and we will laugh no matter when we look at it.

Bali next week!