Do Something. New. Today

When people are asked about their New Year’s resolutions or what they’d put highest on their “Bucket List,” they often list TRAVEL.  But what keeps us from it?  Money?  Time?  Convenience?  A travel buddy?

Years ago, I wanted to travel but we could never really afford it, or thought we couldn’t.  Later, we had small children, and that seemed to be a good excuse not to travel much.  I mean, just think of loading strollers and playpens and hauling small kids through customs!  But you know what?  We didn’t do any of those things when we didn’t have kids, or at least not very often.  We didn’t just take off to the mountains to go camping for a long weekend or even to a terrific historical site or tourist site two hours away for a long Saturday or enjoy a bed and breakfast in mid-winter one town over.  There were always reasons not to or reasons to put such trips off.  Many trips could have been rather cheap and over a weekend, yet we rarely ventured out. 

 The first time I visited England, I was impressed by how much younger I was than my campanions on a bus to Stonehenge.  Many of them could barely hobble to an archeological site, let alone climb it, but they’d waited until retirement to see the world.  I knew then that I wanted to travel more for enjoyment and while I was young enough to climb and walk and endure the journey without extreme physical stress.

Since my divorce, I’ve taken my girls on several trips, including Disney for a long weekend, writers’ conferences in Daytona on the ocean for  a week,  a couple of pagan festivals where I slept in bunks at a campsite,  a long weekend for my mom in the gardens she’d always wanted to visit.  But this past year, I found myself really wanting to explore more and realized in late spring that travel really was more possible than I’d thought.  Technology and liberating some of my workload helped to open up this door so that I’m not chained to my desk and can actually be at a different location with family or friends.

I decided that I wanted to visit Central America, specifically the Belize/Costa Rica/Yucatan area and the Mayan temples there.  It had always seemed unrealistically expensive in the past.   Read the rest of this entry »

By the end of the first hour at the office, I was feeling overwhelmed and didn’t like it very much.  Not that anything was particularly any weightier than usual.  It was just the annoying little time and energy consumers that plague most work days and add unnecessary stress.  Most of them are chores that have to be taken care of and only I can take care of them.  No choices there.

So how could I make it better or was I just damned to a miserable day?  You know what?  I didn’t want a miserable day.  There had to be some way of making it better—besides berating myself for not using enough positive thinking. 

That’s when I began to catalog things that could make the day better.  Many of them were things I didn’t have any control over, though I listed those, too, because you never know what might show up or bring things into your control unexpectedly.  The surprising thing was how much of my day I actually did have control over and could “make better” without the syrupy nature of so many people who espouse positive thinking.  The terminology of  “what would make it better” broke through the mandate of a disingenuous “if you want a good day, you must think happy thoughts.”  Read the rest of this entry »