Since that fateful yoga lesson, I suppose a lot has changed in my life. I mean to start, I certainly do yoga more than once a week! Starting yoga has started me on a journey of truly looking after myself.
In essence, yoga was the starting step for me to treating myself like a temple. Living like this is a privilege, and I want to make sure I treat it as such.
I have not posted anything on this log for little under a year. That’s right in 2020 I have not updated my travel blog.
Stomp stomp stomp here comes the elephant.
A travel blog, or indeed travel at all has been somewhat impeded by Miss Rona over the previous months….
In the summer of 2017 I took the plunge and decided to move to Nicaragua… a country I knew nothing about….in a continent I had never been…. Alone. Brave! Without doubt. Crazy? Maybe. But it was the best decision of my life.
I had come from a country where Kate Moss, thigh gaps and visible rib cages were all the rage. And I was a woman in my early twenties so unsurprisingly my beauty standards were a bit fucked. And I had just landed in Central America. In the land where big booties, juicy thighs and sensuality were the catch of the day. It felt like a fucking revolution!
It has been nearly a year since miss Rona started her commotion in our collection ocean and what a time. It has been simultaneously one of the most eventful and uneventful years of our life. Everything has changed and shifted, and the world is pretty unrecognisable to a couple of years ago. And yet, now we have settled into our new ‘normal’, each day melds into the last. It feels like a period that time forgot.
This year is kind of a landmark year in my life. I am no longer in my early twenties.
That’s right, no more all-nighters partying, no more eating just crisps for dinner and absolutely no more sleeping in my make-up.
I am officially an adult….. Holy shit!
I have something to confess….
I cannot stop watching Wife Swap! Although it may be pure shit, I just can’t stop myself. There is something so fascinating about peering into other peoples lives to see how differently they live. I suppose in reality that’s what made me love travel so much. Every time I got my visa stamped at a new border, it felt like I was reading a new chapter in an anthropological book.
People watching was my favourite. Watching what people ate, how they got around, how they socialized, even how they walked. It was fascinating.
BUT in these quarantined times the closest I get to travelling is a quick trip up the garden, so Wife Swap will have to do!
Everything in life is a decision. We decide what time we wake up, what to eat, what to wear. And this is all before we start our day. These kinds of decisions are the small stuff. Deciding between porridge and toast is no big deal. No sweat.
But the bigger decisions- that’s when it all gets a bit tricky. There is no back-up button in life, no re-dos. We have to live with the decisions we make. And this is what makes decision making so anxiety inducing. All these decisions can begin to feel like a bit of a shitter.
Sometimes what our body and mind tells us can go against what we ‘want’. We want to run but our bodies will not carry us, we want to just carry on and pretend like everything is fine. I spent years of my life ignoring the what my body was telling me like it was an inconvenience. But as I have got older and I’ve looked back I realise it wasn’t my mind being annoying. It was my intuition trying to tell me something important.
I spent all this time thinking there was something wrong with the way I felt. But as I look back on these situations, I realise my body knew what was up, it was trying to protect me. So nowadays I don’t take my body aches, or emotions, as an inconvenience. I listen to them like a warning system, they are there to help me. Or bodies are always telling us something, sometimes we just need to open our ears and listen.
Sometimes we all go out shopping and return home with something you never set out to buy or even actually need. For some people it is trainers, for others the newest handbag, for me it is the humble indoor plant. It started with a tiny cactus with a beautiful pink flower on the top which sadly I killed within a couple of months. Undeterred I decided this untimely death would not be the end of my plant parentage.
Take 2 was a medium Echeveria Imbricata, also known as a blue rose, which I loved…too much. Water is a fantastic thing for plants; however, you can have too much of a good thing and plant 2 was loved to death.
So far, I had killed 2 ‘unkillable’ plants and my green fingers seemed to be more gangrenous than horticultural….
We don’t want to be seen failing. We want to be seen to be perfectly competent all the time. It’s not pleasant when everyone knows you were dumped, or you went for a job and didn’t get it, or you failed an exam. It is embarrassing. It conflicts against this perfect persona we want to put out into the world. But guess what? You will fail, you will be rejected, and things will not always go perfectly for you. Welcome to life lads.
But should that fear stop us from trying?
To get what you want in life you have to take risks. To have the possibility of suceeding, we have to put ourselves in the vulnerable position that we might fail. Like Pam we have to be brave and take a chance.
Now if you have stumbled onto this blog thinking this will be a step-by-step guide on how to get around the travel-guidelines during lockdown you are in the wrong place. Here at Ramblings Round the World we stan those quarantine-abiding queens. Big up Chris Whitty!
Instead we are getting a little creative….
Obviously, we can’t travel right now, but we can *drumroll* travel from home! So put your passport away, we are not going anywhere (but on the plus side this involves absolutely no packing which is definitely the worst part of any journey)!