Lifestyle

Countdown New Zealand Day 15

05/22/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

I picture us living in a small home with a decent sized yard on the outskirts of a small town in New Zealand. From the windows, we look out at the mountains framed by a brilliant blue sky. It is a simple life. We rent out some space of some sort to people traveling through and in this way stay connected to the larger world. There is a garden that allows us to produce much of the fresh food that we need. We diligently can and freeze the excess for the colder months. Every morning we go down the street for a coffee and read books from the local library. When we have free time we drive the van out to the beach. We deepen our practices: meditation, yoga, journaling.

Money? We don’t need much. Just enough.

Doesn’t all that sound nice? And yet, once again I look to an imagined future for my salvation instead of the present moment. The only relief to be found is right here, right now. It is in the hum of the refrigerator, the taste of my coffee, and the feel of the breath moving in and out of my body.

My tendency is to look outside of myself for comfort. If only I had this. When I achieve that. When I meet the right person. All of this, a fool’s errand. And though I know this to be true, I still default to having my eyes set firmly on the horizon instead of on the ground on which I stand.

Countdown New Zealand Day 16

05/21/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

We are disassembling our life. Again. May is the month we tend to do this. Last May, we began the process of moving back to the States. May of 2018 we disassembled so that we could move to New Zealand. In May of 2015, we were leaving Asheville to begin a road trip that feels like it still hasn’t met its end.

I’m hoping things around the house look better by the end of the day. I suspect that they will. There is a time period during a disassembly that things look hopeless. There are piles everywhere and you have no idea where they are going to go. But eventually, these mounds get tucked into bags or boxes, redistributed or discarded until with a sudden sense of relief you look around and there is nothing left to squirrel away. Well, there’s always something. Usually, whatever this is just ends up getting tucked it into a closet somewhere for the new occupants to deal with.

It’s no wonder we’ve procrastinated our way into a stressful situation once again. The act of disassembling your life is not pleasant. It involves sorting through piles of things I’ve come to identify as part of me and then deciding which ones to keep and which to discard. My tendency is to want to hold on to all of my pieces, just in case I need them again someday.

Even though it stresses me out, I’ve become good at disassembling my life. But now I really wish I could be better at assembling one. Destruction comes easily for me. Creation, not so much. I don’t know how to break out of this pattern I have created. I don’t know how to stay.

Am I having regrets? It’s difficult to tease out. But it does not matter much at this point. This is how it is right now. This is the only place from which we can move forward.

Countdown New Zealand Day 18

05/19/2020 by John 1 Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

Yesterday I completed an event I’m going to call the 12-Hour To Do Relay. From 6 am until 6 pm, I ran a lap of about a mile. After completing the lap, I had to spend the remainder of that hour working on my To Do list. This mostly involved checking off items in preparation for moving back to New Zealand.

It was a rainy day and the trails I was running became streams at times. I had to get used to the sensation of putting on wet socks and shoes every hour on the hour. By the end, I ran 14.5 miles and scratched 18 items off my to do list — well worth the small discomfort of putting on squishy shoes and soggy shorts.

This idea was inspired by a YouTube video I stumbled across. In it, Beau Miles completes a marathon and gets a whole lot done by following the same formula I outlined above for 24-hours. This was my original plan, but I backed down to the 12-hour version because the weather was not ideal and I figured I could maximize some of the benefits of the activity while minimizing the downside of being awake for 24-hours.

For me, this experiment proved to be a great way to get things done. It provided structure to the day by breaking up the work I needed to do into small 40-45 minute chunks of time. Getting outside and moving my body between these task periods kept me energized and engaged. It also allowed me an opportunity to pause and plan what task to do next. I was able to stay busy and engaged all day because I knew that at 6 pm, I would be done and then could rest and do what I wanted the rest of the evening.

So if you’ve got an overwhelming list of things to do, I recommend making up your own To Do Relay. Let it be whatever works for you. A walk around the block every hour on the hour for however long you can spare will give the same benefits as running a mile. Or 15 minutes of yoga every hour followed by tasks. 4, 6, 12, or 24-hours, it doesn’t matter. Just do what you can and you might be surprised by how much you get done and how much fun you have while doing it.

Here’s the video that inspired me.