As I write this, we're less than two weeks away from starting our cross country drive! If you were to tell me one year ago that we'd be going on this trip, there's no way I could have believed it. Now, here we are with so many changes to our lives since then, getting ready for a huge adventure.
I've always been a planner when it comes to stuff like this, but the last year has taught me that you can just push forward and trust that things will work out. We've got some destinations in mind, but I'm most excited for following our instinct to find detours to amazing places we've never heard of.
In so many ways, this mirrors our journey so far in building our business. We've changed course several times and have had some truly unexpected events that have filled us with happiness and hope. These are the emotions that I want to bring to our family this year when we pack into our car and hit the open road. I also want to remind myself to keep this intention in my daily life. Each day is truly its own adventure with detours that might not fit your plan, but could result in something amazing.
This all sounds really good, right?
As in, this trip will be a magical experience where we stumble from one fabulous experience to the next without any down days or arguments or rain storms or disappointments.
After writing all this down, another side of my personality steps in to remind me that I get annoyed with the kids and the dog on a 30 minute drive to go hiking. What does this mean? How can both of these realities exist?
I'm starting to realize that this is what life is. Everything exists all at once, and this includes all the possible emotions and mental states that any given experience can cause. It's all in your mindset on which of these coexisting possibilities gets turned up and tuned in to your body and expressed as emotion.
With this in mind, I'm going to do my best to feel both the highs and lows during our trip, and acknowledge the tendency to react negatively to the lows. It's easy to feel joy and exhilaration when we spot an amazing waterfall or watch the sunset over the ocean. It's harder to be exhausted during a drive and not get frustrated about stopping for a break after only an hour of driving.
I'm building my mindset for this trip as a collage of these types of moments happening all at once. These moments are all there, they will all happen, and I will be the same person experiencing them as they happen. I will handle them all with a sense of joy and happiness or a sense of peace and patience...it's just a matter of what part of the collage I'm looking at.