The Pursuit of Life

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Tag: Life (page 2 of 2)

THE PURSUIT OF ADVENTURE | A SABBATICAL

Swig Family Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me  – Walt Whitman

We are going on a road trip.  For six months.  We’ve taken leave from work, given our landlord notice and done our best to purge all of our extra belongings.  And so begins an expedition of sorts, an odyssey to explore the West, see where an unstructured life will take us, and give ourselves time to exhale and relax and just be.  Here’s why.

Why Not?!  It seems like a no brainer – if you find yourself with the opportunity to take a sabbatical and put some wanderlusting into action, why on Earth wouldn’t you?  Well, yes.  But it’s so much easier dreamt than done. We, like most of you, have for years heard about those people who have cast aside their responsibilities, sold their belongings and quit their jobs and traveled the world.  And we always thought wow, I wish we could do that.  How lucky those people must be.  And then it hit me about a year ago.  Why not?  For better or worse, I have always been someone who thought: if he can do it, I can do it.  And so we started to really think about it and to think about what we would want to do with some time off.

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the pursuit of | a life fully lived

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Explore.

People often talk about living life to the fullest.  It’s one of those phrases thrown around casually and nonchalantly, a generic mantra to live by. I have lately been thinking about what it really means to have a life fully lived.  Perhaps it’s the new year, or the alarming number of friends who have loved ones with newly discovered illnesses this month, or just a time of transition for me.  Whatever it is, it’s been weighing on my mind.

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The Pursuit of Life | A New Year

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APPROACH THE NEW YEAR WITH RESOLVE TO FIND THE OPPORTUNITIES HIDDEN IN EACH NEW DAY.  – Michael Josephson

I love this quote.  It embodies the fresh start that comes with each new year.  Many people hate New Year’s resolutions, and the typical half-hearted resolutions probably are something to loathe.  But with the start of the new year comes the opportunity to reassess.  To stop and think about the past year, the lessons learned, opportunities taken, opportunities missed, happiness, successes, regrets.  And to evaluate how we’ll take these into the new year.  Rather than making resolutions, I like to take some time to simply be more mindful.  Think about the person that I want to be, where I am currently, and what I can do to continue to grow, learn and thrive.  It’s a good practice to periodically take the time to reevaluate our trajectory, and why not start with the beginning of the year?

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The Pursuit of Balance: Slow it down

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This one is a hard one for me, because I have never been able to figure out how to balance things in life.  I am a person who dives head first into something when I’ve made my mind up to do it, and usually I end up overdoing it – whatever it is – and as a result I live in a pretty constant state of stretching myself too thin and feeling tired.  Really tired.  All the time.  I think it is something that most of us do.  We live in a world that is uber connected and uber busy.  Information is thrown at us from all directions – email, social media, television, car radio, phone, tablet, and now even our watches (!) – and with all of this information and knowledge and connectivity, we find it increasingly difficult to disconnect, to give ourselves time to breath and recharge and relax and balance the things that we want to do for ourselves with the things that we need to do.  At least this is my experience, and the experience of most people that I know, particularly our friends in the Bay Area.  But the point of this blog is to figure out how to live with intention, to find purpose and take active steps to achieve those purposes and not to let life pass us by.

As I sit with a coffee on a Saturday morning writing this post, I am feeling guilty that I am not (A) working (the ultimate guilt trip in my life), (B) hiking the beautiful headlands in Marin, (C) doing laundry, (D) taking the furbaby to the park, (E) brunching with friends, or (F) you name it – don’t our to do lists always go on for pages?  And then I get stressed because I am feeling guilty and anxious and you can see how the cycle continues.

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