Turning Travel Into A Lifestyle

We’ve been overseas now for just over a week, which of itself is just crazy to think about. It’s hard to believe that with everything that has happened since we’ve left that we’ve crammed it all into ten days! An ongoing conversation we’ve been having over that time is how do we keep the focus of our trip on the lifestyle we want to create rather than it becoming a extended holiday. Put simply, the reason for that focus is that there were aspects of our own lives and of our relationship this past year that we weren’t happy with. This time away gives us the time and space to be able to craft a lifestyle we are happy with. In that sense, the travel we embark on is secondary to the things we do that shape this new lifestyle.

But how exactly do you go about turning an extended period of travel into a lifestyle? It’s a question we’ve asked ourselves here at our first stop in Boracay in the Philippines. Well, there’s a few things we’ve thought of that we want to implement. This list of things isn’t exhaustive, we’ll surely morph it and add and subtract to it as our travels go on, but it’s a starting place for us to direct our focus while we travel.

The first idea is something we actually picked up from another travel blog, which is to unpack all of our things every time we arrive in a new place (but only those places we’re staying in for longer than 48 hours). We first tried this last week in Boracay (in the Philippines) and we found ourselves calling our hostel our home. What we’ve noticed is this helps us to be more present in a place. With our backpacks emptied, our mind is more focussed on the place we’re in rather than on the next destination.

Another thing we’ve stated doing that’s helped with becoming more present is doing mindfulness before each flight. We use an app called Headspace, which has a whole range of guided meditations. Mindfulness helps us centre after the rush and stress of checking-in, going through airport security, gate changes and boarding. By the time you get onto the plane, you feel flustered and anxious. Mindfulness helps us to bring a leg of the journey to a close and to prepare ourselves for the next destination. It also helps us not to be grumpy or stressed towards one another!

Mindfulness is one part of our self-care. Another aspect of our own well-being we want to implement into our lifestyle is keeping as balanced a diet as possible. At home we tried to have a healthy diet (Jade did this better than me), and we realise that when you’re travelling it’s easy to let bad eating habits sneak in. Health and wellbeing are important to us and we want to maintain a healthy outlook while we’re away. Plus, maintaining our health through diet will help sustain us for the long haul.

Talking about sustainability, we want to leave as minimal a footprint on the places we leave as possible. While in Boracay for example, we avoided taking tricycles which are the main form of transportation but also create a massive amount of carbon pollution. We also only had our air conditioner running while we were home. These might only be little things, but travelling can create a lot of damage on the environment - we want to be aware of our own impact.

We also want to manage the things that have an impact on us and something that has a massive impact on our mental wellbeing is technology. While we rely on tech for so many parts of this trip, we also want to take some time away from it and schedule unplugged time. Technology, especially social media, has the potential to distract us. But since presence is such a big part of the lifestyle we want, taking some time to detox from the pull of technology will be incredibly important.

The last thing we talked about having as part of our lifestyle is family time. Family is a value we share that is also incredible important to both of us. And even though we don’t have kids, we recognise that we are each others family, especially during our time away. We also know that spending quality time together is something that enriches our relationship and our family life. This past year we haven’t been great at creating moments for that quality time, so we want to use this trip as a catalyst to get back to having more of that quality time in our relationship, not just for this trip but also beyond it when we return.

And really, that’s what this lifestyle is about. The travel itself is secondary to this lifestyle we’re trying to create, because even after this trip winds up, we’ll have this lifestyle that we’ve created. We’ll continue to think about what that looks like and we’ll probably have to keep reminding ourselves of this list of things. For our readers, with New Years quickly approaching, perhaps now could be a time to reflect on what your life looks like and whether there are things you want to add or change to your lifestyle.

From the Burns family to you and your loved ones, we hope 2018 is a peaceful and prosperous year!

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