You may have noticed some changes around here...

Something Jade and I agreed on from the very beginnings of our travel and of this blog was that travel should never surpass lifestyle as our priority while we're away. Our travel, though significant, should always be secondary to our lifestyle. That's why at the start of our venture we planned out the elements that would constitute our lifestyle.

Yet, we noticed as time went on that, in practicality as well as on this blog and our social feeds, travel was slowly taking centre stage ahead of those things which we had talked about. Something needed to change, in our life together, as well as on our blog.

Don't get me wrong, travel is great. It's fun, you see so much and can be immersed in a variety of cultures and traditions. Certainly, this has been our experience over the past nine weeks here in Cusco, Peru. But when you're travelling long term and don't have a lifestyle in which to base your travel, you begin to become directionless: travelling for the sake of and spinning your wheels in the process. Disconnection seeps in, in yourself and between yourself and others. Routine goes out the window, along with the budget. You risk allowing important things like your relationship, your health and your wellbeing taking a backseat to whichever attraction or experience that's next on the itinerary.

It's an experience of ambivalence, where you don't take hold of the reigns of life. Whether you're travelling or not, this is an experience we can all land ourselves in. And when we do, it's important to stop and take a stocktake of our values, aims, goals and priorities. To re-envision our personal mission and vision of how we want to do life and break this down into daily practicals. If you're not being who you want to be or where you want to be then you have the power to make the changes to get your life back where you want it.

What signalled our dissatisfaction with our lifestyle-travel balance was that we hadn't posted to We Venture for a long time. Frankly, after our last write-up about life in Cusco, I wasn't sure what to write because we're still living in Cusco. Anything more felt too much like a travel blog and that's what we didn't what We Venture to read like. Yet, it felt too out of place to write something about lifestyle. It didn't fit. Which meant that somewhere along the way we must have lost a sense of our lifestyle because we no longer could articulate it.

We went back to the drawing board and thought about the things that are most important, the things that our lifestyle has revolved around and what we'd like it to revolve around in the future. If this blog was to continue on after this trip, what would be the things we'd post about on it? We thought about the things we more talk about together. We boiled it down to three.

Travel was the obvious one. We love travelling and we want to continue travelling, even as we continue to build our family. We continue to build our wish-list of future destinations and trips. And all with the focus on the experience our family will have in different countries, cultures, traditions and peoples.

The second is wellness. Wellness is a broad-term but we wanted to cover a few things here because we're not personal trainers or dieticians. Physical wellness in the form of exercise was a big one for us. Admittedly, it's a hard focus-area while travelling and Jade does this much better than me. Diet also falls under this - another area where Jade is more disciplines - I just crave bad things all the time! Wellness, for us, also emphasises mental wellness and ensuring our routine includes those things that help us be our most mindful and grateful. Lastly, we're both spiritual people, so wellness includes those practices which help us maintain a healthy soul.

The third focus took a bit of creativity to name. We have both always been future-focussed people, which sees us doing a lot of dreaming about our future: where we'll live, what our values will be, where we'll travel next etc. Contrasting this is a drive we both possess regarding our careers and wanting to make a difference through our work. This was a central struggle for us last year: how do we balance our personal drive with our relationship's need for quality time. Hence, we came up with work-love balance. We've heard of work-life balance, that balance between work and being a healthy human. But for us it needed to go a step further, to balance our ambitions with the hopes, dreams and time our relationship needs.

These are all blanket categories, they cover a lot of things. There's a lot of other phrases we could have used and that you might relate to better, like intimacy or mission. Even lifestyle itself is just a word, we could focus on life more broadly or our relationship specific, it's all semantics. There may be other things that you're life or relationship focuses on and maybe what we share about here will relate to or touch on those things. The priority for us was to get more honest with ourselves and our lifestyle, to ensure that who we are remains the priority over what we do or where we go. And being transparent about those conversations on We Venture, we felt, could offer a lot of value to others (individuals and couples).

So we hope you enjoy the changes we've made and the new themes we will share here. Of course, we'll continue to share all our highlights from our travels. And hopefully, we will get to share many more stories with you about our Venture together in life and love.

#priorities #lifestyle #lifestyleblog #marriage #relationship #values