Some days, this definitely feels like I’m living on vacation. Please don’t get me wrong – I am working my ass off here. I have two active website builds in progress, and I’m kicking off a Magento 2 upgrade, so I am still the same eager nerd I’ve always been. But still. Even when I spend 12 hours in the WIP slogging through page builds and wireframes and sweating it out in the tiny call closets on the phone with clients, I can still look out at the Adriatic right across the road. Or just walk away from my computer for five minutes to put my feet in. Or take a quick ride on my scooter. I am slipping in and out of vacation several times a day.
And then there are my tenacious and enthusiastic traveling companions. My Ramses crew. Every day, there’s a new onslaught of Slack messages about dinners and tours and daytrips and drinks. And those are just the unofficial “Hey let’s try this thing!” conversations. As a true joiner at heart, I find this to be both delightful and difficult to turn down.
On top of that, Remote Year has side trips and local experiences and add-ons in addition to the track events I wrote about before. Like canyoning. Which is pretty much not available in the US due to liability concerns, so I took some time off to do that this week (and crunched an ankle pretty good. Hence the liability concerns). You can see the whole canyoning gallery here.
It’s a lot.
So on top of running my new baby digital agency, I am constantly going. There doesn’t seem to be a day to catch my breath. At home when I felt like this, I would snuggle up with Sassy and Spicer on my couch, get terrible takeout, and crank up Netflix for an entire Saturday while I caught up on emails and work projects that I’d been putting off. I would get a chance to clear my head and my to-do list without feeling like I was missing out. Because — let’s be honest. Most of my compadres would be doing the same.
And the older I get, the more I need introvert days to recenter myself after big group outings and spending a lot of time around people. Sometimes that looks like doing something important like catching up on work, and sometimes it’s closer to doing nothing but reading a book or tooling in my garden or taking an amble through the woods.
I love this life I am living. And I am truly grateful to be living it. I am trying hard to soak in every moment fully, and take advantage of every dinner/side trip/amazing view that I can.
But I need to stop and disconnect from all of it for a few hours every once in a while. Lounge in bed until 1 p.m. writing on a Saturday. Sneak into a quiet hotel pool in town and just sit under an umbrella and read. Or post up on the couch on a Friday night catching up on the work I paused so I could go and jump off cliffs in a river on Tuesday.
It would be so easy to just blaze through this year without reflecting on what I’m seeing, learning, experiencing … to just not think too much about how it is changing me. So I am choosing to take moments to pause, be grateful, step away from the group, finish my work, and catch my breath.
It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good view while I do.
