It’s 5am and I’m awake… I hope this helps with my jetlag….

I have definitely started getting into the mind set of a traveling person. When I walk down the street, my mind isn’t completely filled with all the tasks of the day and tomorrow. I find my thoughts consumed by the actual moment. What the air smells like. How cool it is on my skin. What the cobblestones under my feet feel like. All of this even walking down the streets of Palo Alto, which is where I work every day! My mind is in more of a conversational self instead of ordering me to get things taken care of or things I should have done. Maybe this is why I look forward to my yearly trip. It allows me to focus on something else for once, the lack of a to-do list which seems to rule my every day. The other thing I like is I allow myself more non-necessary experiences. For example, this morning I went to Prolific Oven to get a soy chai tea. As I’m waiting there, I started thinking about my time in Italy and all the pasteries we ate there and how wonderful that was. No guilt, just a gotta-experience-this-cuz-I’m-here type of feeling.

Then I started thinking how we limit the fun we have in our everyday lives and I’m sure I’m not not the only one. And it’s not like I don’t have fun in my everyday life, I absolutely do… but I keep it on a rein, only letting out what I think I have time for. We give ourselves permission to slow down while on vacation (even though we might be speeding along in a completely different sense with airplanes, trains and the sights). I day dream more when a vacation is near at hand. I reflect on past experiences and how they’ve influenced my life today. Maybe this is one of the influences? This is the first time I’ve become so introspective before even putting a foot on the plane. Or just maybe this waking up at 5am has put me in an altered state and I’m just trying to make sense of it all.

-Corinne

Oh by the way. When I got that chai tea, I also got a breakfast roll thingy. mmmm raisins, whole wheat bread type stuff, ricotta cheese… yeah in my every day life I would think, “I need to run how far to work that off”, but in my vacation mindset, all I thought was I-gotta-experience-this-while-I’m-here. I hope I keep this feeling for a very very long time.