Posted on Mon 26 August 2013

Travel and your normal goals

I'm sure there's a lot of you like me, traveling at every possibility you can find, trying to explore all there is of our small and yet so large planet. And just like me, you probably have a lot of other goals too - trying to learn that new language, working out more, spending half an hour every day practicing this new skill.

The thing is, at least for me, it's very hard to combine the two. Being away from home almost every single day for the last two months, I've noticed that I hardly studied Japanese or Spanish - maybe a few minutes on Memrise or WaniKani here and there, but that's it -, didn't practice playing piano at all, and even my workout schedule (the easiest to keep up while on the road) suffered.

In and of itself, this wouldn't be a problem. Who travels more than a few weeks in a normal year anyway? But since my medium term goal (say, by the time I'm thirty) is to travel continuously, without a permanent home, I need to fix this. A lot of it is surely because I'm only traveling temporarily - the time in any given country seems (and is) short, to valuable to spend on mundane activities like spaced-repetition studying that I could just as well do at home.

But there's something else, a more fundamental logistic problem: How do I bring along a piano when changing countries every few months? Do I just find some place to take lessons and use the equipment there? Actually, this applies to most of my possessions - sure, I can get rid of most of my clothing, travel with one suitcase worth, but what about my snowboard? My sound system?

Some of them I could live without - just renting a board whenever I go to the mountains -, some I'd miss dearly.

What do you do to keep working on your goals while traveling? Do you just call it a holiday and skip?

Tags: life

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