I Don’t Want Forever: Lessons From Two Years Away From Home

Cotopaxi Ecuador

Volcan Cotopaxi, Ecuador

When you spend any meaningful length of time away from everything you have ever known, you can not help but learn something. The past two years have been the wildest, emotionally volatile, serendipitous adventure, of my life.

Now, back home, it kind of feels as if my piece of the puzzle does not fit any more. My perspective, how I think about the world, how I decide what is important, It is not, how it was. I find myself living in complete contrast to the life I was living this time last year. Dealing with the anxiety and discomfort I have come to expect from moments like these, is as exciting as it is isolating. Continue reading

The Importance of Martial Arts in Travel and in Life

mma legend

I’m on the floor with a beautiful Brazilian girl. Both of us covered in sweat, the air seems to stick to us, as it blankets our bodies. I look down at her in a daze, I try to take in all of her, my world is spinning. My hands move up and down her legs, she smiles at me, it feels as if my heart is about to stop and I can’t breathe. Literally I can’t breathe! This girl is a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt and her legs are wrapped tightly around my throat, as I desperately try to remain conscious my arms scrambling frantically to free myself.

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One Simple Trick to Motivate You Into Realising Your Travel Dreams


Valle cocora If you throw your hat over a fence, the only way to get that hat back is to climb that fence.
I love the simplicity of this metaphor; if you want something throw it over the fence, and if you want it bad enough you’ll go get it. Let’s be honest, we can have hundreds of places we want to visit and a thousand things we want to do, but for each one we can also think of a million reasons why it is not possible.

The fact is, it is easier to do nothing and dream up excuses, especially if life is great. Your only motivation is some vague dream of what life could be like, along with a perceived risk of losing what you already have.

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You Are Not Your Mask

http://onewaytoihsan.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/la-femme-au-masque.jpeg

The truth is, it is hard to be honest, it is hard to trust in who you are, it is hard to guess how others will feel about you and it is hard to overcome the fear that the truth will not be enough.

You are having a conversation with a friend, a stranger, a girl you like, and they ask you a question, your opinion on something. Suddenly you freeze. What should I say? What if they think I am weird? How could they understand what I actually feel?

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Are You Prepared to Die?

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Steel Workers Have lunch on top of a New York Skyscraper

What would you do to experience something truly Beautiful?

To touch, see, hear, smell and breathe in a moment, a single moment so intense and full of Awe and Wonder that you could cry. An experience that challenges what you thought it meant to be alive and your understanding of real.

Would you leave your home, your family, your friends, that one girl whose very name fills you with Joy and rescues you from sorrow? For just a chance at something greater than yourself.

Would you be prepared to die?

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Why I Don’t believe in Religion

from https://i0.wp.com/i.imgur.com/jjewm.png I don’t believe in religion I really don’t, not any that anyone has made up anyway, and it’s liberating! I am not a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu or even an Agnostic or an Atheist. I am a human being at the same time as “[i] am the universe experiencing itself”.

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A Finite Number of Heart Beats

Let’s talk about hedonic adaptation. Hedonic adaptation is the phenomenon of a loss of novelty in an experience. Wake up on a beach 100 times and it will become routine. Something is lost. Some of the brilliance, the awe, why we fell in love with that beach to begin with, is somehow not there anymore.

What a tragedy that by loving something, by suffocating it with our need to experience it we numb ourselves to it. We can do this to places, to songs, to people, to relationships, anything! After all everything worthwhile is finite.

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Is the Impossible Possible?

484998_10152627447530154_1927930923_nI think it is interesting this idea of impossible. Why should anything be impossible, it seems impossible that impossibility exists. A man on the moon would seem impossible to the ancestor looking up to the sky from his cave at the vast unexplainable impossible night sky. Impossible is the space between uncertainty and understanding. Impossible is temporary.

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Moments of Life

To be a human being.

The animals that we are.

To chase and strive and be your best.

journey into the unknown.

 

Look upon the world we live.

The universe, the ones we love.

Stare into infinity.

Evoking awe and wonder.

 

Flow and twist and change.

Charging ever onwards.

Like a river, each time you fall.

Your current will grow stronger.

 

Everything worthwhile takes time.

Every possibility is improbable.

Only dreamer’s dreams come true.

So dream, appreciate life and its moments.

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Normality does not exist

This is something i wrote a little while ago, but i think it’s particularly relevant this week when the Australian high court has decided to overturn an equality of marriage law passed only a few months ago in the Australian capital.

“Accordingly, the ACT Act cannot operate concurrently with the Federal Act.”

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/high-court-strikes-down-act-gay-marriage-law/story-fn59niix-1226781474406

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Choose to be Happy

perspective is reality so why not choose happiness
we literally create our existence
we are the masters of our own destiny
happiness is a choice

we do not have to believe what we are told
if you see the world differently
you are labeled insane
but there is no right and wrong
there is no normal there is nothing but your experience

we are here to expereince to take in
this glorious wonderous universe
we are a combination of vibrating frequencies aware of itself
on an organic spaceship rocketing through one small corner of a spec of the universe
at least so far as we understand

you cannot say someones view of life or existence is wrong
but you can say i am happy
i am happy and you can be too
why not choose happiness, why not choose peace, why not choose love

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  –  William Shakespeare