Centre yourself in routine

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It's why we travel in the first place. We run as hard and as fast as we can, until our legs are burning and our wallets are empty in desperate attempt to leave all sign of it behind. Routine. It's boring, mundane, predictable, and well...it's routine. Worst of all, most of us are ruled by it; mind and body are endlessly creating and performing prioritized to-do lists. Time management, multi-tasking, every week the same. We are marionettes and our schedules are pulling the strings. Tuesday is chicken casserole, Friday is movie night, Wednesday take the kids to dance class. Take your two weeks paid vacation and turn off your calendar! Don't you feel liberated?! Damn rights you do, you're the man, master of your own life...until you turn it back on to find 251 unopened emails, 43 of which are marked urgent. If your life gives you two or three weeks vacation, I say go nuts...drink Mojitos at 8 in the morning and walk around the streets till 4am singing songs you only know the half chorus to...hey, you earned it. But if you're a marathon traveller...or planning a crazy backpack trip for three months in some country whose name you can't pronounce, I wanna talk to you for a minute... There is a difference between a vacation and an adventure. Most of time, travelling is not relaxing. It's constant moving, planning, adapting, repacking... struggling to communicate while struggling to digest whatever it was you ate last night. If you've done it, you know. It's amazing and rewarding and unforgettable and exhausting. The body performs new actions in new environments on interrupted sleep and fuelled by food you ordered by randomly pointing at the pictures on the menu. Every decision is a gamble of great adventure versus great disaster. So many unknowns make every choice a flip of the coin, and your mind is constantly in overdrive. Hyperstimulated with the environment and out of every comfort zone, nothing is stable. How do you endure this state for long durations and still continue to draw benefit from your journey? The answer is exactly what you were running from...routine. Of course you have a million new things to do, see, and eat, but take time to draw comfort from the routines you've always known. Make time to sleep when you should. Exercise like you always do (or at least as much as you tell your friends that you do). If you always read for an hour before bed, let your friends have one more drink while you go back to your room and read another chapter of whatever Oprah is recommending this month. It will center you, recharge you for the next day, and give you the energy you'll need to make it through your adventure. Maintaining a balance of both schedule and randomness will help you to appreciate the importance of having both in your life, not just when you travel. Too much predictability is boring, but too much chaos is exhausting. Besides, your body can only take so much foreign beer and meat (does this look like guineapig to you??) on a stick before you end up playing the 'find the back alley toilet' game where even if you find one...trust me, no one wins.

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