Originally posted on Facebook HERE
We can plan all we want, but sometimes the Universe will take us in another direction. For this extended vacation, I had all kinds of plans. I brought a bunch of music gear to work with while I’m here, thinking I’d be posting at least one video a day to YouTube. Day one, it became obvious that was out of the question due to extremely poor internet service, especially with uploads. Wow. I took three weeks off, and that was going to be a big part of my plans – along with several other things, some health related (running, yoga, meditation & massage), some related to writing (getting three new books ready to send to my editor), but mainly this was going to be a “music” vacation. Those were my plans. And in stepped the Universe to throw it all out of whack. I did record a song I really like on the first day I was here, and made a video. It took an entire day to get that video uploaded to the cloud. Ugh – I’m used to that being almost instantaneous. The internet can’t be relied upon here, it loses connectivity several times a day – I have to restart the router at least ten times a day. So – I’m actually not writing today’s post directly on Facebook like I usually do for fear of losing the entire thing, I’m using Pages, then I’ll copy and paste when I’m ready to post. When I realized that internet based activities could not be relied upon, I had many choices. I did make it clear before booking the Airbnb that I need fast and reliable internet, which they said they had (they really thought that they did). But that’s a relative thing, right? So, I could have gotten all pissed off and told them I want to cancel the whole thing and found somewhere else to go, or just gone home and given up. When I was younger, I think this might have been my initial reaction. Not anymore, though. Now, I just try to see what the lesson is here. Where I am, it’s beautiful – just look at today’s photo from the back window. The people who run the place are awesome to deal with. I found a great route to run on right away. The massage studio I’m using is fantastic. And after two weeks here, I can see that what I was doing was setting myself up to basically just work every day while I was here. It would have been working on things related to music, yes – but don’t let anyone kid you – that’s work. Creating and editing videos is work. There’s an art to it. I could have kept recording videos for editing and posting once I got home, I guess – but – then I’d be adding even more work to a schedule I’m trying to take a break from. Bottom line is I’m hardly playing any music at all since I got here. I am running, doing yoga and meditating a lot, though. Writing and reading. And doing a lot of “work” work, too – for my day job. And towards the end of week 2 – yes, it took that long – I’m finally starting to see myself start to relax a bit. To actually sleep more than 5 hours a night. And now, looking back on the time I’ve already spent here – some of the time that I enjoyed the most was actually when I was working on stuff for my day job. I love it. I absolutely love it. It’s a bit of an eye opener for me, because before I left I was feeling a lot of stress there, but it had more to do with the speed of things, and the workload being so extreme, than it did about anything else. I’m working on getting help there, but as for the actual work itself – it’s my passion, you know? I love it. Not that I don’t love playing music, too – but my favorite part of that these days is writing and recording with my band The Fusion Project. The videos I do are a fun hobby, and sometimes the fun goes away if you try to make a “job” of it. So, I’m playing when I feel like it, and resolved to make this last week all about relaxing and not feeling like I have to always be productive, you know? Just let the days come to me. When the Universe makes it clear they have plans that don’t coincide with the plans you had, just step back and let the Universe take over. There’s always a lesson or two to be learned.
