After one month of travelling, not only did my body need a detox but my mind did too. Trips are not doubt tiring because you’re constantly thinking up places to go, planning things to do everyday and fitting as much in as possible - unless of course, it was a sun and sea kind of holiday where you just lazed around all day, which are my favourite but definitely not the kind of trips I had in the past month. I remember only a couple months back when I started living life in the little town Oestrich-Winkel, I was saying how everything around me seemed beautiful, there was no stress and I found myself growing more patient. But after a month of travelling to larger cities like Paris or London, coming back here almost seemed like a disappointment, I missed the rush and the adrenaline that pushed me out of bed at early hours to maximise my day. I came back and hated that feeling of realising that this wasn’t the town to be restless but honestly, I need to be thankful because this is a beautiful place to be. So essentially, I found that I lost patience and the “whatever attitude" from all this travelling. I was just mentally and physically tired. It’s simple to detox the body (relatively) with eating the right foods, resting right but what about the mind? Well personally, I have eased into a nice little routine for myself that calms my mind every morning and every night. It has brought me back into the mindset of knowing that sometimes you just got to slow down and remember that you can’t do everything in one go! Going at my own pace and enjoying the rest of my time here is probably my utmost priority at the moment. So when I was in Brighton, I actually bought two books from a little store along the beach by the The School of Life - Relationships and Small Pleasures. Trust me, I’m usually not the one to read mindfulness books or meditation books but these are just highly relatable books with short short chapters that take about 2 minutes to read. Relationships: As the title probably gives away, this book is about relationships. It doesn’t give you the regular 101 on the romantic side of a relationship but the more practical side of it and what happens behind every relationship. More importantly, this book tells you that love is not only an emotion that’s felt but also a skill thats to be learned, It takes you step-by-step through the key issues of relationships and highlights the importance of communication and how love isn’t just a matter of luck, which I think actually applies to all sorts of relationships in some form - touching on the art of acceptance through thinking of relationships differently and letting go of expectations that could in turn disappoints us, hence become more “easy-going". Small Pleasures: Contrastingly, Small Pleasures leaves you off on more of a positive note. It reminds you of the little things in life that make you happy. You might not actually see/feel those things on a daily basis but I feel like having a book like that to remind you of the joys is incredible because the chapters describes certain situations/environments so vibrantly that for the 2 minutes you are reading, you actually feel like you’re present in the moment. There are 52 “chapters” made for one small pleasure per week but I’m personally reading it everyday. Each chapter goes into so much detail and touches you by almost giving a reason to why something makes you smile. Small things aren’t openly talked about nowadays but something we all feel and unfortuantely sometimes forget. This book basically brings these moments of joy into consciousness, hence allows me to start my day on a positive note. So these two are books that I’ve been reading before going to bed (Relationships) and every morning when I wake up (Small Pleasures).
I just find that there’s something about reading that slows you down, makes you calm and at ease from the daily rushes of life. Plus, it’s definitely easy to incorporate a little bit of reading every night/day since books like these have chapters that literally take 2 minutes or less to read through. After a couple weeks of adding this to my routine, I have more or less come back to the "spirit of living in a small town", the patience has come back, the mood is boosted and my mind is rested enough to get cracking on the studying!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |