Living out of a suitcase for me, on an average, happens every alternate week, some times even more. It is almost always for work and rarely for pleasure. From 2009, traveling has been a big part of my life for various reasons and this day marks 10 years since it began. As a small treat to this element of my life and for completing a decade, I wish to dedicate this post listing 10 things I learnt from living out of a suitcase.
- Minimalistic lifestyle: "Look for the bare necessities..." I always loved this song from 'The Jungle Book'! It makes more sense to me since the last 10 years. Traveling frequently, really lets you identify the bare necessities. It is liberating in its own way.
- Schedules: No matter how many times the joke is on me for promoting schedules, I still believe it helps in managing the mess around frequent travels. I am still in the career building phase and for me the frequent travels call for an addition to the current 'work in progress' status. One of the main things that helps me with handling the fear of missing out is by scheduling in all the important things.
- Fitness: It always comes down to fitness, at least for me. With constant change of climate, water and food; if you are not fighting fit, you are doomed. I have had my share of illness and multiple courses of antibiotics in a year to come to this place. Today I can say that I have been able to schedule in timely exercise and smart eating habits while I am at home and during travels. They are entirely different from one another, but they are there and it helps big time!
- Sleep: I cannot emphasise on this enough as I learnt this thing the hard way. In most cases, I am sleep deprived for several reasons before I travel. Sometimes the change in time zones aggravates its effects. Clocking a good 8 hours sleep during travel is essential.
- Journeys: I have met people who hate traveling more than the ones who love it. However, in the defence of the ones who hate it, they were always traveling for work and not pleasure. I give them that traveling for work has little fun to it. But again, the uninterrupted conversations, meeting different people, watching the road, catching up on reading and the list goes on which is just the same when you travel for pleasure. Why taint the experience of traveling only because the purpose of the journey isn't for pleasure?
- Catching up: The best thing that traveling lets me do is catch up. Catchup on my sleep, writing, reading, organising photos, etc. The best part is when I get to mail or chat with my family and old friends. I literally get to experience the next best thing to actually meeting them.
- Reflection: I have been told on several occasions that I tend to overthink. In spite of that, I feel reflecting is an important practice and should be done often. I do it in every possible way, writing down my thoughts, discussing with my core family, seeking advice from different people and it helps me in the most unexpected ways.
- Patience: Delays, traffic, break downs or worse, last minute cancellation of travel arrangements. Everyone who travels meets with these patience testing moments. And every time you brave through them, it adds to your patience.
- Flexibility: Given the number of roles one plays in a lifetime, it is not possible to travel frequently without being flexible. Unlike the common presumption about me that 'I have everything my way', it is quite the contrary. I never, literally never have it my way! Everything is always adjusted keeping the larger picture in mind.
- Home: There is something precious in coming back home, knowing that there is a place where you can be yourself and do your blooming laundry after the travel. People who travel more, know how important it actually is, just because of the lack of time at home. This has helped me in focusing on quality time with my family! That extra effort never fails to pay off!
