On The Road: 17.3.17

So I’m here in Ubud in Bali now, about two weeks in and I’m reminded of all the reasons I love coming to live here – the abundance of nourishing, affordable veg. food, the digital nomad/entrepreneur community at Hubud that make me feel like I’m not actually doing this alone, friends to live and have fun with at Keith’s Villa, the local smiles and hellos and selamat pagis in our village, the humidity and sunshine like a hug. But most of all it’s just the good feelings I feel when I’m here that are hard to quantify, call upon when I’m gone.

I sometimes wonder why I keep coming back to the same places I've already explored. If you’re someone who can *technically* live anywhere, why not just go everywhere? But I do believe certain places are meant for us individually (find out which places are meant for you here through astrocartography), they bring things out in us and certain magic can happen only there.




Plus I’m getting more and more on board this idea of taking it easy on myself, choosing things that support me, having more of a balance between the challenge and the ease. I probably need to slow down a bit. It comes back again to this thing of choice – if you're in a position where you can do everything on the earth (funds permitting) all the time, why not go and do it all? But even though I'm lucky enough to have all this freedom, I want to stop trying to do everything and choose a few things I really want and work on building them up. Quality over quantity.

So the idea is cementing in my mind more and more, to create a base in Europe and spend those Northern Hemisphere winters here in Asia with always a little time in Australia. I just need the housing gods to smile on me and help me out with some kind of creative living arrangement where I can have a place to call home but still leave it behind when I want to…does this exist? Am I allowed to ask for this? We’ll see.

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Something I forgot and I’m really feeling now I’m back here is how much of a lone wolf I tend to make myself be, and how spending time in Ubud makes me feel so much less seperate. Mostly everyone is living some kind of strange life and set-up here, I overhear people everyday at Hubud telling someone how they’re back for a few months, after being somewhere else, home or away, for a few months, there are so many cobbled-together lives going on here and it’s comforting and hopeful to see it up close.

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So I’ll be here until mid-April when I take a long plane ride to a country I’ve never visited before. After a few weeks there I’ll try to settle in to life in Paris with my real life one year visa and hopefully keep building on my life there brick by brick. For now I’m in a nice-feeling limbo between the ease of my hometown Brisbane and the challenge and all-out wonder of Paris. It’s going by so fast here and I don’t know if I’m ready yet to ‘move to Paris’ and live the dream I’ve always held in my mind. I'm feeling the fear.

But a well-timed talk from Good Startups at Hubud on not avoiding or ignoring your fears and instead sitting with them and opening them up, poking and prodding until you understand what they’re trying to tell you has me set on sitting down in the next few days to poke and prod these fears of mine. They range from 'I’ll be homeless and unsettled forever' to 'I can’t build a community or a home that feels good unless I stop travelling' to 'I can’t ‘make it’ in Paris'. And I’m sure there’s lots more of those lurking in me to be opened up and sorted through.

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My friend Mel is here in Ubud for a week, staying here at Keith's house and there's been lots of other new people staying here too.



Life feels kind of like a movie at the moment, full of scenes of young, happy people laughing late at night in bars, riding around town in scooter gangs, making last minute plans, swimming in perfect jungle settings and sitting around in a living room talking about nothing. I think I want lots of more of this in my life, less lone wolf, more community. This is how I want to feel.

I’ll write again soon,
Katie x

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