Back

How Small Habit Shifts Enhance Our Family's Travel Experience | Day 317 of my 2023 Journal

Cecilie Conrad·Nov 14, 2023· 3 minutes

Small habits changing.

One peaceful day follows just after another. It is interesting how my peace arises from small habit changes. Jesper and I usually talk while we drive. We drive a lot, so we get enough time to talk about everything we need to talk about while driving long distances. We spend our evenings with our teenagers and our days with our projects and adventures, so we rarely sit down together to work on the things that need our attention.

It is clear this needs to change. Staying in Mexico without a van and not renting a car starved us so much that we started the process of change. Change is not easy. And it does not happen overnight. Therefore, it is important to choose the changes we want in life with great care.

We have just interviewed Dean Bokhari for the podcast, and he had clever things to say about this: "Success is sequential, and habits are built one by one." And we discussed how clear values are essential to steer the focus of change in the right direction.

We KNOW we need to spend more time, NOT driving, together where we can work on the many things that need our joint attention, and now, finally, we are building the habit.

I am grateful this has happened, and I am also grateful we both can switch from effective strategies to get things done to a state of just being. In my case, on this day, just being part was going for a long and “stupid” walk with Silke, collecting life advice from t-shirts, laughing about beachwear, and enjoying the sunset over Playa; meanwhile, my sons embarked on a grand adventure on their computer together.

Silke and I especially enjoyed the fashionable Nordic line through the O seen on many a t-shirt design, changing the word LOVE to the Danish word for lion. Haha. Unbelievably, we also saw a mural we had not seen yet; hard to believe at this point, but true.

And Jesper's crucial driver's license arrived from Europe, putting us in a much better place when planning further logistics!

With love

Cecilie-Underskrift-300x133

Cecilie Conrad

Thank you for reading
I would love to hear from you. Listen to your thoughts and reflections - or praise :) It is often emotional to share our lives like this, and we get very happy when we get your feedback. So feel free to share a comment below 😋 

See more images on Facebook

I scored eight out of ten on the travel score sheet of my son-in-law, as I had brought a knife in the packed lunch - the knife took my two last point…Read more
Goodbye, Mexico City. That was fun! And exhausting. We want to come back, but we are also eager to leave. It is intense to visit the huge cities. Read more
The central story of this day is the earthquake. Thank God we have no pictures. Because there was nothing to take photos of. Except for a lot of peop…Read more
It is nice to sometimes just have a practical day. We needed papers to travel with the dogs, so Silke and I walked to the local vet; smiling, profess…Read more
The classic pilgrimage to the main art museum, the cathedral, the central square, and the Aztec ruins took us through a rich array of experiences. Th…Read more
I just wanted to include more images from the same day. The streets with their shiny buildings contrasting the little cargo-bike-food stalls, the arc…Read more
I titled this “Beating Hearts” because the Aztecs’ human sacrifice took out the still beating heart of 52 humans EVERY DAY (according to our guide)! …Read more
The first step in Mexico City was to take it in the city. A good way to do it while not wasting time is to visit an art museum. Mexican art is like n…Read more
I am not afraid. I am insecure about how to find my way in this context, how to find solid information in most here-and-now contexts, and how to bala…Read more