Welcome to my latest blog and my first for 2018

It is almost the end of January and I arrived back in the Dominican Republic on December 30, staying at Punta Cana that first night, and then travelled across to Santa Domingo and then up to Sosua on the 31^st.  So I began New Year at my apartment in Sosua.  My apartment is modest in many ways, just a studio, but I love it.  Here at the condominium is the amazing large swimming pool, the view of jungle, and the place is fairly quiet and peaceful most of the time.

My plans for the rest of 2017 had been to write blogs on a regular basis.  But if you look at my previous blogs, you can see that August, was when I last did a blog. Work often has a way of putting a spanner in the works. But as I begin getting into writing again, I recognise that it is important to have a good space to focus and get organised. This I have here, but did not have so well in Sydney, nor when travelling. Another issue that I now realise is that for me over the last couple of years, I have been doing enormous amounts of writing, but then end up with so much great but also jumbled productions. A book that I have been compiling over this time has lots of excellent ideas and insights, but when I look at editing the document which is about 250 pages, I get overwhelmed by its size. So that has been a major reason for my procrastination. Recently, I started to think that I would much prefer to work in smaller bite size chunks. Essays and blogs is something that has appealed to me for a long time anyway. But now it makes sense more than ever to me.  Write a blog or an essay each week on one of the topics in my 'ebook monolith'. Break it down into workable bite size chunks & get it out there. I always had in mind to produce a book of collected essays, so I think 2018 will be the year of my blog but aiming to do it far more regularly, like weekly. And while some blogs may be general or on topics of general life and activities, my thinking is to use a blog to write about the many varied things that I have already put into my e-book gargantuan :-)

With January being almost over, I have been thinking, am I getting too slow in my middle years, or is there something about New Year’s resolutions that I have a problem with? I started to realise in the last couple of days that 2017 had been challenging in its own ways. When January 1 rolled around here in DR, I had just spent the previous 3 weeks traveling from Sydney AU to Athens, Brussels, Amsterdam, 2 weeks in Morocco, then flying up to Dusseldorf Germany to fly to DR. I had planned to come here beginning of February, but even Morocco was cold, so I came here earlier. After all that rollercoaster of travel, I needed time to slow down. And now that I have had a break, I have been able to think better about resolutions. 

To make resolutions that will be good ones, I believe it is important to examine the previous year really well, take stock of what was on track, what you want to continue in the coming year and what new things might be good to embark on.

I really enjoyed being in 2 places for most of last year plus travel options between. So I stayed in DR last year until April. By then I had been in DR for 15 months. The government has a flexible approach to long term visitors, with an exit fee based on time stayed, but personally after 15 months of the limitations experienced in the developing world, I knew it was time to return to Australia and do more paid work teaching. And mostly, I really enjoyed that too, teaching from July until beginning of December.

I loved the travel between as well. At first, I had planned to return to Sydney via LA but the tickets from LA to Sydney were quite expensive. I discovered it would be cheaper to return via Europe & Asia, and this allowed me to visit places that I had never seen before but had always wanted to: Morocco, Lisbon, Istanbul, Bangkok, Siem Reap & Phnom Penh. 

Living part of the year in the developing world allows me to live cheaply and have a nice break. Here in my apartment, I am fairly separated from some of the challenges of the developing world, but never entirely, so it helps fuel my drive for my work focusing on wealth resolution for the developing world. When I walk the streets here, I see all the wonderful qualities of the developing world and also the challenges. When I am back in Sydney, I have an opportunity to do work with a good income, find all the things I want to buy in shops at reasonable prices, and be around neat and functional environments. Public transport that is organised & safe. Beautiful public parks with no rubbish and lots of nice places to sit & write.

So, my resolutions for 2018 are:

To read on average one book a week, 52 by year’s end

To write one blog per week

To meditate & visualise 3 times per week minimum

To swim each day while I stay in Sosua and also do planking.