Making Space for Adventure

A friend of mine knows that I love to try foods I've never tried before.  She's Mexican, and recently, she brought me an unripe mamey that she'd purchased for me as a gift at her local open air market.

Mamey, peeled.

She'd instructed me to wrap it in newspaper and put it on a shelf in the kitchen.  Today, I checked and it was ready.  I peeled it and E and I both enjoyed some of the delicious, very unique tasting, sweet fruit.  (Turns out Guito *loved* it, too.)

This whole experience (receiving the very hard brown skinned fuzzy fruit, wrapping it to let it ripen, then peeling, cutting, and tasting it once it was soft) was a new one for me.

And I *love* new culinary experiences. I also love new linguistic experiences, and (most of the time) I love new cultural experiences as well. I do my best to seek them all whenever I can.


BUT, life often requires that you stay within your well-known box.  And there's nothing wrong with that.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a routine you enjoy and sticking to it -- it's very efficient.  In fact, all of the times when I've been in peak physical shape have come after a period where I committed to a well-known routine, pushed the physical aspect to my own limits, and then enjoyed the benefits. 

Today's mamey reminded me that you can always have an adventurer's mindset, regardless of where you are.  You can recruit others to help you have adventures that are their normal, but are foreign to you.

This lesson was a big one for me, because E & I are in the preparation phase of embarking on a sabbatical year.

After 10 years of constant career hustling as my number 1 priority, I'm excited to go on sabbatical and focus instead on enjoying far-away friends and family in person, food, languages, travel, local foreign culture, reading and more. (I'm also hoping that with work on hold, I can focus on getting more fit as well, but I understand that this may cause a conflict and in the event that it does, the sabbatical's joys other than working out are going to take precedence.) 

I'm even excited at the preparation.  I've got 14ish weeks to plan all the dependencies -- and I *love* planning complex tasks.  One of my favorite things I've found to do so far is figuring out the creative meals I can make to most efficiently use up the pantry and freezer contents before we leave.  Since we will be packing up the entire house to prepare for renters, we can actually evaluate our *stuff* and finally get rid of things that we've just kept around because we haven't moved in 13+ years -- so, every week, I've been enjoying throwing yet another ton of things into the Goodwill pile.  We even splurged on his and hers kindles to avoid the weight of physical books -- so I'm anxiously waiting for those to arrive so I can take advantage of the lessons from my first kindle book as we prepare:  The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up.

In short, I'm looking forward to remembering the lesson of the mamey (adventure can be anywhere) as we embark on this next journey.
   

This is how large the mamey pit is!  Huge.