Breakfast Chats: Our Countryside Holiday Edition
Some thoughts from our time away from home
“Breakfast Chats” is a lighter series, where I share short musings and conversational tidbits about life things. It’s a regular, monthly feature that I’ve made open for access, through the year of 2024, to all subscribers, both free and paid.
We just got back from a two-day holiday in the countryside; it was a work opportunity that I got invited for, and for this month’s breakfast chats I thought to maybe do a special holiday edition? :)
So, we were staying at an ecohut on the top of a hill, completely unplugged from everyday life, and with nothing but these beautiful green plains stretching for miles. I think when you’re in that kind of an environment, your mind allows you space for thoughts that don’t really crop up in the middle of your usual life things. And I just felt like I could share some of those, so let’s get going.
1. The Small Surprises of a Holiday
So, the afternoon that we checked in, we just were hanging outside taking in the views, when two cows popped their heads up over the fence. They had climbed all the way up the hill and were very curiously looking at their new neighbors. It was honestly such a small thing but felt like such a highlight.
I think for me these are those memorable bits of a trip, the little things that remain in your memory and make you smile long after you’ve left. Like, seeing sheep grazing in the fields the entire day. Getting to have a fresh farm breakfast every morning. We made eggs & toast paired with some of their local produce. A beautiful, orange butterfly kept fluttering around the hut on our first day. This gorgeous leaf fell of a tree and into my lap when I was outside reading. You know things like that.
These are the things that I’ve been thinking about ever since we’ve been back and I think they’re going to stay with me the most :)
2. Humility and The Idea of Control
So out of the two days that we were there, we caught some crazy weather on one of them. It was intensely windy, there were severe weather warnings and that day we couldn’t really be outside for too long without getting whipped into several directions. The morning also started a little grey and I remember telling Nabeel a few times that we’d caught a bad day and I wish we’d found better weather.
But you know when I heard myself say it for the third time, I realised I just didn’t want to do that. You know, one of the big things that I’ve realised and learnt particularly over the past few years is that one of the larger skills to master in life is humility. I think the problem with us in today’s world, where nothing is really a barrier – things like food can get delivered in a matter of a few minutes, we can order anything we want from anywhere in the world – we’ve gotten used to having control on things in life.
And while control is absolutely helpful in getting a lot of things done, I think where we fall is that we start to want to command our life through it. When things don’t go the way we want them to, whether that’s smaller things like holidays or larger things like life plans, this lack of control becomes the source of our dissatisfaction.
I think humility is not a theory you can memorise, it develops with actual experiences in life. And I’ve personally started to see lack of control as one of the most powerful sources of finding our humility.
It’s not just in the gratitude of things that we have, but also in the humility of things that we don’t, where our mastery of life lies.
Everyone gets frustrated, it’s a natural emotion that our body provides to us. But to understand that emotion and to use it as a building block for your character, I think that’s something that’s become very important to me.
Interestingly, the grey skies parted that afternoon, we ended up visiting the most beautiful canola fields and right now as I write this, I don’t remember what our original plan for that day had even been.
3. Our Relationship with Nature
On one of the mornings when I was finishing up my chai on the patio, I remember standing there and thinking, it feels like I was hearing the sound of the entire world. There was so much beauty in the air. There were cows softly mooing in the paddocks, the so-many birds chirping away, the wind rustling through the trees, the sound of the river coming from down below; it was such a symphony.
I think when you experience the world that way, you realise even more what a disconnect we have from the rest of nature. And I don’t just mean that we don’t take out enough time for holidays to be one with our world. I mean that we don’t intimately know it enough.
We don’t know the different birds, we can’t identify wild plants or know what they do, what are the names of all the different trees. It’s almost in the way how a lot of us don’t know our neighbors in our modern societies and I think that’s just what we’ve become. We just don’t give enough value to knowing our ecosystem.
If you think about it, the diversity of flora and fauna in a region is similar to how human communities are built, right. With us, someone grows the food, someone provides medicine, education, books, art. In the same way, one kind of tree provides the fruit, one will give moisture to the surrounding plants. And that’s just trees. Each living being in nature has its purpose and creates this powerful ecosystem.
Imagine if people from our communities started thinning out, we'd instantly notice because we see their immediate benefits. We need the doctor, the teacher, the artist. But because nature is often understood as something that provides longer-term benefits, or something that we can take from but not necessarily give back to, we don’t really care to understand it in the same way.
You know, I sometimes wish I could design some of the curriculum for schools that our kids go to. And not as an expert, but just as an individual who would love for my nieces, nephews, the kids of my friends, to know certain things intimately.
I wish there were regular, frequent camps and nature trips to get children to know their local fauna, to see flowers and plants and know them by name. I wish we had trees in schools with labels on them the way you see in botanic gardens, so that their identity was a part of our children’s everyday lives. I wish this was critical to our ideas of education. Anyway.
4. The Hidden Glories of Life
You know the views at this place were so gorgeous, that at first I felt like, I just don’t want the sun to set. But I soon realised, there was something very enchanting about things as the night took over the day.
It would be pitch dark outside so our world would shrink to just the walls of that small hut. I think when you’re not able to see too much, your other senses get heightened and you start absorbing things that earlier may have gone unnoticed.
Even though now it’s spring time here, the temperature had dropped during those days, so we had the wood fire heater going to keep things warm. But it was honestly at night when its presence felt deeper.
In the quiet of those hours, I think the sound of the wood crackling away was clearer, more soothing. We’d hear the sticks and logs shift subtly every now and then, the shadows of flames would quietly dance across the floor. I think we were just more aware of its presence, that this was what gave that beautiful warmth to the room.
Also, because there wasn’t really anything for miles, there wasn’t much light pollution as well. And the first night, when we turned off the lamps before sleeping, the whole hut suddenly turned pitch black, so much so that I couldn’t see even my own hand for a few seconds. But then slowly, as my eyes adjusted, thousands of stars started to appear in the sky.
And lying in bed looking out the glass on all sides, it made me realise how the stars are always there. It’s only us that can’t see them at times. In the city, they disappear into the excess of light. And in the countryside, while we could see the night sky shimmering away when we would step outside, but within the hut we still lost sight of many of them as they got diffused by the glow from the lamps inside.
The sounds of the fire, the sight of the stars, all these things are so much like the good things, the beautiful things that we have in our lives, quietly existing around us.
But by virtue of being busy, distracted, and maybe just having lost the art to appreciate life, we can often miss out on them.
I think, realistically speaking as humans we can’t be present to such things every second of every day.
But I think the trick is to practice it enough, so that this quality becomes a trusted companion for life. Something that we can turn to often enough, if not all the time.
5. Getting Good News
Right before we left on our road trip, we finally got some good news that we’d been waiting for for months. And I think I just wanted to say this once again, that truly life is seasonal. Our springs and summers are followed by the autumns and winters and then back again. Hard parts of life are not wrong parts of life. Just feeling grateful for all of it.
I think that’s pretty much it for our breakfast chat. I will see you soon.
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Music Credit: The music in my voiceover background is ‘Milky’ by Ninn Tendo.