Dreams, Decisions and Moving Forward, Machu Picchu and Oaxaca

Dreams, Decisions and Moving Forward, Machu Picchu & Oaxaca

Machu Picchu

A dream becomes a goal when action is taken toward its achievement

~ Bo Bennett

Dreams

It’s really important for people to have dreams, we all need something to look forward to beyond our daily life. I’ve always believed we should have a range of dreams. We should all have little dreams, things that are not that hard to accomplish. I’m talking about a place you’d like to visit that’s not too far away, maybe something you’d like to do that you need to save up a little bit of money for. Then there are those somewhat larger, somewhat harder to accomplish things a longer vacation or something you need to train or get educated for like learning a foreign language. Then there are those pie in the sky dreams, those things that will take a lot of time or effort to accomplish. For me, I want to go to space, it’s sort of the culmination of my travel addiction and why it’s number one on my bucket list.

Making Decisions and Moving Forward

One thing that happens to a lot of people is that they trade their dreams for comfort. It’s easy to stay the course, do what you do everyday and take no chances. You see there is a risk involved with doing the thing you need to do to realize your dreams. You have to get outside your comfort zone and being uncomfortable in order to realize something positive is not always something people are willing to do. However this is certainly one of those situations where the discomfort can lead to something really positive.

As I mentioned in a recent blog I’ve resigned my current position as of the end of June. There have been a ton of ideas flowing through my head and like most of the times in my life when I’ve made a change, I never really know how things will turn out. Initially I had hoped to do a hike on each continent. My plans have changed but not permanently, my long-term goal is still to get a hike on every continent and during my next time away from work I’ll be knocking off at least one more continent.

Machu Picchu

One of the decisions that I made for the upcoming year is to make sure I add at least one more hike on a new continent to the list. So I made the decision this week that I’ll be doing the climb up to Machu Picchu in late September or early October. I’m really looking forward to this trip, Machu Picchu is one of those places that I’ve read about all of my life. We’ve all seen images like the one above and I really can’t wait to get there and photograph it for myself. I’m also looking forward to kicking around Peru for a bit after the hike. I’m exited to see Peru, someplace I’ve never been before.

Oaxaca

One of the other decisions I made this week is that shortly after crewing for a friend at the Tahoe 100 mile race in July I’m going to move to Oaxaca. I’ve been fascinated with Oaxaca for quite some time. As someone who loves the Day of the Dead celebration and collects Day of the Dead art, Oaxaca holds a special fascination as a place that likely has the most amazing celebration of this holiday anywhere. For this reason I began researching Oaxaca a few years ago. I’ve also for quite some time been interested in doing a Spanish language school and Oaxaca seems like a great place to do that.

The city of Oaxaca is a city of about 225,000 people, as such it has all of the amenities that you might want in a city. It’s also very affordable and has good public transportation and there is a significant local art scene. So I’m pretty excited about the idea of spending a couple of months there and developing my Spanish language skills.

La Catedral de Oaxaca

I’ll get the opportunity to hike up Machu Picchu and check that off of my bucket list. I’ll also get to spend some time getting to know Peru and the three months in Spanish-speaking countries should really help my language skill development. This gives me the opportunity to both do something I love and also add a skill set that can help with my career so it’s the classic win-win.

I hope the example in all of this for other people is to help you see how you can chase your own dreams. What it takes to do this is the willingness to take the risk, the ability to do some planning and a bit of patience. I believe in you and I know you can do it my friends, and just the exercise of developing your dreams into a potential plan will help you have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane