Happiness, Mindfulness & Decisions

Rev Kane relaxing in the arctic snow flurries

Make bold choices and make mistakes. It’s all those things that add up to the person you become. ~ Angelina Jolie

Originally posted in 2017

It’s been a confusing couple of weeks for me, of course it’s also been an incredibly busy. There is the standard 50 hour work week. On top of that is my blogging work, my creative writing and of course everything related to marketing my book that just came out Appalachian Trail Happiness. I’m not complaining, I’ve brought this all on myself as I work toward getting to my goal of transitioning to someone who makes more of my living via writing and speaking engagements.

Also, things are going well. I’ve picked up two more speaking gigs in the last few weeks. I’m also very excited to have finally gotten through to the permit lines for Havasu Falls and will be doing a backpacking trip into the fall in April.

Havasu Falls

I’m also looking to buy a new camera for hiking, it’s been a few years since I’ve updated my camera equipment and I realized on my Jordan trip that particularly in low light photography the technology has eclipsed what I have currently been using. Plus I want to go to something lighter than my DSLRs.

There have been a couple of big decisions I’ve been mulling over, one pretty personal that I’ll keep to myself for now. The second is more career oriented. As those of you who read this blog regularly know, every five years I leave my job and take off on an adventure. My next one is creeping up in 2019. I’m hoping to do a really big trip if I can get sponsorship, the plan is to do a hike on each of the seven continents with a few side trips as well. Tentatively I’m looking at Everest Base Camp, Mt. Kilimanjaro, Machu Pichu, finishing the Appalachian Trial, the overland trek in Tasmania, the Western Highland and Great Glenn Ways in Scotland and of course any place I walk on Antarctica will be utterly amazing.

The trip has been tentatively settled in my mind for a time. The question I’ve been struggling with has been related to what position I come back to after the trip. I’ve been sitting on the fence between, dropping into a program directorship or faculty position, jobs that would give me more personal satisfaction. Or, come back to larger higher paying positions that have less student contact. A lot of what has been driving my decision is how it will impact my pension at retirement based on when I’d like to retire. After wrestling with this decision I’ve decided that the higher paying positions make more sense. I think I’ve been at this decision for a time, but now I’m finally comfortable with it.

This is the dilemma we all deal with, we all have that idea of what would be a perfect career, but reality gets in the way and it’s hard to get to where we want to be. The answer is to have a clearly set goal, to be patient and make progress, constantly make progress until you can finally jump fully into what you want to do.

At the Everest Rock Bar after the white-knuckle flight to Lukla on the trail to Everest

So I’ve had all of this on my mind and I’ve been really busy. This has led to me also being really scattered, not paying as much attention to my health and that has messed with my sleep a bit. Which all means it’s time to do what you always have to do when you are out of sorts and come back to basics. Sleeping right, eating right, exercising and being more mindful. So I’ve started eating better, starting meditating as well and started focusing on being more mindful. That point was especially driven home when a friend thanked me for the signed copy of my book I sent him, just one problem, in my scattered state I forgot to sign it. Coincidentally I had just done a post on mindfulness so that worked out well.

I’ve also ramped up my workouts, because in a little over four weeks I’ll hit the trail to Havasu and I really can’t wait. Tonight my friends I hope you are all busy as well, I hope you are making progress on your goals and having many happy days ~ Rev Kane