Essentialism and Alligators

I scheduled this post to publish last Wednesday but, clearly, it was sitting in my drafts when I got back from vacation.  I am holding onto some of the residual vacation vibe as of 11:18 on Monday and I’m hoping to keep it for a few days more.

We went to a magical part of Florida and saw countless dolphins, mosquitos, birds and alligators as well as one shark and three manatees…no zoos or wildlife centers were visited.  It’s a part of our country that serves sweet barbecue and sweet tea.  Northern Florida moves at it’s own pace along dirt roads and tupelo honey stands set up by the side of the road and overheard conversations about stuffing peppers in chilly Piggly-Wiggly’s in towns that maybe have seen their best day already.  

Here’s my blog post from before I left.  I wish for you that you can take some time this summer and step away from it all too.

“Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.”
― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

I am writing this in my office the day before I leave with my family for a week’s vacation.  I started an ambitious new post about a bathroom I recently finished, but that will have to wait for the next week.

I started reading this book called “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” by Greg McKeown.  It’s been helpful already to me in managing my day to day life and I’ll recommend it to you even though I’m halfway through it.  It’s useful to anyone who feels pulled in different directions while struggling to just do more and more.  Professionally, I am the busiest I have ever been and it’s been a struggle to understand what direction I want for my business and, more importantly, what direction I want for myself.

“What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”
― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

And so I’m off to Florida’s forgotten coast.  Off to stay in a home with no WiFi on a small island on the edge of the humid pine forests, swamps with Cypress knees, underground freshwater springs with mantatees and alligators and things magical and dark.  Talk to you next week.

“Poisonous frogs feast on insects that don’t even have names. Tropical lizards disappear into the cracks of trees whose branches spread out as wide as their trunks climb high. This is the real Florida, as it was before people, and probably will be after us, too.”

Nancy Pickard

SaveSave

SaveSave