Revelations

How to Find Happiness

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Finding happiness is going to be a huge challenge for me and so many others in 2022 but we can do it if we want to. After three years of a myriad of changes in my life, such as leaving a marriage of 25 years, two moves, buying a house, and learning to adapt to living on my own, I am finally in a good place where I know that I must get back to my writing. I have promised myself, let’s call it a New Year’s resolution, that there will be no more excuses for procrastinating. After considering a number of ideas for writing about my travels “within” rather than “without” since COVID isn’t allowing me to travel very far these days, I chose to tackle a topic of interest to me for a very long time…happiness! Why have we human beings been pursuing happiness, this elusive state of mind, ever since we came to this earth, and why have we failed so miserably at achieving it?

When I stop to reflect on this topic, I realise that my interest in what happiness is began more than 20 years ago. Up to that point, it really was just a word with no significant meaning attached to it. In fact, I had never even stopped to consider whether I was a happy person or not. I was too busy working and getting on with my busy life.

Then one day out of the blue, I overheard a conversation between two people where one of them remarked that in his experience, he had discovered that many people were unable to share in the happiness of another. He concluded that it was almost as if they were jealous of anyone who was always happy. On the other hand, he wondered if it was a case of that old saying “Misery loves company.” It’s true that we all want to be happy, yet we can’t seem to achieve it for some reason. Oh yes, some of us can put on a happy face when underneath we are not. It could be a mask covering up latent anger, sadness, or anxiety which we don’t want others to see. So I began to think about why we would rather talk about our misery instead of doing something about it. Are we afraid to seek our own happiness because it might seem selfish, or is it because we have the wrong idea about what could bring it to us causing us to search in all the wrong places?

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Seeking the Truth of the Matter

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We won’t regret what we do in life only what we did not do.

Whoever said this could not have said it better. Most of us will probably have more regret about what we never got around to doing rather than expounding on what we did do. This is a common lament say those who have worked with the dying. Let’s face it, we can get so bogged down in the business of daily living with obligations to family, friends, work peers, and basically what society expects of us that any dreams we might have had get relegated to the back seat. It’s unfortunate that it’s not until we are on our death beds that we finally realise what we could have had if only….Why do we do this? Why can’t we do what our soul wants us to do? Why do we believe that we should settle for a life that excludes true inner peace and happiness? Did we not come here to do better than settle for second best? These are weighty questions which I have been pondering for some time.

After more than a year of having to live with the ramifications of COVID, many of us older folk are discovering that it has given us more time to consider our past and what lies ahead. Please note that I am speaking for myself as one of the ‘older folk’ and most likely not for our children and grandchildren. Their time is apt to be taken up with work, school, parenting, and whatever it’s taking for them to keep their heads above water during the pandemic.

Like so many of us today, we are having to make adjustments that we had never dreamed of doing before the pandemic. Where we can go and what we can do have been severely limited and yet, I can honestly say that my days are as busy as they were before but with a difference…a huge difference! Whereas before I was spending my time going out and about to visit friends, attending meetings, shopping, visiting my family in Ottawa, and preparing for my annual winter trip over to Thailand and beyond, now I am being forced to rewrite my schedule. My travels are taking on a whole new direction. As we go into a third wave, it’s an misnomer to say that my blog which I named betstravelsabout is rather outdated. But is it?

Reversing my travel from going outward to going inward is a work in progress. So what does travelling within look like and what can I learn from it? How can it ever replace the joy and excitement of getting away from my everyday life in Nova Scotia to return to Thailand and other Asian countries where I built up a whole new gang of friends sharing the same joy in travelling as I did? Some of my closest friends still live there and may have to stay there until they can either go back home to their country or be allowed to pick up their nomadic life once again. Judging by what is happening throughout our world today, their latter choice could become just a dream. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I plan to finish off this post with what ‘travelling within’ looks like for me.

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Resilience in the Time of the Coronavirus

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“I am so excited!” Seems strange to be writing this when there is so much despair in our world at this time. Probably the first thing that will come to any reader’s mind would be “What on earth has she got to be excited about?”

This unexpected feeling hit me when I tuned into my favourite radio station, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, more commonly known as the CBC. What caught my interest was an interview with small business owners across the country who are moving their companies forward using their ability to take the tools that they already have and apply them in a manner that can produce a new product that will be helpful in our war with the Coronavirus.

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Waking Up to the Effects of Climate Change

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My final two weeks in Chaing Mai this April were horrible…one of the worst experiences of my life. This may come as a shock to you from a returning visitor for the past ten years who has never hesitated to put this beautiful historic city at the top of her list as the most desirable city in SE Asia to visit and possibly live year round. I can only blame this change of mind on climate change. This year Chiang Mai broke all their previous records for high pollution indices and even gained the dubious title of being the most polluted city in the world beating New Delhi and Shanghai, the usual winners. The PM2.5 ( fixed particulate matter) was hovering between 140 to 200+ the whole time I was there. I can’t imagine what effect that had on my all ready compromised lungs where some bronchitis had set in while in Bali.

Bangkok gets smoggy, too

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Ubud – Art and Culture, Monkeys, and Rice Paddies

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How can I best sum up my one month stay in Ubud?  On one hand, the month seems to have passed by much too quickly failing to give me enough time to really explore as much as I would have liked. On the other hand, it seems likes eons ago that I first stepped onto Bali soil again after a nine-year hiatus. It’s been a month of changes in many ways for me as in the weather,  friends who have come and gone, my personal travel plans, but the most difficult has been getting to know the new Ubud which hardly resembles anything like the small village it was. It has, unfortunately, morphed into a far too  busy and noisy town adjusting to the over development  brought about by the influx of tourists, many coming from China.

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