Slow Learning

Trip Start Feb 16, 2008

Trip End Jul 22, 2008

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Flag of Australia Coogee, Australia
Saturday, February 23, 2008

After a fun night out at the Empire Bar with a group from the hostel in Sydney, where I met a cute, smart, and well-traveled Canadian (eh!)...He'd lived in London and Spain and had spent three months in New Zealand visiting his parents who've been sailing around the world for the last 5 years. Pretty amazing! I keep meeting people sailing around the world...Anyways, we decided to meet up the next day (saturday) to hit Coogee Beach. I've been spending so much time during the day by myself that I welcomed the company. Also, I was in frantic mode. One of my intentions with this trip was to slow down considerably and I'm not doing this very well at all! Saturday morning, I was trying to book hostels and a few other things, regretting my decision to leave Sydney a little. I decided to give Sandy in Melbourne a ring, a friend of my friend Barbara's. She was amazing from the beginning. I thought maybe we'd just meet for lunch and she'd give me some ideas on what to see in Melbourne. Nope...she offered to pick me up from the airport and offered to let me stay with them. SO NICE and much more on that later...

Off to Coogee...loved it! So beautiful and very different from the other couple of beaches where I'd spent time. My Canadian friend left after about two hours in the sun. I wasn't ready to go -- enjoying watching the waves too much. Plus, there's a walk you can do from Coogee to Bondi that I wanted to do, so around 4:00 or so, I set off. AMAZING! So incredibly beautiful! What's funny about the whole thing, is that I kept stopping to write. I'm not much of a writer. I get impatient, maybe, or I don't think it's interesting, fear reading it again, I'm not sure. Maybe it was the amazing surf. Maybe it was my mood. Maybe after a week, I just had a lot going on in my head. I'd walk. I'd take pictures. I'd write and write. Funny thing about it all...I didn't even have my journal, just a piece of paper. I covered it front to back. I laughed.

Beautiful

I cried. I realized learning to slow down is going to take much longer than i thought and I need to be more compassionate with myself...AND that it might take some help (something I'm still learning how to ask for - how many of you reading this can attest! please don't answer that, you know who you are. thank you, i love you all for it!).

So, how do you ask for help with this? Sometimes it just comes. That morning, before I left, I read my email and was reminded by a friend to slow down. That I'm doing too much. Why is this so hard, I wondered ALL DAY? As I walked and looked out at the ocean for those 2 and a half hours as I walked along, it made me think of this song Two Pina Coladas (Garth Brooks)..."I'm telling you, science as proved, heartache is healed by the sea." The ocean calmed me down. I wondered...am I trying to live up to something that maybe I'm not. Maybe I have a tremendous amount of baggage or maybe I have all this stuff that I just need to let go of. I think I'll get there. It will just take some time. I have a lot of it right now, time that is. I may run out of money before I run out of time, but that's ok too. So, two and a half hours, walking along this amazing stretch of land, wrapping it's way around the coast. Each time a more beautiful beach or cliff. I took so many pictures. I came along Waverley Cemetary right along a cliff. Imagine that -- your final resting place, looking out into the ocean. Just breathtaking. I loved seeing people walk past signs that read "No dogs allowed" with their dogs. One particular dog cracked me up. I could hear her little bark for awhile and when I came along, she was running in and out of the waves SO FAST! She was having so much fun -- really enjoying it and barking as if to say, "hey guys, check this out! why don't you come chase me! i know you want to!"

Back at the hostel, everyone was having a low-key night (too much champagne and Red Bull and vodka from the night before I guess). I was in my room packing and some of my roommates were watching "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". It was nice to see Chicago, but really funny because they were asking me all kinds of questions about American weddings. This has come up quite a bit. So many people are fascinated by our culture's obsession with weddings and getting married. Some of the European girls could not understand it at all. Sometimes I can't understand it either. For many of them, the focus is on a career, not on marriage, and marriage happens into their 30s. It was funny and enlightening. I guess it's America.

It was sad saying goodbye to everyone at the hostel. That little corner had been my home for a week. Those girls, my friends for a little while. We exchanged emails, so perhaps I will hear from them again!.