Back

How Small Habit Shifts Enhance Our Family's Travel Experience | Day 317 of my 2023 Journal

Cecilie Conrad·Nov 14, 2023· 3 minutes

Small habits changing.

One peaceful day follows just after another. It is interesting how my peace arises from small habit changes. Jesper and I usually talk while we drive. We drive a lot, so we get enough time to talk about everything we need to talk about while driving long distances. We spend our evenings with our teenagers and our days with our projects and adventures, so we rarely sit down together to work on the things that need our attention.

It is clear this needs to change. Staying in Mexico without a van and not renting a car starved us so much that we started the process of change. Change is not easy. And it does not happen overnight. Therefore, it is important to choose the changes we want in life with great care.

We have just interviewed Dean Bokhari for the podcast, and he had clever things to say about this: "Success is sequential, and habits are built one by one." And we discussed how clear values are essential to steer the focus of change in the right direction.

We KNOW we need to spend more time, NOT driving, together where we can work on the many things that need our joint attention, and now, finally, we are building the habit.

I am grateful this has happened, and I am also grateful we both can switch from effective strategies to get things done to a state of just being. In my case, on this day, just being part was going for a long and “stupid” walk with Silke, collecting life advice from t-shirts, laughing about beachwear, and enjoying the sunset over Playa; meanwhile, my sons embarked on a grand adventure on their computer together.

Silke and I especially enjoyed the fashionable Nordic line through the O seen on many a t-shirt design, changing the word LOVE to the Danish word for lion. Haha. Unbelievably, we also saw a mural we had not seen yet; hard to believe at this point, but true.

And Jesper's crucial driver's license arrived from Europe, putting us in a much better place when planning further logistics!

With love

Cecilie-Underskrift-300x133

Cecilie Conrad

Thank you for reading
I would love to hear from you. Listen to your thoughts and reflections - or praise :) It is often emotional to share our lives like this, and we get very happy when we get your feedback. So feel free to share a comment below 😋 

See more images on Facebook

Parents often fear that giving children freedom means losing influence over their values and choices. But what if the freedom we think we're "giving"…Read more
Fear and doubt in unschooling—where they come from, how they spread, and how to move through them without defaulting to school-based thinking= Read more
Thoughts on how to stay clear, while the devices keep coming at us with new distractions. Read more
What if we abandoned the question “How do we know they’re learning?” and trusted that learning is happening? This episode examines the anxieties that…Read more
Cecilie, Sandra, and Sue examine the widespread belief that children can’t learn math without formal instruction — and explain why that belief doesn’…Read more
A funky morning of poetry, light and thoughts just outside of Berlin. Read more
Is the smartphone really ruining the lives of tweens and teens? Do we need to protect them by keeping them away from the tool? The movement out there…Read more
Dinner tables, car rides, bedtime chats, café corners—this episode dives into the real places where unschooling lives and grows. Cecilie Conrad, Sand…Read more
A morning reflection from Budapest on trusting life’s intensity, receiving what we need, and surrendering to the beauty hidden in challenges. Read more