Thank You for Calling Roshi Travel. How Will You Help You?

So the wife and I are finally getting a vacation. We take at least a couple of trips regularly but for us, a vacation involves a couple of things.

• No drives over three hours
• Just us on the trip
• No visiting family members

Keeping those things in mind, we haven’t had a real vacation since a cruise three years ago.

So tomorrow we’re heading off to London for a week. This is something we’ve been looking forward to for a while now. I’ve done quite a bit of traveling as I used to be a travel agent. My wife has done some but not a lot. Interestingly, I’ve never been to London. I’ve been to both Scotland and Ireland but never England – unless you count layovers at Heathrow (I do not). The only time she’s been to Europe was our belated honeymoon to Paris so this is going to be a nice bit of exploring for both of us.

How will this fit into practice? Well, I could easily use this as an excuse to blow off practice altogether for a week but really I see vacations as condensed practice opportunities.

The great thing about traveling is the barrage of new experiences, new smells, new sounds, new flavors all coming at you, rapid fire. How one handles those sensations is, to me, what one’s practice should be about. There’s no pillow. No statue. No opportunity to sit. You simply move and experience and – hopefully – remain mindful through it all.

And in a city like London, if you do manage to remain truly mindful you get to absorb the buildup of over a thousand years of people’s lives and loves and works. Nice stuff if you can do it right.

Of course, I could be very wrong about this. This could just be the buildup of my own preconceptions of the small but shiny new insights that I believe I have acquired.

Perhaps one-on-one travels with a Roshi might be a nice way to practice.

We do have free net access in the hotel room. Perhaps I’ll write a blog entry every day while I’m there.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

P.S.

Thanks to “Irrepressible Angst”, my unofficial blogging muse. When I go a long time without posting, it’s due to my laziness. So far, whenever I start again, it’s due to her prodding.