loving doing nothing down under'

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it. While I have come to Australia in order to experience life and pleasure, during the first weeks I was here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Generally speaking, though, I think that Western people have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Statistics back this observation up, showing that many people feel happier and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, and then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pyjamas, eating cereals straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma. This is because, in contrast to Australians, we don’t really know how to do nothing. This is cause of the great sad stereotype – the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.
For me, though, a major obstacle in my pursuit of traveling an indulging pleasure was my ingrained sense of guilt. Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is so typical, the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness. During my planning of traveling to see the world, all my synapses were exciting in distress, looking for a task, looking for something to do that matters and which justifies my absence; a medical internship. I am glad that I succeeded in that in order to seize my feelings of guilt. And now that I am here and planning my months of traveling after my internship I am still looking for this confirmation. When I told my Australian friends that I was planning on doing some months of traveling in order to experience pure pleasure by seeing the world while doing nothing, they didn’t have any hang-ups about it. Nobody once said, How completely irresponsible of you, or What a self-indulgent luxury. Moreover, it is not like all of this, my ticket to Sydney just came flying into my student's apartment window on my lap, passively willing to accept. I have worked real hard for years at Uni in order to get here. You don’t get five scholarships for doing nothing. Well you know what, I am here, alive and kicking, and I am going to live! These days of spontaneous travel are such a glorious twirl of time, some of the loosest days of my life, running to the train station and buying tickets left and right, finally beginning to flex my freedom for real because it has finally sunk in that I can go wherever I want. What the fuck, why not go to New Zealand for a few weeks in April!? In the reasoning of while we're here down under’ might as well make a leap to the place real down under. I am curious to see a country most far away from my sweet home Holland on planet Earth.

But before I do, I am happy to announce that I am going to spend the coming days of nothingness with Lianne who is expected to arrive here tomorrow! Baby, Sydney’s firework ain’t worth nothing compared with the lights you’re shining through!

See you down under'