In fact you’re right: one life won’t be enough. Take this as the biggest challenge of all that you’ll encounter on the road. It’s important to challenge others and accept their challenges, but it’s just as important to understand that if you don’t succeed in something, it’s not the end of the world. Maybe you set one too many goals. Maybe you started too many things and left them unfinished. Or maybe you are investing all your energy into thousands of ideas instead of focusing on a few of the most important ones.

Saying no comfortably and without guilt requires you to really think about what you stand for. Why are you saying no? When you say no to unwanted obligations in your life or to a long bucket list, ask yourself what you’re making room for? Once you can identify and embrace your priorities and focus on what you want more of, you’ll feel more justified saying no in order to pursue those goals. It could be time with your family, a new exciting project or a cause you believe strongly in.

Remember, all this takes time. Be patient and mindful.

And while we’re at it, we’ll share another secret to checking off more dream destinations (or life goals for that matter) from your list: give a few of them up. When you stop pushing yourself beyond your boundaries, you’ll no longer live under the constant pressure of failed attempts and you’ll have more energy to concentrate on the essentials. Take your time when you visit a new place. Wander around, meet the locals, acknowledge the little things. Try not to plan too far ahead and focus on yourself, because travel happens as much in your mind as outside of it.

Have you given up anything in order to travel more mindfully? Share your story and a couple of photos at office@203challenges.com and become an inspiration to others. 

The post The greatest challenge on the road: give up something appeared first on 203Challenges.

”We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.” – Richard Halliburton

“Life is an experiment in which you may fail or succeed. Explore more, expect least.” – Santosh Kalvar 

“A life lived every day doing only what needs to be done may seem convenient but your heart and soul don’t live for convenience they live for exploration, imagination and the pursuit of dreams. Do what must be done but also do what your heart and soul want to be done.” – Avina Celeste

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

“If we were meant to stay in one place we’d have roots instead of feet.” – Rachel Wolchin

“Life is about the gray areas. Things are seldom black and white, even when we wish they were and think they should be, and I like exploring this nuanced terrain.” – Emily Giffin

“Exploring is an innate part of being human. We’re all explorers when we’re born. Unfortunately, it seems to get drummed out of many of us as we get older, but it’s there, I think, in all of us. And for me that moment of discovery is just so thrilling, on any level, that I think anybody that’s experienced it is pretty quickly addicted to it.” – Edith Widder

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot 

“Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else – above all, a travel bureau – arrange everything before-hand?” – Richard Aldington

”The purpose of life is to live it, to taste it, to experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt 

“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.” – Roman Payne

“When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” – Rebecca Solnit

“We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore.” – China Mieville

“Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.” – Claude Bernard

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