19 unexpected lessons from the first Dubai trip
Most of these lessons are NOT what ZNMD or YJHD taught you. Which is why I think you might find it useful, especially the last point.
Last month I took my first ever international trip.
I thought it would be a sheer waste of my money and time if I did not write about the lessons, my friend.
Also, life gets better when we reflect, so here we go:
You have to be okay being different. I have had so many milestones in my life that I could have afforded an international trip a decade back. I just never felt like. Just because someone doesn’t, doesn’t mean they cannot. Applies to so much beyond material achievements too.
That said, we clicked hajaar pictures :) Journalling is your answer. So many things I felt are the ones that are not making it to the newsletter. They still need to be expressed, though. The good and the not-so-good. Write down what you felt, exactly how you felt it. That is when you truly overcome it and go beyond.
Your best routine gets reflected in your trip. I would wake up at my usual meditation timings every morning, and was super proud of how I was able to pull that off. One of my goals is also to do karma yoga, which means, to remember God during the day while working, and I am glad I could do that too. A vacation is a great reminder of how your life has been going.
Planning always helps. We had our day-to-day itinerary laid out from our agent, and we would get into our car every morning after breakfast, and go there. As much as I hate getting out of home and hated getting out of hotel, because the plan was set, the day almost always went better than expected.
When you go ahead with the plan, you do end up getting some stunning pictures :) But don’t stay married to a plan. You are always going to want to do more things/fewer things/different things than you had planned. It’s okay. Go with the flow. Flexibility is a virtue of only the strong.
There is no next time. One of the things I wanted to get was perfumes, either from Dubai or duty-free. But I didn’t, thinking “too expensive”. We passed multiple perfume outlets in the malls and also in the airport, but maybe it was not destined :) I regret that now. So what it was 20% higher than my budget? Sometimes you should not think too much and allow yourself to splurge, especially if it is something that you like and use.
Resistance never leaves you. The author Steven Pressfield often talks about “resistance” in his books (pick his books if you haven’t already). He coins resistance as our inner feelings and lower traits that do not allow us to do our best work. I guess resistance is present in all our lives, even when we are not working. Almost every single day I wanted to chill in the hotel and not go hang around, but when we hung around, we had the greatest fun :)
You gotta be grateful, every single day. On Day 3 of our trip, I fainted early morning, perhaps due to a lot of exertion of the first two days. I had to skip the entire day’s plans and chill around at a cousin’s home (coincidentally a cousin of ours was in Dubai only) for an entire day. I woke up at 6.15 pm from my afternoon nap that day, which showed how much I needed that down time. I also had my dinner in his balcony overlooking the Burj Khalifa, and had we clicked endless pictures. Even amidst chaos, I had so much to be grateful for. The kind of home I come from, even a tiny inconvenience is met with profound grief (I am not exaggerating at all). Grief is unfortunately the ongoing language in the environment I grew up in. However, here, even though I fell unexpectedly ill, all I had to do was chill for a day and then I was back in action. All you need is a pause, each time your body calls you to. It is that easy. Not everything is worth grieving over. Most things aren’t, rather.
Some chill around scenes at my cousin’s home on the evening of the day I fainted. Yep, that’s Burj Khalifa. Yep, he’s an inspiration of getting rich :) Lack of sleep always catches up. The reason I fainted was not because of two days of extensive exertion. It was because I was not taking care of my sleep hours for almost 2 weeks. If you sleep daily for less than 5 hours and expect yourself to be a superperformer, you are lying blatantly to yourself. A lesson I learnt a very very hard way.
Let people lead you to places. The only thing that was a must for me was to visit Dubai Mall, because that is where I would meet my bestie Chinar, who lives in Dubai only. Other than that, I was mostly okay with everything everyone else wanted—even though it sometimes meant watching dolphins dance :/ So, it is okay if others on your trip decide the itinerary. You have to know what is non negotiable for you (like meeting her was for me) and then be okay where others lead you.
Chinar and I in the outer area of Dubai mall, watching the fountain show. The fountain show is world famous, but we paid zero attention to it because we were busy chatting :) A trip is not about displaying your riches. Not only on a trip, but at any time if you find yourself showing off your riches, you need to alter a part of yourself that you don’t know needs altering.
That said, the greatest wealth is health. When I fainted, I accidentally hit my back on the wooden bedside table, that hurt my back badly. For the next 3 days of the trip I had acute problems getting up or sitting down. Never have I ever had health issues like this, but this scare made me understand that health is the crown on the well person’s head that only the ill person can see.
The best thing that came from that illness was I also had my first ever Tesla ride in an Uber. Some meaningful coincidences y’all!! Compound interest of health is always working. I am a fast walker. When we returned to India, even though I had some back issues still, I was walking very well now. And I saw myself walking faster than most people at the airport. Something that made me proud, that even though I had not been exercising and only stretching for the past few days, because my body knows how to walk fast subconsciously, and the moment it could, it did. Every action you take is either an addition or a subtraction to the compound interest to your health. Keep building that.
You are always going to miss out on something. I was born and brought up in Kota. If a tourist comes there, I am certain there are some places they would see that I would have never. You are always going to miss out on certain places, like Naina said to Bunny. You cannot ever visit a city in its entirety, for even if you visit the same places again, you have changed and so have those places.
Think bigger. The cars there are SO big. Rather everything there is big. Such environments push you to think bigger, and not worry about pennies. This is a life lesson beyond money.
Please get off the grid. I had so many work related things going on before leaving. But I figured it was important to get off the grid and just focus on the vacation. Lo and behold, for most days I did not do anything about work. I came back fresher, looked brighter, and realised I should do this often.
So beautiful, so elegant, just looking like a wow :) It’s not the place, it’s the people. With the right people, you can have fun even in a dorm room of the size of a smartphone. With the wrong people, even the top of Burj Khalifa might seem like the lowest low.
It’s always the people. And the swoonworthy backdrops of Yas Island :) You cannot capture the best things in a picture. Dubai has incredibly tall buildings. But driving along the roads there, you would often come across a mosque in the middle of multiple high rise buildings. Because we went there right after amavasya (Diwali), sometimes driving through the night watching a mosque adorned with the most beautiful, thin crescent moon in the sky was the most beautiful sight. Things like this are something you see only if you keep your eyes open and cameras shut.
No trip is going to change your life. The memories of movies like ZNMD are etched in our minds. It is one of my favourite movies too. But I am here to break your heart at the end of our conversation together, that no week or three weeks holiday is going to change your life. It is you who is going to change it. You should, nonetheless, take such leaves because it allows your mind to get off the grid, and work on your life instead of work in your life. That is where true magic happens.
I hope you liked these reflections, and are taking at least one thing to apply to your lives too.
Keep rocking, I will see you next week.
Nishtha Gehija
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