WRITING PROMPT RESPONSE

Always Have an Attitude for Gratitude

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude

While there are still a handful of life lessons I learned in school, they surely weren’t part of the curriculum. But there are stacks of lessons I learned in the past ten-plus years while traveling the world. The world has become my school and I am more than just grateful for it.

I do know better than to take my travels for granted. I do know I am privileged in some ways more than in others and also am aware of the power of a strong passport. It certainly helps when becoming a modern Nomad.

But I also worked for it myself. Things don’t come easy in life. You gotta do that first step.

I am grateful for all the experiences I made on far-away journeys but also for those I made on travels closer to home. Each and every trip had at least one lesson for me and I surely can’t write down all the moments I’m grateful for.

From people giving me directions to locals offering traditional meals and foreigners inviting me into their homes. I have a long list of strangers that helped me abroad and made me grateful for all the kindness I experienced around the world.

It will be difficult to fit it all into one post but I will try my best.

The seed that got planted very early

While my parents couldn’t afford to take my sister and me to the Maledives, far-away Australia, or a five-star resort in Egypt, they took us on multiple road trips and holidays every year.

With the budget they had, they gave us all. Winter vacations and skiing courses, time for building sand castles on the endless beaches of Italy, and loads of summer holidays spent hiking up and down the Alps.

While my parents surely planted that travel bug in my body, they taught us even more. They taught us you don’t need much to be happy and if you compromise a thing here and let go of some luxury there, you can stretch your money further and take another weekend trip in between.

Yes, I can live with very little and make the most out of it. And I am grateful for that.

My parents taught me valuable lessons about what is important in life.

To live.

It doesn’t help when you save all the money in the world for your pension and then become too fragile to place a foot outside of your home.

Live now.

My first ever flight

No, my parents never flew with us anywhere. I was 17 when I stepped onto an airplane for the first time. With the money I had earned babysitting and teaching German and only with a friend of mine on my side.

It was a four-hour flight and I don’t remember much of it. But that first flight only widened my horizon allowing me to dream further and bigger.

A gift more valuable than a thousand presents

Together with two other friends of mine, we started a tradition of gifting each other city trips to our birthdays instead of presents we anyway didn’t need.

We traveled mostly through Germany but got to see places I wouldn’t have otherwise ever seen. The list is long and I will probably not manage to remember them all but the memories we made across those cities are priceless.

We ate pickles and chips in the streets of Freiburg, tried on wedding dresses in Munich, and partied until late in Vienna walking home in high heels across the fields to get back to my aunt, our home for the night.

Yes, those city trips we’ve done together I’m incredibly grateful for and something I can only recommend to you all. Gift your friends and family members day trips instead of another phone, Amazon voucher, or the third box of unwanted presents.

Family memories in the snow

There are more memories than I can count on my fingers I made as a toddler, school child, teenager, and young adult in this skiing resort in the Alps.

All four of our grandparents were at some point in my life together with me and my family in Balderschwang. A small village in the mountains where I learned to ski and snowboard, was taught how to sled down a slope, and built an igloo in the dark.

Despite teenage mood swings, ages where it was uncool to travel with your parents, and surely some years where I couldn’t stand my sister, I wouldn’t let go by a year without traveling to Balderschwang. With either my parents, my grandparents, my ex-boyfriend, my husband, or all of them together (not the last two at the same time of course).

I am grateful for all the things I was taught on those winter vacations from the more basic ones like how to ski and how to steer the car on snowed-in and icy roads to the more complex lessons of life as the importance of the relationship to your family members.

A dream that became true

This next part is enough to fill a book (yes, I know, one day you’ll get to read it) but I’ll try to cover the most important parts of it.

It all started with a dream. A dream that built up in my head and became something much bigger. I watched every single documentary about African wildlife on TV and never missed a show displaying the beauty of Africa’s vast landscapes.

I read no other books than those about stories in Africa and had finished the local library’s corner of exotic stories. I visited the travel expo and loaded up on more travel magazines.

I studied, I worked and I earned money with only one goal in mind.

To fly to Africa.

And I did it. I volunteered for half a year in Ghana, West Africa, and filled my heart with the smiles of happy children. Children who didn’t need more than a teacher in the school and a few bites to eat.

I traveled across the country without Google maps and traveling groups asking locals for directions and hiking through the coastal rainforest all on my own.

I then flew to East Africa to venture further. From Tanzania all the way down to Cape Town, South Africa, I traveled. All on my own while meeting amazing people along the way.

I learned so much more in those 7 months traveling through 6 African countries than I did studying for 3 years in Germany.

And I never returned. At least not fully.

Africa gained a very special place in my heart.

And I am very grateful for that. For the journey, I went on and all the experiences I made along the way together with the amazing souls I met.

Finding a home away from home

And when I say I never returned it’s partly true. I only flew back for a month only return to Africa again. I ended up living in Namibia for almost 5 years. 5 years I’d call the best ones in my life.

In those five years, I worked as a sandboarding instructor, learned how to become a rock climbing teacher, and jumped out of an airplane for the first time in my life (you all know what happened then).

I met the love of my life and ended my time as a solo traveler. But it’s nothing I regret. I made amazing memories as a woman traveling alone through Africa but I am more than grateful to have a partner now who’s sharing the joy of traveling with me.

Namibia — I’ll be back soon!

Venturing off to new lands

And together with David, I left this country that had become a home for both of us. We took on a job opportunity in Thailand and it shall become a turning point in our career as skydiving instructors but also travelers.

It was our first time exploring a country in Asia but didn’t end up being our last visit. We’ve been back since and I’m sure we’ll return again in the near future.

In the past three years, we’ve moved between three continents and yes, those were the three years of the pandemic. We weren’t ignorant but we were people who suffered from tourism being pushed down to zero and still tried to make an income despite a changing world.

I am thankful for the experiences we made in these three years as we met amazing people and have now opportunities to work in lots of different places. It’s not that we can choose our employers but we kind of can afford to reject those we don’t want.

Looking into a brighter future

Looking back at my lifeline you might see where those seeds got planted, grew, and eventually exploded becoming the blooming flowers we are now. Modern-day nomads some say while others just ask “when will you settle down?”

Not now. That’s all I can say. There’s still too much to do and see.

The more I travel the more I learn how little I have seen so far and the further I want to go. There are continents I haven’t touched yet and I don’t know how long it will take before I get there.

But there’s one thing I’ve learned during the last few years living in Africa. It’s patience.

Patience will bring you to your destination.

Thank you for reading. After all, I’m also grateful for every single reader that comes this far. To the finish line of yet another long article of mine.

This was a writing prompt response to the monthly challenge at Globetrotters.

And here are other submissions to the writing challenge:

JoAnn Ryan with “Gratitude for Rain, Flowers and All of You Beautiful Writers”

Julie van Maanen with “I Moved To Paris Age 19 And My Life Turned Around”

Aarti Tailor with “5 Incredible Travel Experiences To Be Grateful For”

Dan Carlson with “Gobs of Gratitude for the Greats and Gurus of Globetrotters”

More articles of mine about gratitude in life:

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