Buying this studio makes both my husband Zach and myself business owners!!! We try to be very #mindful everyday about how this affects our daughter Addison, who just turned 8! So when she brought to our attention the other day that we haven't been on one single family vacation all summer, we stopped everything and immediately jumped into action.
We needed to take our sweet girl away somewhere, make it epic and fun to show to her, that we work hard, but she comes first. When you own a business, especially a brand new one, you can't step away for long. 24-48 hours tops. So we put our thinking caps on, looking for a solution that would be close, epic and fun. We decided on Hershey Park. We planned to go over the only weekend we had free and decided that Saturday would be for the roller coasters and Sunday for the waterpark.
We make the short drive, checked into our hotel and immediately took the shuttle over to the park to get in hours of amusement park fun. As soon as we get off the shuttle it starts to rain buckets...like huge, torrential down pour. In that moment we knew we had a delicate choice to make, Addison learning from our every move. There choice was clear, it was up to us to make the most of it.
We often show up to our moments on and off our #yoga mat with everything pre arranged in our heads. We have it all mapped out and we often won't settle for anything other than this expectation. I have been walking the the path of #mindfulness for years now and each new bump in the road, each new challenge or experience it gets clearer and clearer to me that these expectations are the biggest obstacle to our abundant joy and happiness. We will be happy "only when it goes the way we planned."
We could have bitched and complained about the rain, which comes natural to us in these situations thanks to something hard wired in our brain neurologist have called the "negativity bias" And quite frankly we should have bitched and complained. It was pouring down rain on our only family vacation. But we chose to rise above that, chose to be present, chose to see past the terrible weather, chose not to label the trip as ruined. We CHOSE to make the most of it. And that is a very empowering choice. To not allow the circumstances of your life to determine your happiness.
So we rode roller coasters in the rain.
Don't get me wrong, that was not optimal at all, but complaining only seems to make it rain harder somehow. We went back to our hotel early, snugged in and relaxed together. Secretly all wishing tomorrow would be better. We dreamt of warm and sunny 80 degree weather and we woke up to rainy ,gray and 50 degrees. Which isn't ideal at all for a day of water park fun, but the universe was making it clear the message my family and I were to receive. Do what you can to make the most of it.
We couldn't adjust the plans, couldn't come back another time. We only had this one day, so we slapped on our bathing suits and like idiots ran around a water park for hours, in the pouring rain, freezing cold beyond belief, teeth chattering, lips purple, bones shaking from the cold and we had the time of our lives! We raced down water slides together, took advantage of no lines and rode rides over and over and over again until we were so drenched, that we ultimately embraced it, dancing, shivering, laughing at a water park in the pouring rain on our only family vacation.
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