Issue #20 • Babymoon Reflections: Ways For Love to Show Up in Our Lives

Thoughts that arose when I tuned out of work and into each moment 💭 + a haul of our Guatemalan market finds. 🛒

I truly didn’t realize just how badly I needed to rest, reset, and recharge until we started our babymoon. In the short time that we’ve been here, I’ve been forced to recognize that I’m so alarmingly accustomed to having a bottomless to-do list. So much so that once I turned all of that off and made the conscious effort to do absolutely nothing, I almost didn’t know what to do with myself.

Emil enjoying an early morning kayak ride in Lake Atitlán before we departed for Monterrico.

There was a moment by Lake Atitlán when we were getting ready to head to a cafe, and since Emil was bringing the big backpack I automatically thought to pack my laptop so I could get some work done. I picked it up and was walking over to place in the backpack when I realized what I was doing, stopped myself mid-step, and told myself to chillllllll. Packing it was just such a natural, no-brainer thing to do. But for what? To work on what? There was nothing that absolutely had to be done immediately, nothing was so pressing or time-sensitive that it required I bring my laptop with me on this perfect day in Guatemala to be consumed by it and not instead by the immense natural beauty surrounding me.

“I like to think of it as the same as when you’re instructed on flights to always put your oxygen mask on first before helping others, because even in the most dire situations, this is true: you need to be in a good, healthy, right-minded state before you can help others.”

I’m sure we’ve all been there — the busy-body mentality; sitting in that discomfort of being “unproductive” and feeling like we need to be doing something in order to have purpose. In the insanely competitive capitalist culture of America, it’s completely natural to feel that if we’re taking time off, we’re falling behind. There’s always someone who’s willing to keep hustling, to lose sleep, not eat, and work themselves to the bone because for so long that was the work ethic we glorified. But that way of life is so clearly imbalanced and utterly lacks an ability to refill a cup that’s constantly being poured out into things other than ourselves. The glorification of that lifestyle is rightfully (and thankfully) dying.

This trip has been a wonderful reminder that in order to fill the cups of others, I must have a full cup to pour from. Once I got past that initial discomfort and thumb-twiddling, I was ready to tune out of the work world in order to fully tune into the beauty of each unfolding moment. In those moments, I thought a lot about random things, so I thought I’d share them with y’all here in case you find them helpful.