Travel Day 955 – Amritapuri Ashram, Kerala, INDIA
It was finally time to start packing up my bag and hitting the road again, but since I had to do a little purge of my belongings, this day became finally a Travel Sunday…
Travel Sunday of Organizing my Backpack
But first I started my day quite early again with a 4.30am rise and the Archana in the main hall. After that I got my free cup of chai and sat down at the beach to meditate while the sun was slowly rising. When I finally felt ready to get up, I joined the morning yoga class which I meant to join ever since I had arrived in Amritapuri, but unfortunately I had always been too busy so far…
While the yoga class was really nice and a welcome change of my usual routine, it also made my morning quite active. After a nice breakfast, I was ready to start digging through my backpack and do some long overdue purging. In order to practice some non-attachment, I thought I should just get rid of certain items that I had not used in a while and reduce the quantity of others…
This purging Travel Sunday was not only necessary because my backpack constantly felt way too heavy every single time I tried lifting it, but I also had bought a few books in the ashram that I wanted to read and I felt I needed to balance the additional weight of my pack while losing certain other items. Well, I had obviously purged my bag before; I was sure that there were certain items that were not absolutely necessary…
Clothes could be donated to the ashram and so I decided to lose two t-shirts, one pair of pants, one pair of underwear and two pairs of socks. Then I took out my scarf which I had last used in Kolkata, one of my two hats and my rain pants. My silk liner was next, because I realized that I rather used my fleece liner more frequently due to the fact that it was also a perfect blanket for train rides and chilly hotel rooms. My sowing kit as well as my pile of medication was also never really used and so were few other smaller items which I decided should continue on a separate path from now on…
So far I had Travel Sundays every so often and it always seemed to be a special day in that sense that it made me touch every little thing that I was carrying with me and think about if it was really needed. The result of every Travel Sunday was usually then that I carried on with a lighter backpack and a greater awareness of my personal belongings. Obviously most frustrating for me is finding certain things in my backpack that I didn’t even know I had with me any more. Those items were definitely not really needed…
But today I had a different goal as well. I needed to fit my Tabla rings into my backpack. Ever since I had carried my winter clothes and shoes in my backpack, I always had to attach the rings to the outside of my pack. This obviously a great inconvenience and so fitting the rings as well as my 4 new books into my backpack became my biggest challenge of my little Travel Sunday… : )
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