Six Months Away

Why not four or eight months?

The answer is all too simple. The number of months does not matter at all. When I was thinking about the domain name, I had to decide quickly.

Investing in as many web addresses as there are months in the year seemed like nonsense to me. At that moment the image of a pair of scales came to mind. If you load a big mouthful onto one pan and have nothing left for the other, short-changing it, as the saying goes, the balance in your life can start to wobble.

In my view, this is one of the most important things in life. It is not only about balancing the time and energy you give to work, family, friends, yourself, society and so on, and, following the principles of time management, sorting your activities into boxes by priority and acting accordingly. What matters is doing what holds real value for you, but everyone has to sort that out in their own head and name it for themselves.

The belief that I had already learnt what matters most and could not learn anything new and essential always kept my feet on the ground and stopped me from making long-postponed decisions. The fear of a step into the unknown was stronger than the wish and the longing to move forward. Even though my legs nearly started to shake when I was buying the plane ticket for my first two month-long adventures, this time fear did not get the better of me.

Six months on the road, or Six Months Away, and six months at home in the Czech Republic, coming back every month to take care of whatever is necessary, seemed to me the ideal compromise to begin with.

What is really important?

When I came back two years ago from a training camp in the road cyclists' paradise, the sunny Spanish island of Mallorca, a colleague of mine, drawing on her rich experience, told me enthusiastically that travelling lets you gain perspective on your life and think calmly about what matters most to us. Only later did I understand the deeper meaning of her words.

At the time I saw it as an extraordinary experience. I had never ridden a road bike before; my usual yearly mileage was somewhere between 50 and 100 kilometres at an average speed of 20 km/h. A planned ten-day holiday in one of the most beautiful tourist spots turned into a drill of eight hundred kilometres, including an unforgettable two-hundred-and-ten-kilometre ride to Formentor, the lighthouse in the hills at the northernmost tip of the island, more than two hundred metres above sea level. Then came a free day, which I used to run my first half marathon at the very start of my career as an amateur runner. On top of that, it all took place in the capital, Palma de Mallorca, near the magnificent cathedral, and that is something you do not easily forget.

That same year, at the end of winter, I decided to take up another unique offer, and at a time when I should have been waiting in the warmth of my home for a new passport, I had to hurry the authorities in the Czech Republic so that I could catch my flight to Bangkok. It was only the beginning of a travel mania. After coming back from Mallorca at the end of March, I started planning where to go next, and further opportunities were not long in coming.

On the other hand, during that year I realised that visiting ten very interesting and beautiful places abroad is a great inspiration and adventure, but the time on a seven- to fourteen-day holiday passes far faster than the flaps come out when a plane is landing, and suddenly you realise that you are not living the way you would like to. You are only unpacking suitcases, watching the hands of your watch and feeling that you are running away from something, or that you really are.

Traveller no more

The moment had come to stop and give things a clear purpose: not to travel just for the experience itself, for posting photos on social networks, uploading videos to YouTube and boosting your ego by telling your friends in the pub about everything you have been through, while they went to work from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.

I made up my mind and began taking steps so that I could live like people on the other side of the planet, get to know their lives and cultural customs, become, with a little exaggeration, one of them, make room for what there used to be no time for, and wait and see where life takes us.
In the true sense of the word, it is not about having a crazy adventure or behaving on the road like a showy, superior foreigner, but rather about learning to live in my own way.

Without limits, freely and easily, with the chance to work from anywhere in the world, while knowing where your home is and where you come from.
And keeping up and strengthening this bond with your home wherever you are, so that you can always pick up the last unfinished conversation with your best friend about why you have cut down on drinking, the debate with your dad about how you might finally settle down, or the talk with your partner or children about the ordinary joys and worries we all meet every day.

Instead of the fun of packing luggage, looking for suitable souvenirs in local boutiques and markets, licking postage stamps and making sure that no important personal documents are missing and that the itinerary is planned down to the smallest detail, after my first ten days in Africa I am beginning to feel as if I were at home, and I ask myself why I planned the first of my journeys of discovery for such a short time …

It is time to give up travelling once and for all, and to try it for at least six months a year.

Interesting matters

The text of the same name, which reveals the inspiration behind the Six Months Away project, was written at the end of the tenth day of the holiday, on 22nd January. We are not packing our suitcases yet, but the first month is slowly coming to an end and it is time to think about whom to visit, where to go and what not to miss before hot equatorial Africa with its steady weather gives way to the cold, even freezing days of Central Europe. With fourteen days of our stay left, I value the time spent here even more.