I was thinking about this page of mine a lot over the last year or so, and reflected back on where and how I wanted it to progress and keep on going in the direction I wanted it to go, and I’ve realised that things in life very rarely turn out the way we want them to. Life hits us with so many unpredictable twists and turns every single day, that a lot of times not even the best laid out plans turn out as they were initially carved out.
My idea, or wish should I say, from a few years ago, when life was still “relatively” normal, was to take at least one or two longer trips a year, to a place I haven’t been to yet, and post my experiences on here for anyone interested enough to read what’s going on. Unfortunately, we all know what happened back in 2020, and the following couple of years, so my plan for that quickly fell through. Of course we all changed our lives at least a little bit during that time, and naturally, I was no exception. I’m not just talking about not being able to travel during those “unusual” years, but in day-to-day life as well. A big wish of mine a couple of years ago was (and undoubtedly still is to this day) to travel to the US, but as I was going through a lot of change in terms of my work situation, unfortunately, that plan had to be sidetracked for a (little) while. In the end, I was still able to travel around, and visit new places that year, which you may read a little bit more about here, among other posts, but it wasn’t the same.
As I already guessed in the linked post above, 2024 was definitely a long year, but it also flew by insanely quickly, just as 2025 is doing now as well. A lot of changes happened – at work first of all, as well as with sports, mainly volleyball, so time off has been even more difficult to come by than before. I will admit, that most of it, I caused myself. To stay this busy and focus on work/sports only, but with getting promoted at work, in a way, as well as going back to coaching volleyball, I just want(ed) to give all my focus to those things, at least until I would be comfortable enough to not have to think about any of it when I’m not at work or at practice. To be confident enough in my own abilities, that I wouldn’t have to worry about any unexpected situations, since I would already know how to handle them. Some people kept asking me how can I keep on going like that, basically just getting home for an hour or 2 during the day, come back late in the evenings and do it all over again week in, week out. I always say that that is pretty much how I grew up, playing volleyball from a young age with 4 or 5 days out of the week spent in sports halls, so I’ve been used to it. And at this point in life, with other things going on, I needed a distraction to keep my mind occupied. Another hobby of mine, sim racing, just wasn’t doing that for me anymore, it just wasn’t as enjoyable as when I first started.
Since I’ve already mentioned sim racing – with my “promotion”, my work schedule let’s say normalised to an extent. Working Monday to Friday, between 7 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon, would give me plenty of time to come home, get some rest and jump in my rig to do some racing, or so I thought. The first few months, when I was learning the ropes of the new position, after those 8 hours at work, I couldn’t even look at my PC at home, let alone sit in front of yet another computer screen for a few hours. Of course I did some sim racing still, occasionally, but nothing like I used to in the past. Towards the last part of 2024, a friend asked me if I would be interested in joining and helping him coach a girls’ volleyball team, and I decided to do it. At first it was meant more of a once or twice a week kind of help, but with my mental state at the time, this was exactly the distraction I needed to stay out of my head and not stress myself out about other things in life, that were basically outside of my control. Which meant that there was even less time for sim racing, back then, but even more so now, since there have been weeks when I literally spent all 7 days at practices or games or just something to do with sports, many times even multiple things in a single day.
With all of that going on, of course it’s difficult to find the time to do anything else, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to how we set our priorities and what we believe is the most important part of our lives. Of course I could have said no to that friend, and wouldn’t be coaching the team with him these days, but who knows where I would have ended up in that case. Focusing on what the team needed, over this last year, give or take, was what kept me going and took away most of the thoughts that caused nothing but stress and anxiety.
To come back around to what this post was intended to portray – with so much other things happening in life, no matter how good of a plan you have, it will never happen exactly the way you want it to. I have been thinking about how to continue and where to take this page moving forward, as I don’t feel like I have that many interesting things to write about from my everyday life, as you can see from everything said above, and I’m not really traveling around that much, it’s why there haven’t really been many posts coming from me. Like my last post, before this one, was well over a year ago now, about my trip to Germany. But on the other hand as well, I absolutely love writing, or typing things out in this case, even if it is just for my own enjoyment, so I will absolutely try to get the page back up and running, with more posts discussing other topics as well, and not just travel related.
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