□ Placeholder: 21 — Spain and Rules

Hello—

From a train to Madrid. It’s been an hour and another couple of hours till I reach the destination. I don’t hate trains as much as I hate airplanes. I find the environment of the train conducive to creative work. The leg room, the views. Nothing exciting is happening. I took this train from Seville—I could have flown in 40 mins to Madrid—but I wanted to be on a train. The speed is fast enough that you can see bask in the glory of distant landscapes and still get a feeling that you’re moving swiftly. The sense of progress with a feeling of quietness.

Long afar, I see modest green mountains. And nearby orange orchards. Oh so many oranges and its trees. The legend has it that Muslims, the ancient rulers of the majority of the Iberian peninsula, brought these oranges from China purely for ornamental purposes. I am glad to report that these are serving their intended purposes beautifully. The season is just right to see all the streets lined up with the green lush leaves and bright oranges scattered among them.

I am almost near the end of my two-week trip in Spain — spent a few days in Barcelona, then Valencia, Sevilla, and now for a couple of days in Madrid. And as I near the end, I think it’s time to reflect on it.

When I was preparing for this trip, I had a few rules in my mind. It’s very easy to fallback into the easy way of living life i.e., , especially when things are constantly changing. Rules help creatively and cognitively by reducing the rote decision making load and often prevent us from falling into unfulfilling way of life.

In the past few days, I’ve built up and torn down, bent and replaced the rules but generally they looked like:

A physical activity every day
- long walks
- running in the vicinity
- cycling etc.
No teleporting
- No podcasts, music
- No social media
- No news
Perform a creative act every day
- Writing something
- Designing something
- Editing photos
Make a small talk with at least one new person everyday
- This was the most daunting and yet most rewarding
- It could be a random person, a co-passenger, a receptionist

These rules could be distilled to:

Feel the place you are in as if you belong there and engage with the world around you.

I did bend these rules here and there and even broke them in some cases i.e, on couple of days I didn’t do any activity because I was feeling torn down of travelling between cities. But all in all I followed them on day by day with an almost religious fervency.

Engaging with new people provided the most “value” from the travel. It sounds cliched but people make places. One huge component of “value” was that those small talks made me feel less lonely. Sometimes they provided me ideas to do things that’s not easy to find on Google Maps.

Behind the mask, it is difficult to engender trust but in general people that I interacted with were easy going. It also helped that the places I visited, apart from the tourists, also had expats from different countries which made it easier to converse in English.

I loved these rules and would love to know if you have had any such setup or system of rules. The entire trip in retrospection feels like an esoteric practice where I started my days with a slight tinge of pressure hovering over my head and as I finished following those rules, they dissipated and gave me a sense of accomplishment and a joy of having done something.

In other words, I was playing a game to keep things “fun.” Do let me know what fun games do you play.

I realise this write up about travelling comes from a very privileged place and I slept on it for sometime as one of the rule I had was writing about my day every day and sharing it with you. The intention is simply to share what I had in my mind and what I saw—not with everyone—but just a bunch of you.

PS: Here’re some photos from a the very beautiful Alcazar Palace in Seville.