Bye bye Croatia on an abandoned military base

Croatia was so cool and beautiful! It’s the first country on my journey that felt really different than Germany and “western Europe”.

In contrast to Germany everything seems to be not so “over organized”. For example they have only approximately one thousandth of prohibition signs. E.g. there are beaches with rocks and there are no “danger, don’t climb the rocks” signs 😆🤯

I talked to some locals and although things are not so organized/ restricted what leads to a certain feeling of freedom, they have to deal with a lot of corruption and inequality. Often there is no straight way to accomplish things. You have to deal with things as they come. And if you want to get a business started, it seems to be very impractical or impossible to make this on a one hundred percent legal way.

Most of these shops are very smaller than in Germany and so e.g. there are very few big hardware stores and the ones that are big, are from the German Bauhaus company. You simply can’t get everything everywhere. And there is an invasion of German companys going on!

Of course are the streets very different as well. To go offroading it’s perfect. If you should wants to get really fast from A to B in the remote areas, it could get difficult, I think.

I talked a lot about what rules, prohibitions etc. do have impacts of your mind and thinking and once it’s more sorted in my brain, I will write about this.

Huge parts of Croatia are all into tourism and in Winter without or just a few people. First I thought this is the case because of the Covid situation, but locals told me that this is normal in Winter. E.g. one peninsula has around 1500 inhabitants in Winter and 20000 including tourists in Summer! Between November and April most things are closed. Even every second parking lot on the highways. For me at the start of my journey it’s perfect that there is a lot of space, silence and solitude 💫

This abandoned military base on the photos was my last stop with some lost places feeling and awesome sunsets in Croatia. There I meet a very nice and clever guy from Germany who helps people installing everything about electricity in their camping vehicles: https://tinoeggert.com

On a stone planet in Croatia and about “feeling driven”

Now I’m on this hill on a Croatian peninsula right next to the Mediterranean Sea looking at the sea, the mountains, the sky and the sun and feeling like on another planet.
The track to get here was really cool and offroady and leed to this wonderful place where I think barely anybody goes.
The sun is shining on the sky is bright. No human made sounds and it’s hard to see anything human made apart from my stuff, Rosinante and myself. Just the sun, the wind and some insects swirling around.

When I continued my journey this morning, I said to myself that at the next beautiful, remote spot I will stay a bit and live the emptiness of this place and pause. Until now the feeling of being less driven is the biggest change of my mind.

It’s difficult to explain what I mean by that. Of course many people know about the benefits to do only one thing at a time, to focus on this thing and being aware of it. And I’m a big fan of this too.
What I mean goes in the same direction but is more about how the perception of the things that I’m doing is changing while I’m doing them.
After some weeks that I spent with less and less obligations and now that my calendar has no entries apart from birthdates it feels like I have more energy to recognise more about myself.

For example I have been optimizing something about the diesel heater of Rosinante the other day. I really enjoy this kind of stuff. I love it. And this is important to get: I find it realy exciting and I enjoy doing it.
After some time I recognized that I was getting faster and kind of impatient. Some how this thing that I love did become more of a burdan then a thing that I enjoy doing. It felt like something else is waiting in some kind of waiting line in my head and tries to get my attention. But I don’t even know what’s on this weird penetrant waiting line and I’m pretty sure that I did not create it. When I started feeling this waiting line suddenly my mind seemed to come up with all sorts of things and put them all on it’s crazy waiting line.
At those moments I started to feel driven in the past and this could lead to a growing feeling of indisposition and stress. Now this happens only rarely. Most of the time when I’m recognizing the growing waiting line, I stop doing what I’m doing and enter something like a inner monologue.
Why I’m going faster? Why is the perception of what I’m doing changing? Why am I enjoying my current activity less and less? Does this has to happen?

In the past weeks I experienced many many of these moments disregarding what I was doing. And I still don’t know why this happens and to be honest: It’s not important to me that I’m understanding why this happens. I’m grateful that I seem to have learned being aware of myself, my mind and the rest of me over the last years and I’m grateful about this new life and what it will trigger in me.
And when I recognize that I enjoy the thing that I’m doing less and that I start to go faster and something inside of me makes up a waiting line I stop and pause. After a brief moment it feels different again: the enjoyment is back. And if it’s not, I do something different or pause longer.

In my believing all of this is applicable to many, many small things I’m doing and what is more, for the big things in my life, too.

For me this process of recognising and changing my mind is absolutely awesome and one of the best things I learned in my life.

One could say: for you having no appointments etc right now it’s easy to do it this way but if you have a thousand things to do: work, family, friends, household, illness, Covid, money… then it’s not easy. And I think that’s right. Then it’s not that easy. BUT it’s still possible, I’m sure.