Balancing Between Adventure and Comfort

by Jasmine Irving

Jasmine updates us on her spontaneous trip to La Réunion, where she has started to plant roots but is sure to keep exploring.

It can be an interesting balancing act: pushing the comfort zone and riding the highs that come with adventure, whilst finding a way to retreat back to comfort in order to build up enough energy to jump in again. Sometimes there’s a reluctance to stop in one place and sometimes it’s all we yearn for. This has been a big theme of my travels so far, knowing when to say yes, when to say no and when to just sit without making a decision and seeing what falls into place the most naturally.

I never did say what I’ve actually been doing here, how I’ve been living. After arriving I met a lovely family who wanted a live-in English speaker to help out with the kids, aged 4 and 7, and teach English. So it’s a similar thing to what I was doing in mainland France, with regards to offering something other than rent money in exchange for food and board. Next I lived with another family, this time with 4 teenagers, and helped them with their English language skills.

It’s so interesting living with people who may have the opposite political beliefs, completely different interests and who you might never have had the opportunity to meet in any other circumstance. Then there you are sharing meals and living under the same roof, getting along like old friends despite all your differences.

To kick start 2015 I knew I needed to ground myself by living and working with nature. I went WOOFing (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) at a beautiful organic farm in the south of La Réunion. With WOOFing, volunteers exchange their time to work for food and board. I slept in a cabin in the woods with hedgehogs burrowing about in the bushes, all different coloured birds singing in the morning and endless rows of palm trees offering shade from the sun.

For me, one of the best ways to get to know a new place is to work with the land, live with the locals and share meals together. This is why I absolutely love WOOFing, it has got to be one of the best ways to travel. With WOOFing, the idea is often to work and live as part of a community and the ethos of the group tends to be about making sure everyone is happy and has what they need, always keeping communication open.

There is a lot to learn and each farm has its own unique way of doing things, depending on the environment, climate and soil. At the farm in La Réunion we planted palm trees to harvest the core of the trunk, which can be eaten in salads. Before staying with the farm I had only eaten “coeur de palmiste” from cans which were nothing in comparison to the real thing, fresh from the ground.

When potting up the very beginnings of the palm trees, I felt grateful to be a part of the start of the trees cycle. I was filled with awe that something so small could grow into something so big and strong.

We also did lots of weeding, which helped me to get to know all kinds of different plants, to be able to identify which ones we could use as herbs/medicine/in salads and which were seen as pests. We planted courgette, ginger, root vegetables, pineapples. I also got to harvest passion fruit, pineapples and guava fruit to make jams which will be sold at the local market.

Now I am back with my first au pair family and am hopefully starting work soon in a local primary school. I’m starting to create my own life here and stay put for a little bit, and I’m still determined to keep exploring when I can.

Before coming here I had this itching feeling where I knew I was ready for a big jump, to leap into a new adventure headfirst. It felt like I wasn’t even consciously booking my tickets and doing all the organising, some deeper part of my self was leading it all and the rest of me was bracing herself to come along for the ride.

And that’s where the balancing comes in. The balance between our intuition and thirst for adventure, with the parts of ourselves that sometimes just need to rest in order to keep up. So, after weeks of darting around the place trying out new things and pushing my comfort zone, today I am having a cup of tea and putting my feet up. I’ll thank my self tomorrow when making the trip to see the volcano which has been erupting on the island.

The balance between adventure and comfort can be such an important one to find and it’s a very valuable experience testing the scales to see what works best for you.