the 'palace-looking' mind.

recently i just came back from my relatively long holiday in my hometown (at heart) Melbourne city. it was kind of therapeutic for me. i spent most of my days with meeting my close friends there, endless brunches, exploring new places, meeting new people and became friends with them...basically i was like re-living the life i used to have back there.
and most importantly, the biggest impact i got during my trip there is that i felt like i finally found myself again!
dealing with my own 'life battles' in these last 2 years (including family financial breakdown and my own denial about living back in Indo) had damaged me as a person. i lost myself and lived under dark clouds which i created myself everyday.
so this Melbourne trip was supposed to heal my soul, and it amazingly worked!

there was one day when my bf and i were walking around city, we were talking about how we used to spend our days-off doing that but we would feel moody at night because we had to come back to our boring jobs the next day. at that time, suddenly i felt relieved. i was like, "hey, isn't it nice that we get to do this but not having to worry about getting back to work tomorrow?" he definitely agreed.

when we were living in Melb, we both had dream to do something for ourselves, do something that we actually love doing and enjoy. living a flexible life and be able to turn our endless ideas into reality, because we only live once and for a person like me i cannot imagine what it's like to watch my ideas die untouched. there are so many things we want to do and we were never able to do any of them in Melbourne.
we enjoyed our life there because the city is so beautiful and inspiring, but with our inspired minds we were often too busy trying to make a living in our everyday life there, got stuck in a routine and suddenly forgot to set new dreams and goals in our lives there.
the dreams to travel, building a family, having our own house and business before we reach 30 (yeah, all of them) just seemed too good to be true. especially when we didn't come from wealthy families that can help us financially there.

on the other hand, here in Indo is completely the other way around. yes the country is a chaos, the city we're living in is a mess (nowhere near Melbourne), this city is lacking in so many things, but that is where we can actually fill in the holes and realize our ideas. things are more possible to happen here but i stupidly couldn't see them before! i was too busy looking at the bad sides instead of looking at them as gold opportunities.
many opportunities had opened up to us since we got back here, those that we wouldn't even thought of if we were still in Melbourne. we are now able to make real plans in our lives, they're all big but most importantly they're within reach and within our time target :)
and the best part, we get to work in our PJs everyday at home with the most flexible working hours in the world, lol. i'm talking about our small photography business (see here: www.firewoodandearth.com) that just started a year ago and is going to public next year (we have big plans for it too).

i felt even more blessed to have tasted the life in Melbourne in my teen-adult age, and honestly i appreciate and love that city even more now (probably because of the fact that i don't have to deal with working and boring daily routine there). not as the place i HAVE to live in anymore, but as a home that i can run to whenever i feel bored of my life in Indo. the feeling as a tourist at 'home' is ideal for me.
and in between, i can also travel to other places in this wide world. that would be an ultimate dream.

i failed to see the positives within the negatives in my life before, but when i see the bigger picture now i realized that my life that i'm living now in Indo isn't so bad, at all! it's even getting more exciting instead.
i gotta say that everything relies on the power of our mind...do not ever underestimate it! we can be happy wherever and whenever, we just need to fix the way we see things. natural happiness or synthetic happiness are both valid. (refer to this LINK , i opened that link when my friend shared it on FB, and i found so right after i experienced it myself).

everything depends on our decision whether to make our mind like a palace where we store only positive thoughts and great imaginations & dreams, or to make it like a jail where we trap ourselves into negativities that will make ourselves miserable.

P.S: the photos below were taken in front of the beautiful Old Melbourne Gaol (Melbourne oldest prison) :))