My Idea of Paradise is…..

It was my Wife’s xxth birthday (she wouldn’t appreciate me sharing) this weekend just gone and its also our 8th wedding anniversary at the end of the month so I thought, just to surprise her it would be nice to do something special. We’ve a lot going on in our lives at the moment (I shall reveal all later..!) so I think she was expecting to have her birthday forgotten in the  tumult. It wasn’t a significant birthday nor is the 8th year a significant anniversary so I thought it was the perfect time for a surprise.

You see my theory is that if you’re expecting a surprise then its not a surprise. And even more down heartening is the expectation of a surprise that fails to deliver (the annoying stereotype of the husband that forgets the significant anniversary).

So with that in mind I started saving and planning in January. Yes January, because if I didn’t start then I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Now to cut a long story short my pockets are now empty, my wife has some nice shiny pieces of apple technology and we spent the weekend without our kids (thanks in-laws) in St Wolfgang in Austria (where we got married). I managed to pull off the surprise, made her cry and had an awesome time.

Now I know what you’re all thinking “whats that to do with the title?”

Ok so I’ll lay it all out for you. St Wolfgang is our idea of paradise. It’s the place we got married, we’ve been there four times and never tired of it, we love the people, the food, the atmosphere blah blah blah…..

However it’s not the place that’s perfect but rather the time. We work hard (well relatively hard) all year, our lives have difficult things in them, awkward decisions and unpleasant moments. Bills, rain, arguments and boredom all war with those small moments in time where you are blissfully happy. How can you gauge that you are happy. Because all those unpleasant things go away, they don’t matter anymore and that’s where the idea of paradise comes in. When they all go away you automatically link them to the place you are in but weirdly enough not the time that you spend which is why, to me at least paradise is not a location as such but more a moment in time. When we (my wife and I) realised that we decided that if we can replicate that moment then we would be able to have paradise anywhere we wanted. No need for long journeys and spending hundreds of pounds but just a little bit of imagination and you’re there, in that moment of Paradise.

I know that we had to spend money, and travel to get that moment so to some degree I am debunking my theory but we also acknowledged while we were there that we were reliving a period of time and as you get older and experience more time you do relive pieces of it in your head. One thing that has to be remembered though is that things change and therefore you need to modify your paradise accordingly otherwise that moment becomes stale.

Anyways that’s it for now. Have fun in your moment!