What 9 days in Alaska made me learn(re-learn) about life

For our recent family vacation, which is a tradition we established 5 years ago for our older son to take him to unique places for his birthday, this year for his 10th birthday we took him to the great state of Alaska. Now this isn’t about my vacation times. There are some good life lessons that I "re-learned", and was humbled by, through observing how people live there. Here are the top 9 that I want to share:

1. You can do more with less: we visited a pretty remote place near Arctic circle, and in a town of 12 people with pretty much no basic amenities you can think of, but the way they created a lifestyle for themselves with limited to no availability of basic things amidst very harsh conditions ( cold, dark, wilderness) shows that if you put your heart and mind to it, you can achieve more with less
2. Value of teamwork, everyone’s contribution matters and is required for the win: the way the tour was arranged was pretty immaculate and you can see how each team member along a 9 day tour was well connected with each other and were working like a flawless assembly line
3. Enjoy the moment - celebrate wins, even small ones: they have a very short summer season, with about 8 months of cold dark winters, and during their summer months ( 2-3 months) they have almost full daylight. I never saw or heard anyone complaining about cold winters, rather them enjoying every bit of summers
4. Face it with a smile and adapt- every bit of harsh conditions were well adapted to. Again no complaints were heard off, whereas many of us living in much better conditions complain many a times about being too hot, too cold, too rainy etc. What I saw in Alaska was never an iota of complaint, rather them fully adapting to it
5. Do what you love - one of the surprising things I heard was from people who live there, either they have been born and brought up here or moved here years ago- is how much they love being here, despite all the odds. This shows the power of “Do what you love”
6. Patience and delayed gratification: The effort they put in to establish a good life for themselves amidst harsh conditions with no immediate returns can be frustrating, but they keep their spirits high and keep chugging along. End result is a good outcome for them which shows the power of patience and delayed gratification. Keep putting in the effort and results will follow - sometimes it will not be apparent to you immediately
7. Don’t underestimate the power of small things: The cover pic here is in several places in Alaska and they do have quite a lot of mosquitos everywhere and they can wreak havoc. So while small in size, it is pretty powerful. While I found the picture hilarious but it shows us the power of small things which we should never underestimate
8. Mistakes happen, don’t have a lack of perspectives: We as humans tend to skew our overall experience based on one negative and miss the other whole set of positives. That is a lack of perspective. During my trip here which was all planned by a tour company, almost everything was immaculately planned and executed by them, except a small snafu. I had to remind myself to not let that one thing give me bad taste of otherwise great experience overall
9. Everybody is/can be a leader and change is necessary: During our dog sledding trip, they mentioned that they keep rotating lead dog positions and there is no alpha dog. So everyone is a leader. Also they keep changing their routes as otherwise they get bored and then they stop listening to the rules. Shows how change can be good and necessary

“You haven’t seen America, if you haven’t visited Alaska”

#lifelessonsineverydaymoments #alwayslearning?#travelchangesyourperspectives