My idea of learning is doing. I hear people about planning their next move for years and sometimes still planning after decades and not do it. I realise when I really want to do something else it is a punishment for me to continue doing the same thing, I want to jump to doing that thing immediately. When I quit my job to travel in 2015 the idea was to just travel and then figure out. So without much planning, without thinking too far in the future I just quit and started doing what I most wanted to do that moment, travelling.
And that’s what we did here at Slowness. We wanted to live in the mountains, farm, practice our hobbies, go through our days in a leisurely fashion; so we did. We moved to the mountains 20 days after we got married. We did meet some people from some resorts in Kumaon because people told us one needs to do some research before they start a new business and well, MBA. Everyone told us we were crazy and that “it doesn’t work like that”. Only four rooms in two acres, not being on any booking platform, building a dry stack stone house with help of masons from the village without hiring any contractor or an architect, entering luxury hospitality industry without deep pockets, using natural materials to do all the construction; foolish, dreamy and impractical were some of the words that were used. But I have been hearing these words for almost everything I did in my life and if nothing else I have always liked doing things people told me not to do.
So armed with determination and good intention we moved to mountains. First couple of years were the hardest and maybe even more for us because “we like doing things the harder way” as a guest, very aptly I might add, described us a few days back. We didn’t know how to make fire, we didn’t even know how to keep wood dry. Washing our clothes, keeping our space clean, managing everything was difficult and on top of that we wanted to keep pets immediately which was a lot of work. Although now we realise it was our dogs and cats that helped us stay motivated and feel loved in the most difficult times.
We worked day and night, managed finances, asked help from our family and friends, learnt ways of living in a remote village, shed our urban habits one by one and slowly, gradually, sometimes frustratingly moved towards opening our farm-stay for guests. And today when I am writing this it’s been 18 months since we started hosting. We are happy to share that we have received a lot of love in these times. Finally after many challenging years we are getting the result of “doing everything the harder way”.
