We have the typical, romanticised lie we like to repeat to ourselves about travel, especially the one that is done alone. We talk of going out into the world to find the self, as though the self is an unchanging sort of thing, like an artefact lying lost under some rock in another land. The long and winding road of my own life experience made me know something starkly different. It is not through going out that you find yourself. You go out to forget yourself–to be rid of the masks, the demands, the labels which your culture, your occupation, your relationships have laid upon you. You peel off all that you are not and in that stark, defenseless area that has been exposed, you finally get to meet the person you have always been. Unbecoming itself is not a one-time happenstance but a mixed tune of militant, uncomfortable lessons that cannot be brought in a classroom, but through dusty streets, in crowded train stations and silent, lonely dawns. It is a ten-point teaching of the life-changing facts which once discovered can never be erased.
The initial and the most fundamental of these lessons comes under the guise of failure. My false sense of being (competent) at home was part of the armour that I wore before I went off. I thought that I would be a competent adult on vacation in a different country. As I learned, real self-belief does not come by way of assured planning; it is drafted in the mainline of an awesome mess up. To me it was created in the train station in Naples, when I had just understood that my wallet had disappeared. The panic was not mental or a fainting fit; it was a physical cold grip on my chest where I could not breathe. All schemes, all safety-nets I had planned, were blown away. There, in the depth of my uselessness, realizing there is nothing, money-wise, that I can do, and without the language, too, another section of my brain woke up. It was an instinct, a problem-solving instinct, of a primitive nature of which I was scarcely conscious. It showed me step-by-step how to make a police report stuttering and mime and using a translation app, got me into a hostel when the owner, sensing my misery, put up with me overnight on the promise of paying later, and it even pushed me into making a humiliating, crackly-sounding call to home. That was the day when I understood that I was not going to crumble when everything failed. I would crouch, I would adjust and I would live. Self-reliance, I discovered can not be about how to avoid failure but to know in your very bones how you have the ability to survive it.
It was during the period of my post-failure solitude in that shabby hostel room that I also had to learn the second major lesson the art of being alone with no feeling of loneliness. Elsewhere at home it was a continuous buzzing of social life, and every moment of aloneness was only a transitional one between appointments. Being alone was not the thing to be sought. It accompanying me everywhere when I was on the road. It was not simple at first, an empty feeling that I attempted to fill with my podcasts, books, and one-distance scrolling. However, gradually, with weeks of silent dinners and hours of deep solitary walks, my attitude to it changed. One day I recall an afternoon in a little Portuguese town. I very often sat on a bench overlooking the sea during several hours and did nothing but watch the waves. It was nobody to speak to, nothing to distract. No matter how I wanted to think of silence, I used to think, as I had never thought before, of silence as being full (full of what, I did not know). It was filled full of my own thoughts, full of the pieces of the ocean and peaceful feeling of my own existence in the world. I understood that loneliness is an agonizing state when one is deprived of relationships, whereas solitude is the health-giving state of alone-ness. Learning how to enjoy spending time alone and how to reach a state of peace and happiness with myself was an acquired skill and a superpower because it became a personal, put-in-a-pocket version of the safe place I could visit anytime, anywhere.
The ability to enjoy being alone with oneself was exclusively possible due to the fact that I had developed the third, and, perhaps, the most liberating lesson of them all, the illusion of control is the first illusion that a traveler has to drop. I was leaving with a strict schedule, a paper that only brought me the illusion of putting control over the future. Seven times plans are voiced, And yet the world for all its infinite wisdom laughs at such plans. A train that was cancelled, a holiday, a flash flood, that is what I first perceived as an annoying inconvenience. However, ever since my wallet episode, and when finding way too often that the most enchanted moments were the unexpected ones, I began to surrender. When I started treating my itinerary as being a chimleaf rather than a rulebook, I felt better. This change of manipulation to letting go was freeing. It enabled me to respond to a last minute undirected invitation by another tourist to visit a town I had never heard of. It also enabled me spend a whole day in one museum as opposed to me hurrying to visit five museums. It has shown me that the great things about any occupation, and life in general, are not those places that we plan with a map, but those side moves that we decide on as we go.
And it is in one of these off-track trips, in the middle of the countryside in Vietnam, when the 4th lesson crusher hit me like a moose, and truthfully, like never before: kindness is the real universal language. My motorbike had a punctured tire and I was miles away with no one speaking even a little bit of English as I was attempting to find a certain waterfall. When I stood by the side of the dusty road, a sense of despair growing over me, out have come a family out of a near-by farmhouse. They observed my dilemma and without uttering a word, they knew what I was going through. My father proficiently fixed my tire, the mother offered me a glass of cool water and the children were staring at me with eyes big with curiosity. When I made attempt to give money to them, they shook their heads with a smiling fixed tremendous denial. This was not an accidental case. Such stories were just a few among the many who offered me their mint tea at a shop in Morocco or went out of her way to walk me ten blocks to where I needed to go in Japan or a man who waited to open his cab door so that I could put down my bag and climb in, in Peru. These little, unadorned works of grace showed me that behind the hyperbolic headlines of segregation and war there exists a very restrained form of caring that is the natural disposition of the vast majority of the human population.
This increased trust in the world was reflected by an increased trust in myself which resulted in the fifth lesson: you will never truly know a map until you have lost so deeply. Previously, I knew that the wisdom is in preparing before you travel by using a guidebook and learning maps. I was theoretically familiar with places which I was visiting. But that is very tentative knowledge. The actual long term wisdom is the one which is gained out of experience. It is not only a geographical condition to get lost; it is a mental condition. It is the experience of seeing your abstract knowledge collapse on you and having to develop a new, inner map using landmarks, the location of the sun, the sense of a neighbourhood. It is the operation of building an intuition and internal compass. When I was lost and then found myself many times, I started getting through the world a simple way. I was less attached to my phone and more attached to my eyes, memory and instinct. This lesson goes long way beyond travel. It is the realization that no matter how many books you read on a subject your real understanding will come only after you immerse yourself in it, only when you screw up and just get lost in it all until you can finally find your way out.
The more the internal world expanded, the more the external world shrank, and this resulted immediately into the sixth lesson: your connection with material goods will be totally severed. I had spent months in a single backpack being confined there in my entire existence. Each item that I carried had to be useful, that it was worth its weight. I had the humble joy of living with only three t-shirts, a single piece of good shoes and one book. This spartan life was no toughness; this was liberty. I have learned that the pile of stuff at home did not bring comforts to me but stress. They consisted of items that had to be washed, cared, insured, and guarded. It acted as an anchor. Travelling with a backpack made me understand such a clear distinction between the things that I desired and the things that I needed. By the time that I came home, I viewed my messy apartment differently. I no longer looked at a set of desired items; I looked at a lot of baggage. It was lightness and freedom found on the road that led directly to the process of simplifying my life, of divesting myself of the non-essential.
It created room to plant a more working and crucial lesson, the seventh one on my list which is: empathy is a muscle and it is something enhanced by discomfort. It is simple to be found within a cultural bubble of your type, to think that the way you live is the expected way, the normal one. This notion is abolished when one is solo travelling. It pushes you into predicaments that are almost too much, where the norms and traditions you follow are not shared by everybody. I got to know this through the act of common sharing in family life with the material wealth of the families being a quarter of what I had, but a wealth in community which I could only hope to have. I heard it as I attempted to put myself into the position of other people to interpret political emergencies along with the historical resentments in my own words and phrases. This feeling, this discomfort of being the one that is slightly outside, is an effective instrument of creating empathy. It makes you listen more than you talk, look without evaluating and understand that there are a thousand ways of being that are right. It bites at your own certainties, and lets them taste of something simpler and gentler than certainty, the curiosity of a truly human spirit.
The eighth lesson is one taught by this new found curiosity, that between looking at the world and seeing something of its intrinsic scheme. When you travel together, you are likely to pay less attention to yourself rather to the people you are traveling with. When alone, you are shifted to internal postures and then, not having any other association, you are coming out with another focus and in another stronger form. You become a detail watcher. You see how it always looks when the light falls on a building in the late afternoon, how there were all these complicated designs in a tiled floor, how that particular mother took her child by the hand in a busy market. You start noticing the minor human drama that surrounds you everywhere-the lovers quarrelling on a table on a cafe, the exuberance of child with a new game mastered, the exhausted stance of a man on his way back home after work. You stop becoming a tourist who gazes at sights to become a traveler who sees the life that beats between them. This is a sort of mindfulness, intense presence that is difficult to develop in the midst of the sound of everyday life and also it is a skill that will enhance all facets of your life once you get back.
With this increased awareness, I also came to know of the ninth lesson: your body is much powerful than you attribute it to your mind. Before I travelled, I was very inactive in life and had a limiting belief concerning my physical abilities. However, the road takes things away. It required of me to walk eight hours to witness a distant sunrise, to struggle with my own weight by climbing to the sixth floor of a hotel with my suitcase in my hand, to walk through crowded and full of chaotic traffic in cities, through miles and miles on my feet. As I encountered every hardship I was impressed by my own strength. I recall it was a strenuous hike up a volcano in Indonesia after which my legs were sore and I was out of breath, but the feeling of euphoric achievement was absolutely new to me. A hundred times on the way up my mind had said that it was impossible, but my body had merely muscled on. This and other similar experiences taught me not to think in the box, believing what my mind is telling me, not to sicken myself with the devastating stories I hear in my head, but to learn to trust the inner whisper, which is the power and the strength of your body.
All these 9 lessons such as self-reliance, solitude, resignation, kindness, wisdom, simplifying, empathy, awareness, and resilience, eventually all culminate into the tenth and the final truth, the one that changes the entire world of yours. You discover that home is no longer a definite location or a point in map. It is an idea that blows up. Home is the sense of calm you got in that beach in Portugal. It turns out to be the flavor of the noodle soup you consumed when you stayed in Hanoi one week long. It turns out into a memory of the good nature of the stranger in Nepal. You hold these locations and individuals inside road closet. You get your comforts and security which you previously found shelter in a physical building, this time you find them inside yourself. You have shown that you can make a home out of anywhere, some small rituals and open heart. This is the freedom at its utmost. The world now does not seem like a big and scary place anymore but like a gathering of possible homes. The journey, as you discover, has unlocked to you a key not even to the door of one but to the door of all, including, even above all, the door to your self re-centred, reformed, and radically transformed.
These initial ten lessons were the groundwork and foundation of my change; they were those painful, earned facts, with the help of which I could maneuver in this world and myself. However, to end at the place would be an account of a substructural curriculum of the journey. The next thing was the post-graduate course, a bunch of more profound, more subtle insights that did not come as a revelation, but as an ever-so-slow-upping-and-downing rite. They were not lessons on what the world is, but how one could opt to be in it. It was the aptitudes I had developed in the anticipation shades of the greater happenings, the conceptual changes that re-engineered my whole life operating system. This was where I got to know how to not only live in the uncertainty, but to dance with it.
The acquisition of this deep seated and profound patience was the first of these higher arts, one which was in danger of being almost lost to the world of the instant gratification I had left behind. Time has another direction on the road, especially in the under-developed regions. I discovered this in a more up-close fashion after leaving one remote Indonesian island by waiting on a ferry. The Ferry was going to leave 10 AM. By lunch time it was gone. The few citizens who were waiting, with me, did not lose heart at all, they just found a corner to sit and chat. My in-dwelling, Western clock was masquerating in rage. I had plans, time table. but it was no use. The sun blazed, the hours dragged, and my excitement at length, inevitably, subsided to that convulsive acquiescence which sends you to bed when you have not enough to eat. I was helpless, all I could do was to be there. I used to see children playing some toy with stones, I used to see the complicated structure of the web of a spider, I heard the rhythm of the dialect round. It is by dusk that the ferry at last came, ten hours overdue. This would have been a spoiled day, a disaster of inefficiency, in my old life. Yet in that forced, lengthy silence I had lived a day of uncompromised presence. I was taught to be patient. This lesson in being patient was like the gift that continues to give because it taught me that in traffic jams it is possible to find peace, taught me to worry less about deadlines and to learn that the best things in life often occur at the time and moment when we have to wait to get them.
Patience both was linked with the acquisition of a less moribund, a more critical skill: the high art of intuitive trust. The first was the lesson that a stranger may be generally good, and the second one was the experience of understanding that people should be trustworthy and when. It was the sharpened intuition, a gut feeling, which is not slower than the conscious thought. The lesson was to be attentive to the background discordance of a friendly statement is followed by an unfriendly glance; an offer appears to be too good to be believed. I recall that I was walking through a busy market in Marrakesh and one guy with a nice smile asked me to take me to a special tannery, just for the day. He was all plausible, but a little nagging alarming bell racketed in the back of my head. That was not logical, but powerful. I explained nicely and left, and subsequently received reports that the other passengers witnessed of the same scam that he was probably making. On the other hand I came to understand what it means to be warm in a sincere way, the natural thoughtfulness that is not demanding anything back. I learned how to get into the hands of an old woman in the Andes who gave me a bite of her bread on a cold bus just out of a generosity malice. The experience of the journey helped me to realize that one should not trust everybody, but not trust anybody is a prison. Then it is not really a matter of skill, necessary to know how to listen to that little, primitive intelligence which is in you, a faculty which, once you know how to attend to it, will prove your wisest and safest guide.
New mode of existence in the world resulted in a total redefinition of what it is to have a productive day as well. My face time the other life defined by product was a product. This attitude followed me during the initial months of my journeys as I attempted to do or see a certain amount of things on a daily basis. However, when I slowed down, I found another and very soulful type of productivity. I remember a trip in a small marine town in Croatia. I managed to do nothing according to my list. I have passed the morning watching fishermen repairing their nets, their hands guided by an economy of movement, that had no sound. In the afternoon I sat at a little cafe in the street, not reading or writing, but overhearing the talk of people, trying to puzzle out the life of the town out of what people said of it in the street. My day was completed by me taking a walk all along the sea-wall, whilst the tints of the sky were changing. In my former dragging terms it was a wash out. Nothing had I made. I had done nothing. But I came to bed more satisfied, more fed, than I had come to bed after many an apparently successful week at my former place of employment. I came to the understanding that productivity is also about a profound observation, solitary contemplation, and a simple yet revolutionary activity of paying full attention. This lesson has changed the foundations of my ambitions in life as I am no longer striving to achieve as many accomplishments as possible but to enjoy rich and enriched moments in my life.
I was able to use this new definition of a good day due to the fact that I had rewired my whole relationship with time itself. In the civilized world, time is a strict and directional commodity that needs to be kept, saved and used. The long road is an opportunity to lose some time, making it fluid, elastic, and that helping one to discover inexplicitness. I even faced single days that were crammed with new sights, sounds, experience so much so that they felt like they had the emotional content of a month. I would be able to think of an event that occurred yesterday, and at times I would think it was years ago and was part of a different self. As on the other hand there were the lazy weeks on a cargo boat, or in some sleepy village, when the hours melted into one, continuous meditative present. The transience and continuous motion of solo travel, the necessity to find bed and evening meal, makes you forget about the imaginings about your future and flashbacks of your past. Your mind, unconsciously must be dwelling on the present. It is an effective, but non-intentional kind of mindfulness practice. You are taught that the future is an illusion and past is a novel – and the present is the only real place. That skill is developed by creating a bond with that moment learned through necessity and is one of the most amazing peace finding tools possible.
Moving through the world, accumulating these moments and lessons, I came to do something new, to do something which became the focus of my change: I began to tell the story of my life in my own voice. Something that I had seldom done at home was to keep a journal, and this became a crucial habit every day. Writing was not solely meant to record events, it was making sense out of the same. It was the mess of the day that through the story telling process got to make a story. I then had to make a decision on what mattered. Was it the beautiful temple I looked into during the day or the annoying argument I took part in with a taxi-driver? I was taught that I could make up my mind. Such a practice in framing my experience led to appreciating my life as a story, in which I am the hero/the main character. It allowed me to change my mindset so that challenges become strengths I need to overcome to complete the plot and become a better person. It was not a tragedy that wallet was stolen since it was an inciting incident of a chapter on self-reliance. It was not a mistake that got them lost, it is the narrative device that was used to reach the unexpected discovery. This self-narrating skill is, probably, the most valuable one that I carried home. It enables me to consume life painful unavoidabilities, as not assaults on my welfare, but as pages of a lengthy and intriguing tale, both of which I am writing and reading.
Each of these more internalized changes in patience and trust and purpose and time and telling stories brought them to a final structures-of-editing-like insight about the nature of existence, itself: the unbelievable solace of transience. All things in life of a solo traveler are temporary. The view which has amsteading you is not lasting. The tasty food is not permanent. Your bed is temporarate. The individual you encounter are transient. This Grove of change in the beginning is disturbing, and it gives an impression of mutability. However, after some time, it eventually turns out to be a source of solace. When you realize that something is temporary, you work to enjoy it with an intense passion. It is understood that the conversation will end so you appreciate it even more. You also stare at the sunset more keenly since you are aware that it is disappearing in your very eyes. This is a following impermanence and as well reduces the pain of the tough moments. That unpleasant ride in the bus will stop. The feeling of being lonely will go away. The ugly weather will halt. Living in a world where everything is constantly changing makes you so much at home with the universal truth that nothing will ever remain the same forever. It is not a nihilistic or sad news. It is his/her greatest truth, it liberates you of fear and the fear of loss, desperation of maintaining something permanent, but it leaves you free to be yourself, to enjoy life, the beauty of the running, smooth, and ever-moving river of life.
