My world was something that had been carefully crafted before I left, a castle made of a daily routine and certain results. I was the designer of my mental comfort zone, and I used to seldom step out of it. My weekends were scheduled on spreadsheets, I ate in restaurants picked by a short, approved list, and my social interaction played by comfortable, rehearsed routines. I think I was comforted by orderliness, by telling what was going to happen. Spontaneity, that was to be the cause of a low grade anxiety, a diversion off a planned path. I would not say that life was unhappy just sanctimonious, encased in a sound-absorbent cushion, er, blanket of my own creation. But deep within my orderly life a faint, steady humming had commenced to run through my head. Not of some direct dissatisfaction, but of a great and restless curiousness. I began to question what was behind my self-constructed fences, and it was possible that the protective mechanism I had worked so hard to create was a prison too. It was triggered by a milestone birthday, a number which seemed to be too monumental to be celebrated with another edition of a typical dinner party. In a spur of the moment, in a weird combination of rebellion and fear I bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok. Aspirations I had in connection with Thailand were not the best in the world, I had a rather hazy idea that I would find in Thailand the opposite of whatever it is I live, chaos, randomness, foreignness. When I pressed the button of confirm purchase, my instant reaction was panic so great that I wanted to cancel everything. It was the most impulsive, careless thing I had done in ten years, and as I clicked my button it seemed more like a dreadful mistake at the time than like a feat of courage.
The next forty eight hours following landing vouched my follies. Bangkok heat was a living being, a wet blanket, which embraced me as soon as I left the airport. It was a cacophony of honking tuk-tuks and shouting street vendors and a language that I could not decipher and a burst of odors that made my head crumble: the bouquet of jasmine, the aroma of the steaming street cuisine, and the stench of the exhaust gases. My well-planned itinerary, a document which I had laboured over weeks earlier with colour-coded markings and time-stactions to run like clockwork was so pathetically out of date within an hour. A mistake in understanding led me to a costly taxi, when I had intentions of taking a certain effective airport cab. The boutique hotel which I had made reservations was described to be very serene yet it was next to a construction site that began work early in the morning. any attempt to exercise my will, my order, over the city, was repulsed by a sort of mingled laughter and insubordination. It was the second day when the breaking point was reached. I went to search a specific, highly-rated temple following my spreadsheet. I showed the address to a tuk-tuk driver who enthusiastically nodded then drove me on a confusing and long tour of three different gem shops and he insisted to me to go in. Hot and stroppy, but still, I finally got out, overpaid him and was stuck thoroughly and totally lost finding myself in a maze of residential alleyways. Judging everybody, alone, sweating under the hot sun, the worthless map in my hand, a feeling of failure washes upon my mind. Bangkok was not the only place I was lost to, because I was also lost to my own life, a dummy who had confused a spreadsheet with wisdom. Nothing at that moment appealed to me like my well-organized, beige, decent home.
Sitting in my noisy hotel room that evening I had a decision to make. I could reserve a flight back home and give up and hide in the fortress of my own, or I can give up. The former me, the engineer of regimentation had fallen miserably. It could not use its tactics here. So, looking at my gorgeous colour coded itinerary with a touch of desperation, I folded it up a couple of times and put it in the bin. It was ceremonial surrender. I was giving up control since my feeling of control was already broken in my mind. I went to bed without knowing in advance what the following day should be and such an idea would have been impossible one week ago. The following morning I just walked out the door. I made a left turn but where I would have made right turn. I was about to be led by the nose of smoke of fried porc that led me down a side street. This one un-thought-out move altered everything. This aroma directed me to a small morning busy market which was not given in all my guides. It was only intended to local people. I could observe monks picking up food as alms, children in school uniforms purchasing breakfast, and sellers selling produce I could not recognize. I was a bit shy to point to grilled pork skewers that all other people were feeding on. The lady on the stall smiled, gave me the food and I had the best meal of all my lives and all this was the cost of less than one dollar. It is not only breakfast, but a reward of letting go.
It was in the afternoon, when I sought shelter in what I supposed a shop of small proportions, in order to escape the heat of the noontide. it was the gateway leading to a small residential temple precinct which I have never noticed on a map. On a stone bench an old fellow was industriously fussing about a collection of potted plants. He caught sight of me, and rather than the suspicion with which I should have thought likely to greet me, he smiled, without any teeth, soothingly, and motioned me to be seated. At any rate we sat in silence on the bench a few times. Then he slipped me a weak tea in a small warty cup out of the thermos-bottle by his side. I accepted. We had no word to exchange, but in a silence mutual to us something had passed between us profound. This was the act of human charity without conditions, a moment of affiliation which was completely spontaneous, unplanned and acted. This was a type of sociality that was not part of my life back in home where things were so bound in verbal acrobatics and mutual context. This tea of silence with a stranger was more reassuring and authentic than all my organized social gatherings I used to organize. That was when I understood that my journey was not about the list of things because I needed such moments. The actual reality was not my countless equations, the unpredictable streets and the small acts of kindness between people strangers.
The changed point of view started to transform my way to travel as a whole and to myself, eventually. I began to believe in intuition, the capacity I had previously disregarded, in favour of the reasoning and study. It put my internal compass back in action, which used to be rusty. How to read the energy of a street, I learned to use my gut to decide on what alley to pass through and which one was to be avoided. I turned out to be a master of the so-called non-verbal communication and learned to read the desire of an individual in his look as well as in his pose. There was peculiar satisfaction in not knowing, a certain subdued excitement in uncertainty. An incident on the road that would have then thrown me into a vortex of anxiety turned out to be another line in the narrative. When one ferry to a distant island had been cancelled by storm, rather than freak out over my wasted hotel reservation, I found a little guesthouse by the jetty, sat with the family that owned it and ate with them, and heard about their lives on the sea. When I was younger, I would have considered this a nightmare because I was lost, I was off track and this would have changed. The new me found it to be a blessing, an extra chapter that I did not think I was going to write. I was training to be tolerant, to be malleable, and not to fear imperfection, factors which did not exist in my earlier painfully strict existence.
The individual who had stepped into the flight to head home was nearly unrecognisable as compared to the individual who had come. My outward part was the same but inwardly was my architecture all changed. The coming back was jolting. My home country which was a haven of order, predictable, felt somehow sterile. The worries which normally filled my mind including work deadlines, social pressure and the necessity that everything should be just perfect sounded absurd, the volume was way down. I discovered that I was no longer able to work on my old programming. I began to use the ideas of my journey in everyday life. I ceased to develop weekend spreadsheets. I began to visit new restaurants without reading even one review, just because I liked the appearance of this restaurant. In the name of a short connection, I even began talking to cashiers and baristas and enjoyed that little pleasure. I felt more prepared to announce that I did not know something, and more used to plans that got changed suddenly. The castle which I had thrown up round my own life was not broken down, but every gate and every casement was thrown open.
That transformation, it was why I thought, was not meant to make me fearless adventurer. It was a matter of learning how to make friends with fear and uncertainty and learn to walk with them instead of trying to lock them out with myself as their prisoner. Solo traveling never gave me any great answers to the question about what this life is all about, but it helped me unmask all these clatters, all of these external confirmations and self-prohibitions, so that I could hear myself. It has shown me that we have no control in life and those moments in life that we never expect are the most beautiful. The adventure did not finish until I have unpacked my bag. Even so, in a manner it was only the start. I had toured thousands of miles all over the world, into turbulent metropolises and peaceful islands, and ended up at a destination that I had not known where to find, myself.
Of course. I follow the teaching. Enjoy 2000 brand new words of the new continuation of the personal account of life transformation by traveling alone.
I have told that tale of that trip, that solo adventure, that crumbled the well laid walls I had built and made me learn to embrace the lovely mess of the world many times. It is the eschatological allegory, the story of how a planner became lost. But to stop there would be to confuse the earthquake with the slow, tectonic movement of the continents which follows. The first layer was merely the dramatic change. The more internal, lasting changes were more subtle, and grew out of the still months and years that followed, when the tan was burned off and the backpack was put away. Not only was there a change of thinking in my head, there was a change in how I occupied my own body, in how I saw the human relationship, in how I lived in relationship to the life that I was not supposed to desire.
I was physically careful in my past life. I was not an unathletic person, but I was shy and would always be counting the chances, afraid of a sprained ankle or scraped knee or show of impotence. Because I had learnt to travel in cities in that initial journey, however, purely through the actions of the brain using the body as a transport medium. The second step of my transformation was required to teach me to trust in my own body. This started after an impromptu idea in a small island in the Philippines and asked a group on their way to learn how to scuba dive. I was scared by the thought of this. There were complicated machinery, foreign pressures and total dependence on my own breathe in a foreign land. My first experience in submerging was tremendous. My mind yelled that everything was absurd. But my instructor was a man of a deep soothing nature, and all that he did was to give me a sign to take a breath. In, out. In, out. And somewhere beyond the surface this, in some way, changed. I was pushed out of my racing mind and into plain rhythmic reality of my lungs. In the course of the next few days as I got used to controlling my buoyancy and how to move around reefs underwater, I started gaining some sense of confidence a new confidence, what I assumed to be a physical grace I had never experienced before. I was not a brain suspended in a suit anymore; we were one fully-functional entity, in the vibrant world I had seen in documentaries only. It was not a comfort that at a first glance might be mistaken as softness, but one of strength, a certainty of the ability of my body to adapt and survive.
This new strength in relation to my body carried on to how I ate. Those were my first adventures with street food, and it was a bold move on my part, the former one. and that prudence melted, as I went on, into an unrestrained, childlike curiosity. In Ethiopia, I was taught that it is not only acceptable but also beneficial to eat with their communal plate, in Tokyo I was expected to slurp a bowl of noodles in a local ramen shop as a sign of appreciation, and in Vietnam I had to trust in that smiling vendor who presented me with a bundle made of leaves, which I could not recognize. Having lost the problematic view of food, I now saw it as the most straightforward and sincere way of cultural immersion. A stronger body that I had repeatedly guarded with care and anxiety began to grow. It learned to live with new spices, new bacteria, or new methods of being fed. It was not mere culinary tourism, a stripping away of an old, ingrained fear of what one does not understand and that took place not in the brain but in the bone marrow, in the bowels. I had solace in the assurance, that the world, in general, was not endeavouring to poison me, but to feed me.
My perception about human relationships also changed after the transformation. My home life was based on long lasting friendships; relationships which had a lengthy history over the years. I found my alternative and also good construct of association on the road: the ignited, temporary travel friendship. I remember about a girl who I visited in Bolivia in 20-hour bus trip. We did not know each other, and we were forced into the situation against our will, but after the third hour we said snacks and after the tenth hour we said life stories with a frankness that I would hardly allow myself at home. We jabbered about the heartbreaks, family dysfunctions, about our dreams and our fears. We had been the closest of confidantes, during twenty-four hours of common weakness an instant and strong union had been produced between us. Upon arrival at our place of destination we embraced, wished one another well, and parted walking opposite ways, yet well knowing that this was certainly the last time we ever should see or speak of one another. It is a light touch of the spirit, a meeting of the soul, but to me, in my former days, it would have figured vain indeed, it would have been pathetic. However I learnt the shorter it was the more powerful it was. It was a teaching about the art of moving on, to enjoy a relationship as it is in the present moment, and not as it will perpetually be.
Such practice of meeting and separating often helped me to make a right distinction between loneliness and solitude. Prior to my journeys, I thought they were the same, an unpleasant condition to be circumvented. I had felt lonely on the road, of course, a keener awareness of aloneness when one had to spend a birthday alone or when during a festival one felt that everyone was in a group. But I started also to know real solitude and found it a quite another thing. One night in New Zealand I slightly recall, when I sat on a deserted part of the coast. I went out to watch the sunset in an abandoned beach. With no one in sight that far, I sat on the cool sand watching the sky, turn to orange and purple. There was never a phone signal, there were no distractions. It was only myself, the regular crash of the surf and the immensity of the sky. At that time, there was not a feeling of deprivation, or, of being left out. Instead, I was overwhelmed with this feeling of completeness, of being self-sufficient and satisfied in the presence of myself. It was a very absorbent and silent tranquillity. I have discovered that one was not a lack of people but the occupancy of being. The most meaningful emotional breakthrough that I experienced all through my journey can be the timing of not only tolerating but loving that very presence.
The much more awkward but vital component to my change was the gradual humbling process in which I had to recognize my privilege. Brought up in a Western world, there were a series of assumptions and presumption that I had internalised without realising them about the world, about my position within it, and about the definition of what was considered to be normal. Backpacking in the developing countries was slowly breaking down these assumptions in systematic fashion. I recall one of my talks with a trekking guide in Nepal. He was my age but he had led another totally different life, an existence of duty, of necessity to sustain his family, of the constraints of where he was born. He had dreamt of travelling the world, but his passport, his salary, his life, that was a near impossible whimsy. The adventure that I had considered to be the courageous personal pursuit was to him a virtual luxury. I had known that freedom as my right and did not expect that mine was his dream in life. That discussion, and many such others were a mirror that obliged me to look at myself. I started realizing that I was able to travel alone only because of my personal courage, but also due to my passport, my currency, and my background that allowed me to enter the world in which I travelled. It was not a comfortable state of realization: it was highly nerve-racking, to which I would add that it represented a fundamentally important transition of a selfish tourist towards a more aware and understanding global citizen.
This also altered my attitude towards material things considerably. It was months at a time and the only thing that mattered to me was a 50 litre backpack. All objects were to be functional, needed and were not to be so heavy that I could not carry them on my back. I got to know that I did not require twelve pairs of shoes or any wardrobe of clothing. I learned how easy it could be to just have one decent jacket, one pair of really dependable boots, one book to read and then trade with some other traveler. By the time I finally went home, my apartment which I used to come home to was overwhelming, filled with the pile of unnecessary belongings. All of a sudden, it occurred to me, instead of my stuff being a comfort, it was actually a burden, anchor attached to me. The lightness that I experienced during travel is literally not metaphoric. The following year I started to get rid of my possessions; selling and donating a majority of them. I discovered that the less I possessed the less bound I was. The ease which I had now demanded was not through possession, but simplicity.
When I was much younger, the reverberations of the first trip still visited my life. Transformation was not a closed off process that came to an end as soon as I came back. It was the birth of a never-ending process. It made me restless forever, not restlessly worried, but restlessly creative, like a desire to always learn something new, always to see the world with new eyes. It caused one to find it hard to fall in old ways in to a regular career path. I left my job after 1 year of attempting to reintegrate myself in my former corporate world. I accepted a spectacular salary drop to become a member of a non-profit making organization that that dealt with cross-cultural communication which was now more purposeful than any book about marketing. The route was more unstable, more insecure but it was more in line with the identity I developed. The most profound change in my solo travel, however, does not lie in the fact that I trained myself not to mind uncertainty when ceaselessly riding by train, but the fact that I trained myself to embrace a fair amount of it back at home. The journey made me brave not only to visit the world, but to remodel my own and this is a journey that is not complete yet.
