Go 4th And Multiply
Four 8ths of March ago (and what feels like half my life ago), I expressed excitement to the digital ethers from a JFK runway, eager to fly into a novel chapter, packed with gratitude for all who helped get me there. Eighteen hours later I took my first jetlagged steps on African soil. Standing at the stop for the Cape Town bus, fierce fears raced to replace the early enthusiasm I suddenly misplaced:
"What did I get myself into?!"
Then, channeling 'Job' from "Arrested Development":
"I've made a huge mistake."
For a few moments on the ride into town, I entertained the idea to turn back and restore my life to its default, factory settings. Reason, or my higher knowing, swiftly substituted that foolish notion with the faith to follow my decision made four months back atop a Malibu mountain. It was time to take this new operating system of solo travel for a spin on the road I now allowed to open at my feet.
I had scheduled a few stops to jumpstart my journey: a wedding in South Africa to celebrate a new beginning for friends — and my solo trip — followed by a casual climb to Africa's tallest peak. After, a return to beloved Paris, reconnecting with that cherished city and a lover last seen five years prior.
From there, the only outline remaining was a vague sketch of spring and summer spent rambling across Europe. Of the two basic approaches to travel I researched, moving without predetermined and prebooked destinations aligned with my mindset during pre-trip planning.
'Vagabonding' -- the name of the book I traveled with & often referred to and the travel style described therein -- gave freedom for the magical mysteries of touring foreign lands to reveal themselves. Plotting too many points ahead would likely staunch the flow of synchronicity, squandering the opportunity of surprise, necessarily making the unknown known.
Those first glorious months moved my path in directions I never might've imagined, the experiences necessary to live for me to believe. Hundreds of journaled pages now pair with pictures in the tens of thousands to join countless memories, stitching a fantastical story together.
With these tools at hand my awe builds at the mass of moments materialized and the curious connections between each. My desire likewise grows to share these stories and that magic with whomever decides to spend some time with them.
I've learned a litany of lessons, practical and esoteric, moving my body over tens of thousands of miles across the waters, on the land and through the air of this fascinating planet we all call 'home.' I wish to tell some of those with you to inspire and aid many other future voyages.
Primary among them: the rigors of travel -- whether across multiple timezone flights or over ridiculous, rocky Asian bus rides -- jostle your brain into modes of thinking well outside the bounds of your baseline mindset.
Sometimes, the physical wear on the body can lead to irrational, fear-based thought, out of sync with reality and your best interests; those early worries in my first moments abroad are testament to necessarily questioning the mind's machinations.
Many more times, the movement into new physical territory brings you to moments of brilliance within.
There was this thought my mind revisited countlessly long before my travels, then more times thereafter: the world was in shambles and needed to be fixed. Who better than me to take on such an endeavor?!
A sharp slap to my senses and sensibility arrived on a strenuous Himalayan hike, waking me with the light of a truth I was previously blind to: If I change my worldview, I change the world.
How else do I experience the world than through my mind? Change my mind, change my reality, my world, The World.
Building on the foundation of this realization, another knowing arrived six months later in Rishikesh, India, set at the feet of the same holy peaks I recently ascended. On the final day of a two-month healing retreat, I sat with a group of similar souls on the banks of the river Ganges; as well as I could tell, we were all seeking, among other things, The Truth.
On that last afternoon together, my mind began melting like the rigid ice of the glaciers above. The heat came from simultaneously confronting yet failing to reconcile a simple fact: no matter how many questions my mind answered, it would always, without fail, find more questions to resolve.
As my mind spun out of control, I broke down crying next to this holiest of Indian rivers, affectionately called 'Mama Ganga.' Like a mother eases her child's worries, so did Mama float some of my fears of not-knowing downstream, wiping away another obsolete OS for my mind, making room for a new method to navigate the world, one more at ease in the unknown.
Still, if the mind sought to lead me down a stream of unending, unanswerable questions, how might I find The Truth I sought? The Way, it seems, was with me since the beginning.
In deciding to leave my old life and home behind, I followed an internal guidance that has always spoken to me, sometimes quietly, other times rapping heavily on the door of my consciousness.
In setting a course primarily determined by its undetermined nature, I lept knowingly into that which could not be known.
There are many names for this internal GPS: Intuition, inner voice, self-knowledge, higher self, flow. For me, I like to consider it my heart's truth. Through the finish of my fourth meandering year, I increased my commitment to learning how to hear the voice and follow the guidance of my heart.
The heart is the fourth of the chakras, the energetic centers recognized in eastern esoterics, and it is the waystation between the lower three and higher three chakras. It is the synthesis of the "higher" and "lower" aspects of our self. The heart correlates to the "air" element, like the wind blowing the sails of one's ship, and perhaps the compass setting one's course.
Through the ongoing experiment of following my heart's direction, the results it yields are my ever-growing gratitude for the experiences it leads me into, all the heart-warming and heart-opening and even heart-breaking ones, too.
The rewards of each are hard to fathom in their scope but easy to appreciate in their benefit; it is the simple and distinct difference in how I think and feel now compared with when I began my journey.
As I surrender to the subtlety of the heart, I come into closer contact with my true nature, with who I Am.
Traveling to find oneself: a cliché for sure, but one I now find less pejoratively, welcoming it more, along with everything else I seek to accept in this wonderful, weird world I inhabit.
The fifth chakra is the throat, the source of one's voice. When this operates optimally, one's creative expression flows freely and fully.
I'm starting my fifth year sailing the unknown seas, excited to share more of the world I have seen, and whatever I continue to see.