Surely it'll be fine...
"Well, this is less than ideal," I thought, looking up from my phone and attempting to count how many cars were left in the parking lot.
Which was kind of hard since the fog was pea-soup thick, and I could barely see a foot in front of me.
And Uber wasn’t responding.
And buses were done for the day.
Oh, and also, I was in a Chinese-speaking country, and I don’t speak Chinese.
This was last night, by the way. We’re not traveling too far back in history with today’s musing.
I had Ubered out of downtown Taipei to explore a nearby national park (Yangmingshan) and had the most glorious time laughing my way through my zero visibility hike. I was so thrilled to be out in nature, moving my body and delighting in my human experience that the fog made everything more fun, not less.
Except, I hadn’t counted on not being able to get a ride back to the city. And also, the sun had already set.
Fortunately, it’s not the first time ya girl has found herself in a situation like this. I am a lot of things, but a planner is not one of them. One time my friend Kate and I hiked over a mudslide to explore a national park in Ecuador, planning to stay anywhere from a night to a week… and we brought one loaf of bread, two avocados, and a lime with us.
And everything worked out. We found a classroom to sleep in (Ecuador has an amazing ecotourism masters program that requires students to live in one of their many national parks for two months), ate our avocados and lived our lives.
It may have been the single night of our eight weeks in Ecuador that I didn’t get blackout drunk, so basically the whole thing was a win (when we walked ourselves over the mudslide, knowing no park rangers were in the park and we were on our own, we shrugged and said, “This will be a good detox”).
And last night – the exact same.
There were no classrooms, avocados, or liver detoxes, but there was an overwhelming sense of everything being fine (thanks, Taiwan, for being such a safe country). If I needed to sleep in the park, then I’d sleep in the park.
But I didn’t need to. First, Sam would have flown to Taiwan, rented a car, and drove to the park before he would have let that happen.
Second, there was a group of four twenty-somethings who were in the same position I was in. So we laughed and took selfies and, eventually, they got ahold of a taxi that made its way up the mountain to retrieve us.
When I was in my first rehab (isn’t it so fun to write clauses like that?), the yoga teacher, Suzanne, taught us how to navigate experiences like this.
“You all know someone like this,” she insisted, midway through teaching us about the power of perspective. “Someone who believes, deep in their bones, that everything will work out… then it always does.”
She then gave examples of friends who had hitched rides from here or been saved by a Good Samaritan there and it landed.
So I decided to become one of those people.
Then, when Shrek got annoyed by things always working out for me, he decided to become one of those people too.
And I gotta say – it’s a major upgrade over the way both of us used to human before adopting this mindset. If it’s interesting to you, Martin Seligman’s work on learned optimism is my favorite starting point.
Also, if you want your mind to explode, I have a friend whose goal in life is to be so spiritually fit that he could smile at his murderer while being murdered because he believes that EVERYTHING – even the things he can’t understand in the slightest – is always working out in his favor.
Also in reincarnation.
But I’m not there yet and don’t know if I want to be. I’d like the Universe to keep its glorious bubble of protection around me, please and thank you.
Xo,
Your friend whose husband loves to say, “It’s when things don’t work out that we get the best stories”
Morning Musings is a delight-first writing practice where I wake up, put my fingers on the keyboard and “learn in public” (credit: Liz Gilbert). The delightful humans who read these musings tend to see them as an invitation to slow down, have a virtual cup of coffee together, and contemplate the human experience.
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