Relax, buddy...

A couple weeks ago I ranted about some of the headaches of traveling in India. Those events and my reaction were true but...India's a big place. Time and cumulative experiences, especially good ones, can modulate the lows so your overall impression is a lot more positive. I am back here for a third time, after all, so India must have plenty going for it, its innumerable pains in the ass notwithstanding. I also needed a reality check about how soft we got in Southeast Asia. Traveling's comparatively quite easy there and returning to India, I suppose, will always hold the potential to be a shocker.

As of today, I think we've been here for a month..and en total, it's been pretty amazing. In that time we've seen two Unesco World Heritage listed monuments...

joined in an all-night, full-moon, fire-filled pilgrammage around a holy mountain with a couple hundred thousand barefoot devotees of the god Shiva...

seen two, rural, all-night performances of traditional Hindu dance and music ceremonies...

toured spice and tea plantations...

spent a week exploring one of the largest intentional communities (i.e. communes) on Earth...

been "blessed" by an elephant....

looked out on the Bay of Bengal one day and on the Arabian Sea ten days later...

I'm sure there's more.

The big lesson at this point has been, "Don't fight it, man." That should have been obvious and it's a prime metaphor for life in general. If you don't try to roll with what life (in this case, life in India) gives you, you're going to expend a lot of energy trying to change a reality that is infinitely larger than yourself. You're also going to miss out on a lot of amazing things along the way.