Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow (Rinse & Repeat)

I am not in control of my life.

I was intimately reminded of this unsettling truth yesterday, when my flight to Bali was postponed indefinitely due to a cloud of volcanic ash hanging over Denpasar, rendering all of my preliminary travel arrangements instantly useless.

My initial reaction was, of course, total panic. Volcanic ash? Several days...maybe more? What am I supposed to do in Sydney for several days? What if I'm stuck here longer? What about all the plans and arrangements I had made? What if I don't get to do all the things I wanted to? The little self-righteous fear-mongerer in my own head strutted circles around my brain-stage, indulging in its diva-meltdown monologue.

Slowly, patiently, another voice entered the scene: This is your new reality, Anna. The task now, as always, is to see how quickly you can accept it, drop your inner resistance, and open up to new experiences... different and possibly better than those you could have planned. The tide has changed, it went on, calm and steady. How quickly can you pick your feet up off the bottom of the river and go with this new flow?

Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth. With each exhale, I felt a softening in the muscles around my eyes and jaw, a draining sensation at the back of my neck and down through the tops of my shoulders. I opened my eyes and looked around at the now nearly-empty baggage claim. I've never been to Sydney, I thought, never seen the opera house. This could be good. I felt an unraveling in my gut, decreased pressure in the atmosphere around me. Yes, this could be very good. I picked up my bag and went on through customs.

Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow... Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. Rinse and repeat. This seems to be the skill I'm out here to master, traveling by myself with everything in constant, unpredictable flux. The particulars of the various travel "crises" I find myself in vary, but the way out of them--Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow--remains the same.

The "crisis" that brought me to Queenstown, New Zealand--and then kept me there for four months--was more of an internal one. I was barely two months into my self-proclaimed "year of travel" and had come to New Zealand with the intention of staying only two weeks--just long enough to visit my sister, an aspiring sommelier working a Sauvignon Blanc harvest in Marlborough. I planned to travel on at the end of those two weeks and declared my intentions of doing so through various public mediums, including this blog.

When the end of my two weeks rolled around, however, something had changed and, this time, it was me. Despite all my talk of "staying in the slipstream," I was tired. Tired of sleepless nights and dusty bus rides and constant digestive turmoil. Of fast food and cold showers and friendships that lasted no longer than a few hours or days. My inner ego/diva balked and screamed, demanding that I "put my money where my mouth is" and "finish what I started." But underneath the screams, I could just make out that second voice, calm and steady, asking quietly, patiently for something else.

It took courage to admit it to myself at the time, just as it takes courage to admit to you now. After just two months of "adventure travel," I needed stability and routine, homemade food and potable tap water, connection and intimacy. I listened to Joni Mitchell's album Hejira on repeat, finding something in her conflicted wanderlust, her isolated freedom I could relate to more than I wanted to.

Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. Slowly, reluctantly I began to face my changed reality, acknowledge my real, human needs and let go of my declared travel plans. I opened up to the idea of stationary adventures, the lessons I could learn starting over in a new place. I picked Queenstown on a hunch, bought a one-way bus ticket, and started flowing towards the unknown. Per usual, the current carried me much further than any of my own plans could have.

Though I would have been happy working at a café, I was able to land two jobs that actually interested me: one selling Patagonia and Merrell goods at an outdoor store and the other, teaching yoga and meditation at the local wellness center. Though I expected to just pay a long-term, weekly rate at a hostel, I was able to find a shared living situation that felt more like a home than any place I'd stayed since leaving California. Though I had assumed all the meaningful

One of those jaw-droppingly beautiful Queenstown hilltops

meditation learning experiences in the world took place in Bali or Thailand or India, I found a local Buddhist center that led weekly, guided sessions of somatic meditation, a modality I had not yet experienced. Though I figured I'd just practice yoga on my own, in my room or on one of the many jaw-droppingly beautiful hilltops around Queenstown, I was offered unlimited, free classes at the wellness center, and absorbed tons of knowledge from my fellow, more-experienced teachers. Though I would have been fine with just a few familiar faces, I got two new close friends, a mentor, and a love interest.

It wasn't what I had planned; it wasn't even what I thought I wanted, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. After four challenging, stimulating and restorative months in Queenstown, I was finally ready to travel on this past week...on a day that also happened to be my 25th birthday.

At the bar where my little expat family gathered to celebrate my birthday/send-off, I received a lot of sympathetic nods and toasts to the tune of: "Another year older, eh? My condolences." I guess I've reached an age where birthdays are more of a funeral for the expiration of my youth than a celebration of the years ahead. I accepted it all with a smile, raising my glass and downing my drinks.

The thing is, I'm not at all sad about getting older. Every year of my life has been infinitely more enjoyable, more liveable than those that preceded it. Why? Because every year, I get a little better at this simple process: Accept, Release, Open Up, Flow. Every year, I soften my grip on needing to plan and control the events of my life--force things to happen when and how I want them to, and get that much better at letting life live me. I'm no master at it yet, but my reaction times are getting quicker.

I meditated in front of the Sydney Opera House this morning. I wish I could convey with words what it felt like, sitting there...something like what a seabird must feel like when it stops flapping its wings, catches the updraft of the wind, and just glides.

I'm not in control of my life, and it's a beautiful thing...because I couldn't come up with this stuff even if I tried.

Queenstown Beach

"I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you're going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you." --C. Joybell C.