On the road for 17 nights, with 17 new friends, I feel I have lived at least 6 months. My phone tells me I walked 5 miles on average (that’s 12,500 steps) every day! From the temples of Kathmandu to the lake city of Pokhara, the bends, swings, and stomach jolting drops of a 22 passenger aircraft to Jomsom, in the shadow of the 7th tallest peak in the world, Dhaulagiri, to the planet’s highest altitude temple, Muktinath, from sacred dips in glacial Himalayan ponds, to a lazy boat ride in Chitwan National Park, an elephant safari in search of elusive tigers, and a leech-full stroll amongst rhinos. 

Oh that was just Nepal. India and Turkey made little cameos.

Time spent with parents—heart-warming even if they’ll forever see you as a child. Day trip to a land of thousands of temples–Vrindavan, you have never disappointed me. Delhi—you on the other hand, leave much to be desired. Also you make me literally, like actually, sick.

Then the longest lines at Istanbul airport, the inside of a hotel in old town surrounded by gorgeous mosques and turkish bazaars, dinner by the Bosphorus, the Hagia Sophia at 5 am, and the most expensive baklava I’ve ever bought (courtesy Istanbul airport).

I am toast and I am grateful.

My big lesson on pilgrimage this year was about honesty, especially, speaking truth when things go batsh*t.

And my prayer has become to find the courage to speak my truth to those I love and respect, even if it leads to acrimony.

Lessons and prayers stated, I have to admit, with all this pilgriming, so much planning and doing, cultivating moments of pause, mindful, present, do-nothing bites of time, have been extremely rare. This is a problem with the way us moderns travel. I am as much a culprit as a victim. I know my travel days are nowhere close to over, but I want to change how it’s done.

I want to create spacious itineraries, with a focus on be-ing rather than merely seeing. Immersion in natural and spiritual landscapes rather than an instagrammable act of consumption. Nature and craft, life and artifact, approached with understanding, reverence, and wonder.

The seed for expedition ahimsa has taken root.

That said, travel is inherently dislocating, and in that it has the potential to remind me of what matters most. And I have been reminded again and again.

Sometimes it’s not in the slow exhale of your breathwork meditation, or the deep stretch of an amazing yoga class, or even at the altar of your place of worship, that you remember the single most cherished desire of your heart, it is in the madness of overwhelm, the uncertainty of delayed flights and missed connections, the encounter with death defying roads and the world’s most dangerous airports, the interminable motion sickness of bumpy rides and the discovery of leeches under your shirt, in harrowing encounters with law enforcement who speak a different language, and those moments when you lose confidence in yourself, and escape some unspeakable fate by the skin of your teeth, yes, it is then that we find what matters most. And that changes your life.