How To Go On An Accidental Spiritual Journey

Your boyfriend asks you to go on a three-month bicycle jaunt through fourteen countries of Eastern Europe, and you say yes. You don’t hear “bicycles.” You hear “time away from life where you can work on your projects.” Even though you have no plans to bring any candles, you imagine candlelit nights spent outside a tent writing intelligent think pieces and finishing all the projects you’ve started — the ones who’ve been living on your desktop and mocking you for neglecting them. You wager you’ll sightsee 20% of the time, bicycle 20% of the time, and spend the rest living in the luxury of space, of being away from the chaos of the everyday so tasks like cleaning out the inbox will seem effortless.

Because you didn’t really hear “bikes,” you don’t train at all. You prepare only by making rules to follow with your boyfriend: 1) meet a local a day. 2) no complaining allowed. 3) Have fun (you don’t define what fun means to you out loud, but you figure you’ll explain later how fun it is to finish a manuscript on the road and submit it to agents).

You pack your bicycle and two tiny bags full of basics and head to Estonia, the very top of mainland Eastern Europe.

Immediately you realize things aren’t how you thought they’d be. You’re very interested in Tallinn, the capital, so you spend no time at all attending to projects and most time reliving Medieval history, getting lost on cobblestone streets, and trying all the foods you’ve never before seen (Like leivasupp and pirukad. What?)You fill your brain with more than you ever knew about Europe, Tallinn, communism, Baltic states. And you love it. You berate yourself for not doing more business. For not completing projects. You think you’ll begin to really revamp your creativity as soon as the bicycling starts.

And then you realize how hard it is to ride and camp in the rain. And the cold. You buy gloves. You learn that Baltic states don’t have summers like Los Angeles has summers. While you follow the rule of no complaints and carry on, you miss the first lesson on your accidental spiritual journey: acceptance. This weather will be one of the myriad hiccups you and your partner will have to accept along the way. Things won’t be how you thought, and you will have to roll with them anyway. But you don’t learn that yet. You wince at the wind in your face.

You hit the pavement. For eight hours a day. What you thought might be quick jaunts from town to town end up taking longer. much. much longer. There are dirt roads and farm roads and roads with shoulders and roads with less than shoulders. You realize you can’t take your eyes off the road. You can’t look away. You are forced to be present in every single moment. For eight hours a day. You get used to the correct body position and find that your body’s natural sag takes you far from the correct body position. So you switch from concentrating on the road to the location of your sit bones, and you remember a monk once telling you to feel your sit bones each time you need to come back to your meditation. And that’s what you do. Day in and day out. You didn’t plan on it, but you are meditating eight hours a day. You become present. You begin to feel. Highways. Your body. Your breath. The scent of summer. The loving ways your boyfriend takes care of you — the ways you’d been taking for granted before this trip. You begin to detect slight changes in temperature. You feel the sting of humidity as it plucks at your skin the more south you get.

You notice nature. You pass under trees that drop plump cherries onto your back, bushes bearing fruits you have never seen. You eat them all. You are visited by strange creatures. A cat jumps into your front basket. A grasshopper rides on your handlebars for miles, tickling you with his feelers. You are amazed by all of it. Sometimes so much that it brings tears to your eyes. You realize you are never alone. You feel taken care of. Supported by the universe, always with enough fruit to eat and never far from a river or stream.

You continue breathing. And pedaling. And meditating. You begin to see the thoughts that make their way through. You notice a pattern. Some are about stupid things you’ve said or things you didn’t do. You notice you compare yourself to strangers and you admonish yourself for failures. Even failures from years and years past. You notice you get defensive when your partner tells you to do things differently. You see that even years after you began to “work on yourself,” you still you haven’t learned to treat yourself with the care that you take with others. You spend nights writing in a journal. You realize there will be no candlelight but there is time in the tent and you don’t use it for business. No, you use it for self-reflection and self-forgiveness and to even go back to when you were a child and think about how your brain learned these patterns of not-enough-ness. Of perfectionism. Of self-doubt.

You begin to let go. You let go of your ideas of how this trip should be. Of how the weather should be. Of the long to-do list you brought with. You stop wincing at the wind or the heat. You start looking forward to getting lost and to unexpected glitches. You start writing letters to each one of your inner-children. All 35 of them. You tell them you’re sorry you didn’t love them until now.

You continue to hit the pavement, breathing deeply from your belly on each downhill. You find the book ‘Hunger Games’ in a hotel room and you read it in two nights. You remember how much you adore reading but never let yourself because you’ve always had too much to do. You order the second and third books in the series and read them on your phone in three days and cry tears of utter joy because you allowed yourself the pleasure of getting lost in a story. Of doing something for yourself strictly for pleasure. You vow to do more things just for pleasure in your life. You mourn the years you spent only ‘doing,’ forgoing pleasure for the opportunity to gain. You question what that even means. What have you gained?

You keep pedaling. On through Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia. You meet a local a day. You notice you compare yourself less. You realize the harmful thoughts are dwindling, replaced by ideas. Big ideas. Ones that would never have bubbled forth had you simply sat down to “be creative” like you had planned. You write this piece in your head on a bike as you’re breathing and noticing your sit bones and making sure your wheel stays far to the right.

Reluctantly, you reach the end. Greece. You ship the bikes home and dip into pleasure. Pools. Waves. Massages. You are overwhelmed with gratitude. Grateful for your partner who has supported you through your accidental spiritual journey. Grateful for the privilege to have witnessed such beauty and food and nature and humanity and goats and lambs and culture and ocean and language. Grateful that you allowed it in. You know you never would have before.