Why I Slow Travel

Chiang Mai, Thailand
05/29/23

On my long solo trips abroad, I pick a base in one spot and take side trips from there. I leave my stuff behind and go back after every trip. I did it this way in Catania (Sicily), Mexico City, and now in Chiang Mai, a medium-sized city of about 1.2 million people in the northern mountains of Thailand.

I stay at a “coliving” (pictured right) – a dwelling that includes living and working spaces for solo travelers doing their jobs remotely (aka “digital nomads"). Colivings have not only everything you need to live and work comfortably but they also come with an instant community (See below).

Since I’ve been here, I’ve done side trips to Mae Kampong, a small village about a 2-hour drive north of here; to Koh Samui, an island in the southern Gulf of Thailand about a 2-hour flight from here; and to Singapore, a 3-hour flight. After each trip, I’ve come back to Chiang Mai. This weekend, I’ll leave for the last time and head to Bangkok.

Some people ask, "Why would you go all the way to Thailand to spend so much time in that one place? Why wouldn’t you see everything you possibly can?"

I do it for practical reasons and also for some more abstract ones that explain why I love this style of travel so much.

Packing up and moving every single week for several months; carrying all of my things with me; getting settled into a new place and getting the lay of the land; finding a suitable place to work that is comfortable, quiet, has reliable wifi and is not a stuffy hotel room – all of that is a total time suck and will completely burn you out.

It may sound more efficient to just move from point A to Z in a linear fashion across all the ground you want to cover, but when you consider the lost productivity on the days you need to work, it’s much less efficient.

With a home base, I take only the things I need on my side trips. I enjoy seeing the new place without any need to scout out a cafe to work from that week or the need to do any other chores related to my weekly routine. Back at my base, I already have a reliable place to work; I know which coffee shops open early enough for me to get some fuel before I start my day; and I know just where to grab lunch.

I can take trips to new and exciting places every weekend and enjoy a slower pace in an increasingly familiar place during the week.

But there’s so much more to it than this.

Today, I came back to Chiang Mai after a 3-night trip to Singapore. It was mid-afternoon and the co-working space, which you have to walk through to get to the bedrooms upstairs, was at peak capacity. As soon as I dragged my carry-on through the door, AP (below) – a cool, young Thai woman who works at the front desk – jumped out of her seat and rushed over to hug me.

“You’re back!” she said. “I missed you!”

What a gift to be “all by myself” nearly halfway around the globe and to have just one person to welcome me back when I walk through the front door; just one person to notice I’m gone, miss me and care that I'm back. That wouldn’t happen if I just kept traveling from A to B to C. Every departure would be a goodbye.

And it’s not just one person – There's the lady I buy my coffee from every morning (below with her husband). When I showed back up at her shop after 4 days away earlier this month, she clapped her hands together in front of her face and said, “Susan! I thought you left!” (Sure, that’s not my name, but for a welcome like that, I'll lean in.)

When you have a base, you can have a routine, and through routine, people know your face and notice when they haven’t seen it.

One part of my routine has been daily tai chi and qigong classes at a studio about a 10-minute walk from where I’m staying. On the way to class one day, I stopped into a pharmacy for sunscreen and shampoo. The pharmacist has greeted me every time I've passed since then.

In the second week of class, I met Neta, a solo traveler from Israel. We hit it off as soon as we started chatting that first day. Sure, we might have had a nice conversation if I had just seen her once and then never again. But we ended up having lunch together every day after class. She had just come from Vietnam, where I am headed next. She gave me all kinds of intel that prompted me to make major changes to my itinerary. And she’s joining me on a 3-day trip to Cambodia early next month!

I connected with Priya, a solo traveler from India, through a Facebook group for female digital nomads where we learned we’d be in Chiang Mai at the same time. She was diligent about meeting up once we got here. Together, we agreed the nearby jazz club was going to be our spot during our time here. For the two weeks that we overlapped, she was the friend that I could text to say, “Want to get dinner tomorrow?” – the kind of friend you really miss having when you’re traveling on your own, never stopping for more than a few days in each place.

Claire, an Atlanta native, has taught at an international school here in Chiang Mai for about five years. A mutual friend in Atlanta connected us. I thought she might just get together with me once to be nice, but after that first dinner, she mentioned other places she wanted to show me the next time we got together. She’s been the friend that I can text with questions about Chiang Mai. And, because I also taught abroad for a few years after college and, like her, picked up the language in my chosen country with relative ease, we have so much in common and so much to talk about.

Brayden moved into the coliving about a week after I did. I saw him come in, but he didn’t see me. Later that night, I was sitting by myself at a restaurant nearby and he walked in by himself. I said, “Are you Brayden? I’m staying at the same place as you.” A New Yorker, he reminds me of so many of my friends from college. He feels familiar.

These relationships came from three weeks in Chiang Mai. And none came at the cost of seeing new places or experiencing new things. I’m not experiencing less because I’ve decided to stay longer in one place. Sure, if I were to plan a perfectly linear trip, and spend each week in a different place as I propel myself forward across SE Asia, I would see a greater number of new places. But living in one place in Thailand (and then another next month in Vietnam) for several weeks is pretty new, too. When, on a week’s vacation, do you get the opportunity to learn what it might be like to live there? To learn the rhythms and routines of the place?

I see all the main attractions in every place I visit, but I also get to see the monks in orange robes set out with giant silver bowls every morning to collect food donations from local shops; teenage girls in school uniforms race home on motor scooters every afternoon; the old folks at the bodega next door sit down for dinner together at a table on the sidewalk every night.

And I get to see people who are happy to see me.

The Do-Over (or The Bells on the Piazza)

Florence, Italy
01/03/23
Shortly after I wrote these tips for solo travelers last year, I learned another important piece of travel advice for those going it alone: Know when to call it quits.

Last summer, my three-week live-work stint in Sicily was supposed to culminate in a 9-day vacation/whiplash tour of Italy with stops in Naples, Positano, Florence and Rome. But relationship trouble had been brewing back home all summer and by the time I headed to Italy’s mainland, I was nursing a badly broken heart.

I had gone out of my way to pack light for that month-plus in Europe. I was so proud that I’d brought nothing but a carry-on containing “5 easy pieces,” as a friend of mine had dubbed the capsule wardrobe I created for myself. I’d move through my total of 5 stops unencumbered, with such ease!

But by that third week in July, checked bag or not, I was physically heavy. Movement at all felt insurmountable.

I made it to Naples, where I dragged myself through a day trip to Pompeii, only to fight tears all day and not care one lick what the tour guide was saying. I didn’t want to cast that veil of sadness over all my would-be memories of Florence and Rome, too. I imagined that every time I saw an image of Florence or Rome in the future, I’d only remember how broken I’d felt when I was in those places. So I packed it in. Changed my ticket. And went home.

And I am so glad that I did.

It would have been completely within my nature to have said, No, Sonya. Be strong. You can do this. Don’t let a man ruin your trip. But, in fact, by going home, I didn’t let him ruin my trip.

I didn’t have any room in my heart for the expansive joy that travel brings me.

Now, five months later, I am back in Italy to complete that leg of the trip that I didn’t do back in July. And the first source of travel joy for me was the simple feeling of empowerment I got from coming back here to do this.

When I travel, the most joyful moments are usually small, unremarkable ones. The ones I can’t photograph. Sure, standing face to face (or more like face to kneecap) with Michaelangelo’s David was a weighty moment, but the one I’ll remember most will be this one: striding across the Piazza del Duomo at 8am, before it filled with tourists, precisely when the church bells started to ring. At this moment, the bells weren’t a spectacle for outsiders (except for me), but just the sound of the start of another day in Florence. All around me, individuals (not families on vacation or tour groups following a flag-carrying guide) moved in different directions across the piazza to start each of their days — untold different days, many of them probably mundane like my own days often are back home.

And I had been allowed a window into it. I was somehow (miraculously, it seemed!) permitted to observe a few bits of their morning routines. They drink tiny espressos quickly and standing at café counters rather than carrying large lidded paper cups with cardboard sleeves through their entire commute; drivers maneuver cars through tiny passages with no apparent rage at the pedestrians who choose to walk in the middle of the street rather than along sidewalks that are barely wider than an American curb; street peddlers glance up at the cross atop the basilica and make the sign of it across themselves, kissing a thumbnail before they set up their mobile souvenir shops for the day. All of this is backed by the church bells.

I can’t say why this moment — more than the Botticelli paintings, the Colosseum, David, and the Vatican — moved me so much, but it was here on the piazza that I was overcome with that expansive joy. And gratitude. To be alive, to have been given a life at all, to live in this world, and to get to see so much of it.

How to Be Alone Without (*Always*) Being Lonely: Tips for Solo Digital Nomads

Catania, Sicily
07/19/22

I don’t travel alone because I just want to be alone. But since I was very little, I have wanted to see this whole world. That’s not as important to everyone as it is to me. And not everyone has the freedom that I have (unmarried, no kids, 100% remote working freelancer) to make it happen. So if I’m going to do it (and not wait till my friends are retired and risk never doing it at all), I’m at least going to have to do some traveling alone.

About once a year, I leave Atlanta and travel somewhere (usually abroad) for roughly a month, work for about three weeks of that time, and then take a week or so off to do some tourism. So far, I’ve done this in Morocco, Malta, Miami, Mexico City (not sure why I chose to knock out all those M’s first), Santa Fé, and Sicily.

I have found these trips to be positively exhilarating in the way they make me feel empowered, independent, and capable. (Read more about that here.) But yes, 1,000 times yes, I absolutely do get lonely! Every time I do another one of these digital nomad (DN) trips, I learn new ways to stave off loneliness, which helps keep my energy up (loneliness is a real energy sucker!) so I can see and do all that I planned.

Here’s my tips. Note: These tips are for DNs who plan extended stays in a single spot, during which they’ll work and have some semblance of a normal day-to-day life. These don’t necessarily apply to solo vacations.

1 - Stay in a coliving house. These are communal living situations that tend to draw other DNs (i.e. people who are working while they travel rather than backpackers and other travelers). They are typically higher end than hostels and, in my estimation, draw a crowd that skews a little older and a little more established than the hostel set – grownups. Any coliving house that I have looked at offers private rooms; most but not all offer private bathrooms; and you share a kitchen, a coworking space, and other living spaces. They are as livable and well-equipped as an AirBnB, but they come with one thing that an AirBnB doesn’t: friends!

In a coliving space, you will find an instant community of other solo travelers who are open to new friendships, having company on their adventures, and accompanying you on yours. In these spaces, I find that I can always participate as much or as little as I want without fear that if I decline an invitation to hang out with someone they won’t invite me the next time. I often choose which city I’m going to visit next because it has a coliving house that I’d like to stay in. That’s how I ended up in Catania, Sicily, where I am right now, staying at Cummari, a coliving for solo female travelers.

(Pictured above left, my housemates and I on a daytrip to Ortigia, Sicily, on Saturday. Two yogis from Madison, WI, and a fashion professional turned English-teaching DN from NYC.)

If you want to know more about my experiences in coliving houses, a post on that is coming soon, and I will link to it here.

2 - Join a coworking space. This one is especially important if you are in a city that doesn’t have a coliving house. At a coworking space, you might meet people who want to hang out. (Though not always, since the members at a coworking space are usually locals with their own lives. They are not traveling and “up for anything” like you are.)

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But, even if you don’t make new friends, there’s still so much value in going somewhere every day where people look at you with recognition, greet you when you come in, and ask if they will see you tomorrow. I mean come on, here at the coworking space in Sicily, there’s a silver fox who gives me a flirty smile every time he walks past my table, greets me in the morning when he comes in and bids me adieu each evening when he leaves. Now if that doesn’t take the blues away, I don’t know what will.

Seriously though, being a foreigner traveling solo can sometimes draw a lot of unwanted attention, but just as often it can make you feel invisible because you’re not “one of us.” When you join a coworking space, at least in that space, during your working hours, you are someone who belongs. You’re “one of us.”

In most coworking spaces I’ve used, the staff have been friendly and chatty. In major international cities, you also tend to find other expats at coworking spaces, with whom you’ll have a lot in common if you just chat them up.

In Mexico City, at a gorgeous expat-filled space called Coffice, I always chatted with Annie from Greenville, SC.

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Yesterday, at Isola in Sicily (a coworking space inside a palace!), I met a woman from Brazil.

If you can’t find a coworking space in your area, go to the same cafe to work every day in order to try to get the same effect. But, beware, it’s not quite the same. At a coworking space, the business model is to let you come in with your laptop and stay all day. At some coffee shops, they might hate customers who do this – unless you want to get another $5 latte every hour or so.

If you are concerned about the cost of a coworking space, the day rate is usually less than you would spend buying lattes all day to secure your table in a coffee shop. In fact, many coworking spaces, though not all of them, include coffee.

Even if you are at a coliving house that has a workspace, you might still prefer to leave during the day to go to a coworking space. I’ve been at coliving houses where the workspace situation was ideal for me and some where it wasn’t.

In Malta, the coliving house was big and could house probably 20 people at full capacity. As such, the coworking room was big, too, and there were always people in there working quietly. For me, the mix of company and quiet made the perfect working environment.

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Cummari, the coliving house here in Sicily, only houses 4 people max. This is a great number of people for sharing a living space and a workspace for that matter. But, since I’ve been here, only 1 of the guests has been working, and she works in her room with the door closed (because she teaches online and has to talk all day). The other people who have come through the house since I have been here have been on vacation and have not been working. So, while the coworking room at Cummari is stunningly beautiful, I've had it all to myself!

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So, I’ve been going to a coworking space in order to have a place to go during the day, see more people than just the handful of guests at the house, and to have a routine (more on that below).

Also, if you’re a digital nomad, you’ve traveled all this way on your own presumably to get a slice of life. You’ll get a bigger slice in a local coworking space than you would by working from your local home.

3 - Develop a routine. This is sort of the same idea as the coworking space. Find your spot where you’ll get coffee every morning on the way to work (even if work is back at the coliving house), become a regular at a restaurant or bar (no, you don’t want to go to the same restaurant every night in this far-off place where you want to see and do as much as possible, but if you are a DN, you are probably staying in one place for more than a week or so, and you can spare the time to eat at the same place more than once). The routine will help you become a familiar face, rather than feeling invisible. It will help keep you focused when you do get a little lonely or homesick and feel unmotivated to work or sightsee. And, again, it will show you a slice of life that you won’t get if you’re never in the same place twice.

Here’s a post about my routine in Barcelona, which included working from a laundromat cafe.

4 - Schedule stuff. Of course, you’re not working all the time. You came here to see and enjoy this place. Some wide open free time is a wonderful thing, but don’t leave all your off time open if you are prone to loneliness. Don’t wait till Saturday morning, for example, to decide how you’re going to spend the day. If you’re feeling a little lonely or unmotivated, come Saturday morning, you might just stay in bed all day and later regret it. So, if you decide you’re going to check out that village about an hour away, go ahead and buy the train tickets in advance. Or get yourself tickets to a show, reservations at a restaurant, or a spot on a tour. Putting down a little money in advance will keep you accountable and, as you know, once you go do the thing you planned to do, you’re almost always glad you did.

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5 - Give yourself permission to do nothing. That is, don’t schedule everything. If you chose to stay a while in this far-off place so that you could get a taste of real life, don’t forget that real life includes crashing in the evening after work some nights and binging a show. You don’t have to post that part on Instagram if you don’t want to. (I think you should though! Normalize it.) When I was in Mexico City, I took amazing day trips every weekend, but almost every weeknight, I came home from the coworking space, got into bed with a chocolate bar, and watched Casa de Las Flores on Mexican Netflix. And I loved it!

Just this weekend, here in Sicily, I had a full-on weekend. I spent all day Saturday touring a nearby town with my 3 housemates and all day Sunday on the beach with 1 of my housemates. You want to know what I did last night? I ordered a pizza from the place on the corner (but of course since I’m in Sicily, even ordering a pizza to eat alone at home is still pretty freaking cool) and we got in bed together – me and the pizza – where I watched Together Together on Netflix. And that’s ok! (Together Together was also just “ok.”) You can’t just go, go, go all the time. Even if you’re in the most beautiful and exotic city in the world, you still need time to just veg out. It makes the go-go-go time even better.

6 - Talk to strangers. Some of my best solo travel memories happened because I talk to strangers when I travel on my own. Obviously, you still have to use your judgment – especially if you’re a solo female traveler – but I have met people and had conversations that I never would have (A) If I were traveling with friends and (B) If I were afraid to talk to strangers.

Strike up a conversation with that other solo person at a restaurant, bar or tourist attraction. Ask someone for a light, for that extra napkin on their table, or directions even if you don’t need them in a play to start a conversation with a potentially interesting stranger.

If you want to know more about some of the times I’ve talked to strangers (and how it got me free desserts and a mini-tour of Paris at breakneck speed), a blog post on that is coming up soon. I’ll link to it here.

7 - Consider the time zone. My previous solo trips to Europe and similar time zones have not been quite as long as this current month in Sicily. I’ve done long stints in the Americas, where I’m in the same time zone as back home or at least within an hour or so of it. I had never considered how much that mattered. In time zones closer to home, I could pick up the phone and call my family, friends or my boyfriend just like I would at home – without thinking about it and without scheduling it.

Sicily is six hours ahead of Atlanta. It didn’t seem like a big deal when I planned this trip, but it has been. There’s been almost no spontaneous calling friends when I need to hear a familiar voice or talk to someone who knows me. Whenever the urge to talk to someone at home has struck, it’s been at a time that they’d be asleep or at work.

Last night/this morning, in Sicily, I happened to wake up in the middle of the night. I reached for my phone to see what time it was (4am here, 10pm back home) and saw that I had gotten a text from my boyfriend just a few minutes earlier. “Are you awake?” (Yes, I know that's usually the opening line to a booty call, but when you are in a far-off time zone and you get a text that asks if you're awake, well, sometimes a rose is just a rose.) I was awake now, so I turned on my lamp and FaceTimed him, knowing that if I waited till I was awake for real in a couple hours, he’d be asleep for another 6 to 8 hours and then off to start his busy day. It’s catch as catch can.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t travel solo to a far-off time zone because you’ll die of loneliness. I just suggest you think about it. The time difference isn’t nothing. And it does have consequences for the solo traveler who might (read: will definitely) get lonely sometimes.

Of course, there are workarounds. You can schedule a standing phone date with your significant other or your bestie at a time that’s mutually convenient. But when that unexpected rush of loneliness or homesickness catches you unaware, there’s a lot to be said for picking up the phone and calling a friend right then. If that’s not possible, you’ll need to have another coping mechanism at the ready.

In Sicily, a glass of rosé has often done the trick.

Solo travel -- because someone tried to tell me I couldn't

Cummari House, Catania, Sicily.
07/06/22

When I travel solo, I’m going after a very specific feeling. It’s a particular brand of triumph that I don’t get from doing anything else. When I drove from Atlanta to Santa Fe in 3 days; when I landed in Mexico City; when I took a boat to Comino off the coast of Malta, I was overcome by an “I did this!” and “All by myself!”

At the New Mexico state line, on the border of Texas, I had to resist the urge to get out of the car and throw my arms up in the air as if I had just dismounted the uneven bars at the Olympics.

I’m starting to figure out where that came from. I was once married to a man who made it his job to take the wind out of my sails, to make me feel weak and small, to make me feel that what mattered to me was stupid and unimportant, to make me feel that I somehow lacked the same savvy and know-how to get through day-to-day life that he and the rest of the world had.

One way he made me feel weak and small was to try to convince me, in various ways at different times, that I was clumsy and accident-prone and didn’t know how to navigate new situations on my own. To put it simply, that I couldn't do anything without quite literally falling on my ass. This was never an impression I had of myself before being in a relationship with him, but over time, he worked at it, and eventually I saw how it might be true (It was not true).

When we split up, when I was 30, I took my first international solo trip. Ironically, my first such trip was supposed to have been to Brazil 7 years earlier when I was 23. I planned the trip before I met him, but by the time the trip rolled around, he and I had been dating in New York for several months, and he (a Brazilian) went with me. Over the course of that year in Brazil, he worked hard to convince me that I could never have done it without him.

When we split up in 2006, I spent 5 weeks in Europe (Portugal [pictured below], Spain and France) on my own.

In Portugal, during a 2-day stay in a beach town called Albufeira, I took a walk down to the beach, and in my red Havaiana flip flops, I ventured out on a large bed of boulders that stretched a ways out into the water.

And then I started to hear his voice.

Had I been with him at this moment, he’d have been repeating over and over, in a tone that clearly communicated an utter absence of faith in me, “Ó! Cuidado pá não cair!” (“Hey! Be careful not to fall” but the tone said “I just know you’re going to fall and ruin everything,”) as he’d hop blithely from rock to rock while I tiptoed slowly behind him, carefully choosing the spot to place my foot for each and every step, lest I fall and prove him right. As you might imagine, the fall hazards were not objects in my path. What put me at risk of falling was the way he made me a nervous wreck.

He often used the purported fact that I was clumsy, accident-prone, and lacked international savvy as an excuse not to bring me on trips with him so he could go on his own. I had dreamt of being a world traveler ever since I understood what a country was; of being a polyglot ever since I knew that there were other languages to be spoken! It was after reading The Sun Also Rises in high school that I decided I'd spend a year abroad when I finished college. (That's what the year in Brazil was about.) I had always been attracted to relationships with foreign people. My friendships in New York and my job teaching English as a second language had facilitated that. And though it wasn't the reason I married him, I had made an assumption that being married to someone of another nationality than my own came with the keys to the world. It didn't. I didn't know I held the keys all along.

On the beach in Albufeira, Portugal, that day in 2006, though I heard his taunting voice in my head, I wasn’t at any risk of falling. I didn’t teeter, wobble or flap my arms as I stepped from rock to rock, sure-footed and further out into the ocean, nor as I raised my camera (a real camera, not a phone!) at an angle above my face to take a picture of this triumphant moment.

Since then, the triumphs have come at a much lower cost. I haven’t had to venture alone across a bed of boulders (in flip flops!) as waves crashed against them in order to chase that high. In Morocco (pictured below), it was successfully acquiring a carton of milk all by myself from a corner store that wasn’t really a store but more like the kitchen window of a private home.

In Malta, it was finding myself on that boat with a group in the middle of what is easily one of the most beautiful places on earth as I thought, “I did this. I got myself all the way to the middle of the Mediterranean.” (Sure, I wasn’t the captain of that ship, but you know what I mean.) In Barcelona, it was making myself perfectly understood in Spanish so that the person with whom I was talking didn’t default to English. In Sicily, it was about language, too. I felt the rush when I walked out of my first Italian lesson on Monday and immediately used what I'd learned to buy gum at the shop next door.

It’s been 16 years since my walk on the rocks in Portugal. As time goes on, I feel the need less and less to find new ways to prove that I can do things all by myself. And never again did I feel the need to spend time with people who tried to tell me that I couldn’t.

Slow travel offers a different kind of sightseeing

LaBar - Laundry Bar, Barcelona. 07/01/22

There’s one thing I particularly love about slow travel (and by that, I mean staying a while in one place, and working from there or at least having some kind of routine in that place that isn’t exclusively about hitting as many tourist sites as I can in as short a time as possible -- though I have done my fair share of that style of travel, too). What I like about the slow style is I get to see the local characters and local life.

I’ve been working from a laundromat café called LaBar in Barcelona this week. Every day, an elderly man in a wheelchair comes in at least twice. I’m not sure that he even buys anything. He wheels himself in, sometimes rolling in backwards, and up to the counter, where he sits parked for a few minutes and makes conversation with whoever is on duty at the time. He’s thin, his skin wrinkled and tan from what I imagine must have been a whole life spent in this oceanside city, and he wears a mesh trucker hat with a logo I can't make out. A few minutes later, he rolls out, and a few hours after that, he rolls back in for more chit-chat.

There’s an older woman who frequents the cafe, too. She’s probably in her late 70s. She may be 80. Yesterday, around 2:45 pm, she sat at a table with a glass of cava and laughed out loud (very loud) at YouTube videos she watched on her phone. One video in particular was so funny that after she watched it, she turned around in her seat looking for anyone she could share it with. I can’t be sure what was going through her mind, but I got the impression that when she looked around and saw that she was surrounded by people who, like me, appear to be non-Spanish-speaking foreigners (this city in general and this café in particular are very international), she thought she didn’t have much of an audience for this video. She then flagged over the young woman from behind the counter.

“Mira este video,” she said to her. Watch this video.

The woman obliged and laughed, and as the elder one watched along with her, she laughed as if she were seeing it again for the first time. The barista went back to her post, and the elder watched the video one last time, laughing no less heartily.

No. 8: Homecoming

I recently found myself in the passenger seat of a big ole pickup truck, riding slowly down a dirt road, headlights off, Bluegrass on the radio, and a Bud in my hand. When I lived in the South – 14 years ago – I was vaguely aware of this aspect of my culture: that country roads are somehow exempt from traffic laws about alcohol, headlights and speed limits. But that culture had never been a part of my Southern reality. I come from the well-paved suburbs of Atlanta far from any dirt road, and my daddy never had a pickup truck, nor dreamed of having one, and he rarely drank beer. I listened to Top 40 not Bluegrass, and when I started drinking, Bud was never my preference. Pickup trucks, Bluegrass, and American beer, in my mind, were the stuff of red necks.

Still in the 14 years that I lived outside of my native South, when I longed for “home,” it was these contrived, cliché symbols of country life, not in any way representative of my own youth in the South, that I sought. The first summer I spent in New York rather than Georgia, homesick, I took a liking to Bluegrass and insisted on playing it on the tape player at my Manhattan summer job all summer long. Years later, with a band of hipsters in tow, I shamelessly insisted that we go to a bar in Brooklyn that was playing Bluegrass, and I made each one square dance with me as if I personally owned the rights to the steps. The last, and only, time I had square danced was as a requirement in my 7th-grade P.E. class, and, like all my classmates, I complained about it fervently. When I longed for the South though, as an adult in New York, I longed for country roads and boiled peanuts from roadside fruit stands while the only produce I had grown up on had always come from the grocery store.

I had seen this phenomenon before in New York, a city of displaced people. I knew Brazilians, raised like me on American rock and pop, who only took a liking to Bossa Nova music after they left their country. I had Middle Eastern Muslim students who, dressed in head coverings and long dresses, told me they never covered their heads back home. And in my 11th year in New York, I, a vegetarian who mostly prefers Asian food and always skips dessert, hosted a dinner party of shrimp ‘n’ grits and peach cobbler with nothing but country playing on the stereo.

During my 6-year marriage to a Brazilian, who always kept one of our collective feet in New York and the other planted in Brazil, I accepted what seemed to me a bitter reality that my Southern lineage ended with me; that my children, should I one day have them, would not be from the South, and their vague notion of what Southern meant would be tied not to me but to maternal grandparents who would not live nearby. Once, seated at a corner table at a Starbucks in the Bronx, thinking about these very facts, I cried when Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” came on the radio. I wondered how it was I had gotten so far off the road that he claimed always led back to Georgia.

And now, so many years after I’d accepted that I had to give up the South, I find myself, not too far from home, on a dirt road in Georgia. A few miles into this Sunday night drive, my companion stopped beside a field of sunflowers and waded out into the middle to pick three for me. With his large hands, creased and worn from hard work, his wide fingers, flattened out it seemed from numerous whacks with a hammer, he pointed out for me where the seeds were and how to remove and eat them. We climbed back into the truck, and I laid the enormous flowers out across the back seat with the care of a mother laying an infant down to nap. This was the fourth time I had gone out with this man, and for reasons unrelated to trucks, sunflowers, and endless dirt roads, I knew by this night that he was not the guy for me. Maybe I knew that if his wading out into a moonlit field of sunflowers for me didn’t do it, nothing would. Still, in honor of this lovely country night that I had wanted for 14 years, that I had once feared I’d missed forever, when his rugged hand reached across the arm rest, between the twin bottles of Bud, I willingly let mine fall into it.

No. 7

Recently I had the opportunity to indulge a curiosity I had had since I was 19 and studying Eastern Religions at Hunter College in New York. I visited with a friend the Hindu ashram where he meditates every Saturday. It seems ridiculous that it took me so long, but the prospect of indulging a curiosity in New York just always seemed so…. indulgent. A pity since New York is a veritable playground of curiosities, but really, who had the time? In New York, I was always too busy.

It was in my 11th year there that I finally saw New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker though it had been in my plans since I was a child. But I’m sure we can all generate pages-long lists of things we’ve “been meaning to do,” but have always been too busy for.

But busy is good, right? Busy is a virtue. I’ve found it, in fact, to be the only acceptable alternative to “fine” when answering the question, “How are you?”

“Busy. So busy.”

If you are busy, your life is valid and important. For those who have too much free time on their hands, we say things like, “You need to get a life.” We ought to simply answer the question, “How are you?” with “Valid. Important. You?”

When I left the US, I said I wanted to live in a place where you didn’t have to book 3 weeks in advance to have a quick 30-minute cocktail with your best friend between yoga and book club, a place where you could call your friends at 7 pm and have an actual chance at meeting them for dinner tonight, a place where people did have too much time on their hands.

In those final busy days in New York, I touted my idealistic views of the new life I was seeking. I’d meet a friend for a quick coffee and tell her why I was leaving New York and heading back to Brazil. “I want a culture that values spontaneity!” I gloated. “I choose to live in a place that puts quality time with friends ahead of quantity of hours worked!” But even as I heard the words come out of my mouth, I wondered if my utopia of free time and spontaneity really existed anywhere in this world.

I was trying to go back to a Brazil that I wasn’t sure could still be found on any map. The last time I had lived in Brazil was at a one-of-kind moment in time: I had been 22; had no credit card debt; was in that glorious moment of pre-student loan repayment so aptly, so spiritually called Grace; life was cheap in Brazil; the Dollar and the Real were one-to-one; I had a savings account and no adult responsibilities that would require me to bleed it. But now, as a full-fledged grown-up, were spontaneity and free time commodities my age and bank account would still afford me?

Still, I pressed on.

It only took me a few days here to realize that my next-door-neighbor’s porch was the meeting place for a handful of young people on my street. Every day when I’d head out for my run, they’d be there chatting, drinking mate, and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. So it really did exist! This was The Scene I had imagined myself in months ago, back in cold New York when I’d made the decision to come here.

“Have a good run!” They’d call after me as I set out. “Stop by when you get back.” It was a dream come true. Except that as I ran off down the road, sinking into my thoughts, I felt not the excitement of a dream realized but rather disdain. Disdain for those friendly neighbors gathered on the porch on a weekday afternoon. Doesn’t the Devil find work for idle hands, I wondered to myself. I’d better watch out for those people.

On many weekdays, another neighbor, Big Carlos, speeds by on his bike, and each time, he calls out to me in greeting, “This is the good life, isn’t it?” I politely answer, “Uh huh!” But even as I say it, I feel like a charlatan, like any moment he could discover that I’m faking, that I don’t understand that this is the good life. Behind my enthusiastic “Uh huh!,” I wonder, is it? Is this good?

On another weekday, I was staring out the window while washing dishes when a car slowed down in front of the house and the driver, a hippy grad student, said, “C’mon Sonya, let’s go to the beach.” And without a thought, I said, “Sorry,” and shook my head.

Wasn’t this what I had wanted? Unscheduled chats with neighbors on the porch? Spontaneous Tuesday afternoon trips to the beach? It had always just been a question of whether this life really existed. And now it does! Yet all I could say was “sorry.”

I confess my first month here – before I had filled my schedule with private students, translations and workouts at the gym – was long and lonely. I had as much time as I wanted to pick up the phone at 7pm and make spontaneous plans for tonight. But for some reason, this scenario was no longer at all appealing to me. All this free time had left me completely empty.

But when students and other work began to trickle in, I found myself sometimes wishing that I had gone to the beach more. Why had it been so hard for me to use the free time that I had literally crossed continents to attain? Honestly, I did have a class later that day, but I didn’t need to consult my schedule to know I didn’t want to go to the beach with her. I knew exactly why I hadn’t dried my hands, run outside and jumped in the car. I didn’t want to go to the beach with people who had nothing else to do on a Tuesday afternoon. I had thought they were losers.

In fact, I thought that my availability to go to the beach with them made me a loser. Insignificant. No one. And that my being busy, having that one little class that afternoon to prevent me from going to the beach, made me Someone. I judged Big Carlos speeding down the street on his bike; I judged the kids on the porch next door drinking mate at all hours of the afternoon. And my being busy somehow made me superior to them, gave me the right to mutter haughtily, Humph, some people have to work for a living.

Somewhere between those wide open days when I first came here and my busier today, when I started to feel my window of time closing in on me, I started to learn how to enjoy my free time. In the days when all I had was free time, I felt too guilty to spend it in any other way than looking for ways to get rid of it. I can’t go to the beach, I thought. I should be online looking for more work. But as work started to trickle into the wide-open spaces in my schedule, I felt a greater urgency to take advantage of what time remained. If I found myself done with all my students before dark, I’d hike the trail by my house or go into town and have a coffee at a sidewalk café watching others spend their free time.

It was around this time, that a friend mentioned that he meditated at a Hindu ashram. I couldn’t mask my intrigue. So when he asked me if I wanted to go, I knew I had to permit myself to indulge that old curiosity. If moving from New York City to this jungle hadn’t taught me to let myself live a little, I’d need a lot more than a day in prayer at an ashram to save me.

I was a bit nervous at first. I must have asked him a hundred times if he was sure it was okay to bring a friend. If he was sure I wouldn’t be seen as an interloper. I was starting to imagine something akin to Eyes Wide Shut. Would they ask me for a password? When they discovered I wasn’t one of them, would I be subjected to an inquisition carried out by men in masks and capes? But my friend assured me that I was being silly, and that he couldn’t think of a place that would be warmer or more welcoming, so I went.

Before entering the temple, I saw many framed portraits and images inside, of people, beings and deities who I could not identify, but as the worshippers approached the room, I could see the pause these images gave them. As if struck by them, they stood at the threshold in what I can only describe as a vibrant, reverent silence. Then, one by one, as they entered the room, before finding a seat, each worshipper knelt before the altar and bowed.

I waited for my friend to pay his respects to God so that I could take a seat next to him. I watched as he – a man in his late 30s, tall and broad shouldered, lowered himself to his knees; his hips rocking back on his heels, he bent at the waist and continued to bend until his face was on the floor before him. Then he rocked forward slightly until the crown of his head was pressed into the carpet.

And there he stayed for at least as long as it took me to catch my breath. Now it was I who stood at the door and watched in what I can only describe as a vibrant, reverent silence. Of all the images in the room, this was the one that moved me.

I tell you that he was a man, of strong build, and older than me because I do not want you to imagine, as I certainly would have, one of the hippies on my block that goes to the beach on Tuesdays. After all, isn’t this the type of Westerner that frequents Hindu temples? No, he is a businessman; he works at a desk and carries a laptop; he wears khakis and uses a Bluetooth. He would not be out of place rushing around Manhattan at a quarter to nine a.m. He is serious, important. Busy. And now, in his khaki pants and pressed shirt, he is on his knees on the floor, his clean-shaven face on the carpet. Watching him, I begin to feel physically tired. His posture of total surrender looks so relieving. What a relief it would be to just stop. Stop pretending to be busy. Stop thinking I am better than someone else. Stop being important, valid, Someone. How nice it would be to fall on my knees, lay my face on the floor and admit that I am nothing. I only wonder if I would ever get up.