The beginning of the trip was admittedly tough for me. I think I was homesick a week before we even left. Just knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing my friends and family, that I would be living out of a suitcase, that I wouldn’t have private time at home to decompress really did make me nervous. When I told most people about the trip they couldn’t contain their excitement about all of the positives, “You aren’t going to work for over a year!”, “You get to travel with fiance around the world!”. But the more I heard their excitement the more obvious it was to me how uneasy and scared I was.

The first month or so of the trip I wrestled with these feelings. The end of Hawaii and Israel were the toughest. I missed my friends and family, I felt so far away from anything familiar and comfortable and I kept reminding myself that I would feel this way for many many months to come.

Plus I couldn’t help but notice that absolutely everything in my life had turned on a dime. I had no job, no home, no loved ones (except Ofer of course) close by, no car, no private time. Not to mention that the first day of the trip was the day that Ofer and I got engaged. I was suddenly going to be someone’s wife, we are really going to get married, live together, commit ourselves to each other for the rest of our lives and someday in the not so distant future I was going to be someone’s mother! I had never in my life even lived with a boyfriend and now not only were we living together we were with each other 24 hours a day. No going to work and then sharing about our day when we got home. Nope. He knew all of the happenings throughout my day not to mention all the unmentionable ones.

Now if I step back, I promise I am more happy and excited than anyone about all of this. I am marring the man of my dreams, we are traveling the world together, we are planning a wedding and we are getting to know each other more than I ever could have imagined before we do so. However the people close to me know that nothing in my life is done without a lot of thought, a lot of talk and a lot of analysis ( as if you couldn’t tell from reading my blogs). If I were home and newly engaged I would be lunching with my girlfriends talking about what a huge step marriage is. About who I want to be in this marriage, about my dreams my excitement and also about my fears. We would process all of this. I like processing things. It made me feel like I have taken the time to try to understand each facet of what was happening so that I wouldn’t have a moment in my life when I would wake up and look around and think to myself, “when did all of this happen?”.

But somewhere in the world, maybe it was Nepal or maybe India, things changed. Ofer and I hit a travel groove. Suddenly things started to gel. I started to notice I could pack my suitcase in half the time. Ofer and I seemed to work out what items and tasks were whose responsibility. If we didn’t know exactly how to get to the hotel I would chill with the baggage until we figured it out. I brought tissues and earplugs for the flight and Ofer arranged the ride to the airport. Neither of a needed to control everything and both of us understood that we each needed to contribute in our own way to feel effective.

And what’s more, I really started to enjoy the process. Now, I like not knowing what the room is going to look like that we are going to sleep in next week. I am even OK with the fact that it well very may be a total disaster. No water from the shower or electricity, no problem...I have learned to take baths in the sink with candle light. No seat belts in the taxi, no problem...flying around in the back seat honestly doesn’t even phase me anymore. Pringles and Fanta for dinner....sound great it covers two of the most important food group: starch and radioactive orange.

This may seem easy to some of you. But to me it is very new. I am used to being in control. I love control (have I mentioned that). I like having notes in my bag of every detail for the trip so nothing goes wrong. I have the flight details, the hotel number and even a map showing the route there. And as much as I like that part of myself...my ability to organize, I have to admit it is liberating to learn to let it go. It feels like I have lifted a weight of responsibility that I was putting on myself; to be perfect, to make the world predictable, to live life through worrying.

Because for me at least, that is really what it is. It is smart to have certain details understood, especially when you are traveling in a foreign place but I obsessed over every little thing going smoothly and as predicted. But the thing that only I had access to, in my body, in my head was how exhausting that was. Constantly worrying, constantly playing the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ game in my head. But I started to notice that no matter if these self induced stresses went through my head or not things always seemed to work out. So in fact, the only person that the worrying was hurting was me. It was like I was living the trip in my own suffocating bubble. I could see and experience what was going on in my own way but I wasn’t allowing myself to access the richness and color, to allow things to be new and different and sometimes hard without making it a painful experience.

Isn’t that the most difficult task in life. To be in control of your own thoughts. To not let your environment determine how you experience the world. Whether in the best of times or the worst of times, I am the only one who creates my experience of them. I truly believe that the quality of our own life that we perceive is ONLY determined by our thoughts. Two people who go through the same traumatic event can see it through completely different lenses. The person who lets the trauma no matter how small be in control of them, in my opinion, ultimately is the one creating the trauma.

These are things that I hope to work on throughout my life. I am in control of my experience. Period. I am the only one that is living the world the way I have chosen to experience it. Period. My happiness, fear, success or failure is determined alone by the way I choose to experience the world.

There are many times that ‘Anxiety Shayna’ shows up. Sometimes she is at the airport rolling her eyes when Ofer forgets the flight number. Other times she is standing on the street dodging rickshaws and missing her old couch and remote control. This trip has been a test in so many ways. A test of how I choose to see my world and how I choose to respond. Even as I write this I struggle with with situations and worries. But more often that not, definitely more than ever in my life, ‘Chilled Out Shayna’ is stepping in. Laughing at the mistakes that we make and excited to see what comes next.

So much of this is a testament to Ofer. That man lives life as a Yogi (except without all the postures). He is able to be still. Challenges arise and he just notices them and moves ahead toward what he believes is right. He even admits that sometimes his own thoughts create the challenges and instead of reacting to them he just watches them like passing clouds without putting judgement on them.

And he is incredibly consistent; consistently loving, thoughtful, creative, positive and patient. Patient with himself and impressively patient with me. I think we are all so complex. Some of us let our complexities run like news tickers in our minds and other feed the lines straight out our mouths. I am the latter. I put it all out there with him. He knows everything; the good, the bad and sometimes the really really bad. But he is rarely shaken. Even as I continue to toss pebbles and throw stones in this waters he always returns to stillness. And this stillness is catching. The more I am around him, the more I truly want to learn from him how to be this way.

The way I felt on the first day of this trip is so far away from the way I feel now. Sitting in the airport, surrounded by a language that is not my own, with a 5 day old head cold, not knowing what is coming up for us next...I am better than good, I am great.