I picked a level spot on some powdery white sand near the edge of the ocean. Lying down on my sarong, I pulled my towel over me as a blanket. It was a starry, balmy night, with a tropical breeze blowing gently across my face.
I liked my new bedroom so much that I slept there for a week. Each evening, I’d lie down and close my eyes just as the first twinkling stars appeared in the night sky. Soothed by the crickets’ lullaby, I would peacefully drift off to sleep.
Each morning, I’d wake up to the first rays of sunlight kissing my toes and the sound of the local fishermen getting ready to start their day. Wading into the still water while I had the ocean to myself, I’d take a morning dip before rousing my friends.
By this point, I was deeply tanned, and my hair was completely blonde, bleached from the salt and sun. I’m also convinced that my heart rate and blood pressure slowed down significantly. At times I felt so relaxed, I couldn’t even be bothered to get out of my hammock to pee.
My Harvard friends wouldn’t have recognized me if they could see me “just chilling.” Catherine and Marion couldn’t imagine me ever being driven. To the outside eye, I looked like your average beach bum. Internally, a profound shift was happening.
I was still in search of my purpose and of the purpose of life in general. But I realized now that I’d been hitting it too hard. If I were going to maintain stamina to pursue a larger meaning and mission, it was key for me to sometimes slow down and recharge.
My favorite place to unwind was the ocean. I would float for two to three hours at a time, oblivious to everything around me except the warm, nurturing water. For the first time in my life, I completely let go, relaxing every muscle, emptying my head and heart, listening only to the lapping waves. I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the ocean began. I was one with everything, and everything was one with me.
By far the most stunning beach was our last stop, Phra Nang Bay. Long before the tourist industry, filmmakers, and rock climbers discovered it, we knew we’d found the jewel of Thailand. Sheer limestone pillars rose from the turquoise water while pearly, soft sand faded underfoot into the sea. When we weren’t swimming or sunbathing, we explored the large cave on shore, climbing up steep walls on slippery ropes through its myriad passages. By now our group had expanded to a gang of seven, joined by Catherine and Marion’s friend Paula, Cath’s new Thai boyfriend Prin, a Danish guy named Henrik, and another Brit named Peter. At night, we ate fresh fish at one of the only three restaurants on the island, skinny-dipped after dark, and danced until the wee hours at a bar carved into the cave. Life was good.
Watching Prin and Catherine kiss, part of me hoped I too would fall in love during my travels. But I was also glad that I hadn’t met anyone special, as I might have missed out on other relationships and travel experiences. Although I wouldn’t have complained if Mr. Right came paddling in on the next wooden boat, I was content with my flirty encounters along the trail.
I wish I could’ve stayed in Thailand forever, but my travel clock was ticking. I had only a couple of months left to get through Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Bali, and Australia before showing up back in New Zealand to lead the summer exchange trip again. As I hugged Catherine and Marion good-bye, I already missed them. A special bond forms between backpacking buddies that’s different from the friendships you make back home. Especially if you travel together for a long time, you go through things and see things that no one else can understand, no matter how many photos you show or how well you try to explain. Twenty years later, Cath and I still write, email, and talk on the phone. We’re currently planning our next big trip.
At twenty-two, life was a wonderful adventure. I was drunk on the freedom of being able to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. For fifteen months, I’d visited fascinating, off-the-beaten-track places, seeing things I never even knew existed. I’d experienced countries from the inside, as a member of the family. I’d interacted with dozens of diverse people and cultures, helping me understand new and different parts of myself.
I had embraced the world, and the world embraced me back.
When I was twelve years old, I got Bat Mitzvahed with my sister. “Mazel Tov! Welcome to adulthood!” everyone said, shaking my hand and kissing my cheeks. But after opening my presents and sending out thank-you notes, I was no more ready to be a grown-up than before I had memorized all of those Torah passages.
Now of legal age, I still didn’t know how to be an adult. I had been back in the United States from my world trip for only three weeks. Unfortunately, my re-entry hadn’t been as joyful as my travels. I arrived home just in time for a recession, penniless and without a job.
Many tribal cultures provide meaningful, practical rites of passage to assist adolescents in their transition to adulthood—things like sending them off into the woods with no food to learn how to hunt. In contrast, the focus of most Western coming-of-age ceremonies is a big party. We generally don’t offer pragmatic instruction to prepare young people to become happy, well-functioning adults. My life question, “What do I want to do and be in the world?” now had practical constraints: “Can I do what I love and still afford to eat?”
One evening during my senior year in college, my roommates and I sat around our living room talking about what each of us would likely become in the future. “Becky, Heidi, Elise, and Ignacio are going to be lawyers . . . David and Paulie are doctors . . . Jason’s an artist . . . Megan and Kevin are going to do something in business . . . and Laurie? Hmm. We have no idea.”
Neither did I.
After four intensive years at an Ivy League school, I needed a break from academics, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever go back to school. I certainly didn’t want to go directly to graduate school, as had many of my friends. I wasn’t going to become a doctor, go to law school, get an entry-level job in a Fortune 500 company, or do anything else that people were saying a Harvard graduate “should” do. I wasn’t purposely rebelling; it’s just that the current options felt so limiting, and none of them felt like “me.” My interests and talents were much more diverse, something I first realized while hanging off a cliff in Switzerland.
Why Say “Or” When You Can Say “And”?
Appreciate and Allow Multiple Passions
My parents had promised I could travel every summer during college, and I held them to their word. Not only was I eager to visit my Swiss family and farm, but I also wanted to climb a serious alpine peak and learn German. Thinking it would be a great way to kill two birds with one stone, I had signed up for a Bergsteigerschule (mountaineering school) in the heart of the Swiss German Alps.
That was not one of my better brainstorms.
“Diese?” (“This one?”) I called down to my guides, fifty feet below me.
“Nein, nein!” (“No, no!”) they shouted back up.
I was trying to figure out which rope on my waist I should clip into the carabiner to secure me to the side of the cliff, versus the one that if released, would send me plummeting down the mountain.
My guides, Hans and Fritz (yes, those were actually their names) were about as good in English as I was in German, and they kept mixing up key words like “up” and “down”—very inconvenient when