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Solo travel, Enlightenment Epiphanies and Some Leadership Lessons
No transcendence to speak of.
I turned 45 last month, and I celebrated it by myself with a glass of scotch in the remotest part of India — Leh.
And, before you conjure up images of me drowning in scotch and being sad, lonely, or depressed on my birthday and thinking that age got to me — stop. It wasn’t any of that. Okay, maybe, a little.
I was sold on the idea of solo travel as a catalyst to spiritual enlightenment — as God manifests itself only when you travel alone to an exotic destination. So I decided to mark this milestone by meeting my real self, uncover my elusive passion, discover the mystic wisdom of this cosmos, and undergo a magical transformation.
Sorry to break it to you but none of the magical transformations ever happened.
And reflecting back, I understand why. All the advice about traveling alone overlooks the fact that we are prisoners of our minds. When we travel to a different place, it is a mere change in the foreground for our infinite thinking loops running in the background. My experience was no different — I was in constant mind-numbing chatter about the mundane, and the problems I had been grappling with back home.
“Why do you wonder that…
