The surprising way getting lost in China actually leads to awakening
What's not to love about a hyperbolic title?!
My son and I were sitting down to lunch in the nearby shopping mall when I got a panicked message from my husband. He’d arrived in China for business that morning and had managed to get a connecting flight from Beijing to his final destination. But on arriving there he was stuck at the airport.
He had no cash and couldn’t find an ATM. No one he spoke to understood English and he didn’t have the name of his hotel in Chinese. Before he left last night my son told him to download a translation app. He didn’t. (He believes people everywhere speak English, which is true, apart from when it isn’t.) He had asked me download a messaging app which would actually work in China before he left, which is how I was able to get his message.
The wifi at the airport was patchy, he said, and roaming from our local phone company wasn’t working at all. Side note - the roaming capability is patchy in every country we’ve been to including the UK. Maybe we should just buy local SIMs in future. But I digress.
I googled the name of the hotel in Chinese and messaged it to him. I also found the name a taxi hailing app which accepts foreign credit cards, a VPN operator - which he couldn’t access but may be able to from the company’s office -, and the name of the Chinese search engine. It’s called Baidu in case you’re wondering because obviously Google doesn’t work!
Why am I telling you all this? Firstly, because although I knew he was stressed out and panicking, and probably hadn’t had enough sleep on the plane, I also knew he would make it to his hotel. I was chuckling to myself as the messages stopped and I finished my lunch. Because by that point he’d managed to find an ATM. I was sure he’d managed to get a taxi and was on his way to the hotel.
I mean, it’s amazingly easy to be calm and philosophical when you’re not the one stuck in a situation! But also I spent a year in China pre-smart phones. I have some stories to share about being lost and stranded and unable to communicate. But things always work on fine in the end.
Secondly, because I’m weird and I actually kind of love these moments. Travel is as much about things going horribly wrong, being stranded and forced to rely on your wits to get out of a sticky situation, as it is about anything. Anyone who’s ever traveled much, especially off the beaten path, knows this!
I mean obviously, I don’t think that way when I’m in the middle of one of those tricky situations. In the moment, when I’m in a foreign country, where I don’t speak the language, have no clue where I am or how anything works, it’s a totally different matter. Then I wish life was smooth and easy and everything always worked out perfectly all the time.
But, later, with hindsight, those sticky moments make the best stories. They build our self-trust and our trust in a benevolent universe that’s always working on our behalf. They also remind us that our default response is usually the least helpful. I tend to get irritable with everything and everyone when things aren’t going my way. My husband tends to panic and/ or catastrophize.
Such moments offer us the opportunity to practice staying calm - and I don’t know about you, but I still need a lot of practice. They’re offerings to help us trust our intuition and build the resilience and inner strength we crave. If we can figure out how to stay present, there’s no better opportunity to get detached from the need to have things always go our way all the time. Because nothing ever goes our way, all the time.
So much of our culture, is sold on the idea that the whole point of life is figuring out what we want and manipulating circumstances to make sure we get that thing. This is especially true in the world of online business and self-help/ personal development, where it’s all about setting goals and stopping at nothing to make them happen.
Depending on your leaning, you either employ productivity hacks, “proven paths”, and strategies to get what you want. Or, if you’re more spiritually inclined, you set about vibrating at the right frequency to align to your goals so that what you want comes to you.
I call bullshit on both of these. Because getting what you WANT very often creates a mile-wide barrier to getting what you NEED. And fundamentally we all need the same things, peace, joy, love, and an end to suffering.
We think suffering will end when our life is arranged just so and we’ve eliminated all the toxic people and difficult circumstances from our lives. But the thing that creates our suffering isn’t other people or external circumstances. It’s our own emotional reactions and the stories we attach to them which cause our pain.
But back to my husband. By the time I’d got home and started working on this newsletter, he’d called me from his hotel. Crazy nice hotel by the way, massive indoor swimming pool with insane chutes and slides - my son is pretty annoyed he doesn’t get to go there.
Where was I? Oh yes, now at the hotel he was able to FaceTime me. His voice was upbeat and he was laughing about the whole situation by that point. It turns out that his Chinese colleague was at the airport for a family trip at the same time and he bumped into him! The colleague was able to help him get a taxi and give directions to the driver, so he arrived at the hotel without any problems.
Did I not say that these moments offer the best chance to learn to trust in a benevolent universe?!! Because being lost and stranded and having no clue how we’re going to get out of a situation is a normal part of travel. But so are chance encounters, lucky breaks and serendipidous moments! Also life. I’m talking about all of life here.
Last week I said I was changing the name of this Substack to The Slow Path. But then on Tuesday I was in the cold basement auditorium of the Asian Civilizations Museum for the start of my training to be a volunteer guide and some one mentioned the phrase “same same but different”.
That’s the name of my Substack, I thought!
So I’m changing again. And while I can’t promise that next week won’t offer me an even better name for this publication, because you know, who knows? But I don’t intend to go changing it every week. So I’ll do my best not to change it again anytime soon!
If you’re not familiar with this phrase of want to know more about why I felt it’s such a good fit, do check out my About page.
Thanks for bearing with me through this transition.
And if this is no longer the Substack for you, then no hard feelings. Well, maybe a few, I’m human after all and prone to interpreting unsubscribes as rejection. I know, I know! I’m working on it. I promise I’ll remind myself no one’s obligated to read and sometimes we all just subscribe to too many things, or we’re simply not interested in something anymore and that’s perfectly OK!