Last year my husband and I visited Rarotonga. It was a long-awaited trip looked forward to throughout a busy year. Every time I felt life was a bit tough, I imagined myself on those white-sand, blue-sky beaches. We arrived to sure enough to white sand, coconut palms and blue skies just exactly as I had imagined it, but looking back, my memory is clouded instead by resentment: at the steady winds that blew across the beach making it uncomfortably cool, at the raging itchiness I developed with a heat rash, and at the inability to feel restful despite nothing but searingly beautiful aquamarine seas to look out upon. I resented the “difficult” circumstances and allowed myself to wallow in it.
One year on, as I write this, I am currently sitting on a stony beach on a different tropical holiday overlooking a brown, swollen river overshadowed by a clutch of sheltering trees in the jungles of North Sumatra. They hover like midwives over our morning fire as we cook on sticks our freshly caught fish for breakfast. I have red spots all over me from leech bites, stinging flies and potentially malaria-ridden mosquitoes. Tropical storms with thunder and forked lightning have assaulted us every evening… yet I feel content. More than content. Deeply at peace here and with a heart swollen full with gratitude. To lie by this river, serenaded by the song of cicadas and a thousand other jungle creatures all the black night through, has left me soaked in a sense of warmth and tranquillity. In fact, I find I am faced with another dilemma entirely: that of letting go of this tropical paradise. I can’t bear the thought of returning to the concrete jungle with its sirens and exhaust smoke back home.
What is different this time? The difference is that I have spent a year cultivating a practice of gratitude…
Listen in for the rest of the Podcast.
Share this post