Nothing gets the proverbial escape plan in motion like a trip to Thailand dangling under your nose.
Last weekend, I’d already decided to ask for some additional, unpaid time off from work. I’d envisioned spending a week in silent retreat, wandering the grounds of a meditation center and rebooting my mental system so I could forge ahead with a better attitude.
But by Tuesday—before I ever managed to spring this on my boss—a friend had liquored me up and half-convinced me to steal away to Southeast Asia with her and another of our coworkers.
“You can meditate in Thailand,” she told me. “They are Buddhist, after all. Besides, you’d be amazed at how different your problems look from halfway around the world.”
(This is something that I should know for a fact. I do, after all, work for a travel company. But in truth, I don’t even have a current passport. I hardly feel sheltered, but my two forays abroad practically render me a bumpkin in the eyes of my footloose colleagues.)
This is one of those times when I don’t know whether to listen to my own inner guide or keep my eyes on the signs around me. The next step seems so obvious; even my relatively practical mother has encouraged me to take this trip. My hesitation is that the real escape I’ve been seeking seems more of an inward journey than an actual one. But am I really just so crusty and dried up from my day job that I’m not recoginizing the escape hatch when I see it!?
Just in case, I’m going to go ahead and renew my passport.
Meanwhile, another idea I’m stewing—one that would nicely accommodate world travels, actually—is to try and take my current work freelance. It’s not the most promising response to a promotion, and wrongly navigated, could put my entire relationship with this company at risk. So it’s kind of a scary week ahead. But if all goes south and I lose my steady paycheck, I do know a place where I can live for $20 a day….
