Expect, and Enjoy the Unexpected

As an immigrant, I am no stranger to change. Moving to a new country taught me several lessons. One of the most important lessons I have learned is that life is full of change.

I couldn’t think of a better way to illustrate this idea than by sharing a part of one of my favorite books: “You are a badass, how to stop doubting your greatness and start living an awesome life,” written by Jen Sincero. This book taught me a lot about life and I want to share one of the best lessons I learned from it with you.

“When I bought my ticket on the Super Deluxe Express bus to Delhi from Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, I was told I was paying a wise 400 rupees extra for the luxury of a 5 hour nonstop ride, as opposed to 10 hours and countless stops of the local bus. I was so extremely exhausted from the three sleepless days I’d spent whooping it up at a camel festival in the desert that the thought of bunkering down on the Super Deluxe and sleeping all the way to Delhi sounded good to me. But what I got instead was a seat next to Mr. Friendly, a middle-aged man who spoke three words of English, and who insisted on chatting me up even though I was doing what I thought was a very convincing job of fake sleeping, and a very real job of having no freakin’ idea what he was saying.

The bus left an hour late due to massive confusion and overbooking and took almost 2 hours to get out of town thanks to the fact that it was November, peak wedding season. Weddings in India traditionally involve a ceremony that lasts for days, stretches for miles, welcomes anyone caught in crossfire and includes a parade through the streets complete with horses, marching band, explosives, a car with a loudspeaker, blaring Indian music and important wedding announcements, and a bunch of guys carrying what looks like table lamps on their heads. My bus ended up getting trapped in wedding festivities pretty much every 10 minutes, which meant that everyone on the bus, every time we stopped, skipped off to join the party.

When we finally did get out of town, we kept pulling over to let random people on and off (in the middle of nowhere), have some tea, a smoke, a chat, maybe light a fire in the brush in a ditch or strap giant burlap sacks full of something large and bulbous to the roof. At some point this guy got on who was standing by the side of the road in the darkness. We scooped him up without coming to a full stop and he took his place at the front of the bus, standing next to my seat, and immediately began hollering at everyone in Hindi. My bus mates responded by cheering, chanting, and sitting in silence, while I responded by seeing if I couldn’t find another seat farther away from his mouth. I got up and joined the group of people sitting on rickety benches around the bus windshield. We were careening through the narrow dirt streets of tiny villages, Bollywood music crackling over the radio, slowing down only for the almighty, holy cow. Then all of a sudden, in some tiny nowhere village, he pulls over yet again. More chai perhaps? Maybe he’s going to go visit a friend? Has to pee? Wants to talk a walk for an hour while we sit here? The driver waves for me to follow and gets off, as does everyone on the bus. It turns out that Mr. Yell in My Ear was some sort of holy man who was just warming up the crowd for a tour of the temples in this small, gorgeous village, called Vrindavan. It is, I learned, the place where Krishna went with his wife Radha and where they build hundreds of temples in their honor.

So for the next 2 hours I found myself wandering through countless temples, gaily tossing flowers onto shrines, holding hands and skilling in a circle around a statute of Krishna, solemnly chanting, praying an clapping, and all I could think was how homicidal a bus of New Yorkers on the express bus from New York to DC would be in a similar situation. Meanwhile, not one person on the bus was expecting this, and not one person complained, even though when we finally got back on the bus it was well past the time we were supposed to be arriving in Delhi and we were still a good five hours away. Instead, they all changed, and tipped, the holy man and spent the rest of the ride merrily chanting away with one another. After that we stopped at a roadside restaurant for dinner, then another pee break, then I was waking up the family I was staying with at Delhi at 3 a.m. They, of course, acted like it was the middle of the afternoon and insisted I share a cup of tea.

Here’s what India taught me about tapping into the Mother Lode:

• Talk to strangers, we’re all family on this planet.
• Expect, and enjoy, the unexpected.
• Find the humor.
• Join the party.
• Live in the moment.
• Time spent enjoying yourself is never time wasted.
• Share your space
• Loosen your bone, Wilma
• Love yourself, and life becomes a party.”