On Adaptability

Even though I’m months behind on this blog, I’ve been trying to keep my posts more or less in chronological order. I’m going to break from that soon– if I want to write about Sri Lanka before I finish California, there’s no real reason not to– but I thought I’d give you a birds-eye view of what these last few months have been like.

I finished the Trapped In Turkey tour in mid-July and headed back to the US a week later for a two-month stay. I popped up to Maine for a wedding but otherwise had a palindromic itinerary: Boston, San Francisco, LA, San Francisco, Boston. I returned to Istanbul at the end of September and three and a half weeks later I jetted off to Athens for the TBEX conference and the Peloponnese for a FAM trip. I returned to Istanbul for four or five nights and then went to London (via Kiev) for an intense four days of World Travel Market. The most intense part was getting the opportunity to go to TBCAsia in Sri Lanka, so after London I returned to Istanbul for four nights and then was off to Sri Lanka (via Frankfurt) for twelve transformative days. Somewhere around this time my parents decided to fly me back to California for Thanksgiving, so I spent a night in Istanbul post-Sri Lanka before flying to San Francisco (via Munich) for a week with my family and then finally returned to Istanbul at the beginning of December.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I moved into a new apartment, finished a major project, and started a new job.

If you found that exhausting to read, imagine how exhausting it was to live.

I loved all of it, truly. Even when Istanbul felt like the city I traveled to just to do laundry, I was endlessly grateful for the life I was living.

Now that I’m resettled into Istanbul (I haven’t left for more than a month!) I’ve had more time to reflect on six months of madness, of the endless forward motion.

What has struck me most is the easy adaptability that I’ve somehow acquired along this convoluted life path. I realized it first when I returned to Istanbul from the USA and both felt so comfortable– I discovered I am able to slip between those two worlds with minimal culture shock. It was reinforced over and over as I made Athens feel like a home, as I quickly learned the London Underground, as I mentally prepared to go to Sri Lanka on such short notice, as I immediately leaped from tropical Southeast Asia to autumnal suburbia in California.

It’s an affirming thing to realize. I feel very confident these days, very capable of dealing with whatever strange turns life lobs my way. I can throw myself into a strange or unexpected place and land on my feet. The ability to adapt continues even when I’m not traveling: the other day, I found myself rushing to the posh Istanbul district of Nisantasi to buy a gift for a movie star (that’s a whole separate story) and even though I was stressed and fighting off coffee shakes and slipping on icy sidewalks, I marveled at how this totally unforeseen circumstance was manageable for me. I could easily slip this into my daily to-do list, and succeed. I am an adaptable person, more than I’ve ever been before.

Travel inevitably teaches you to roll with the punches. These last few months have been unusually intense, but I embrace it– adaptability is one of those traits that I will be able to carry forward into my future life, wherever it takes me. Realizations like this make me appreciate the life path I’ve chosen, and crave more opportunities to grow and learn. I look forward to jumping deeper into the unknown. I can do it.