Living in a van brings a lot of changes and challenges to the traveler's life. One of these changes is the need to focus one's energy on other things than before: The day is structured differently and the needs of the occupants are of the highest importance.
This is particularly true if one of them is sick and needs special care and attention. This special care will make simple things more difficult but ultimately teaches both people involved a great deal about two most underrated virtues in today's larger society: Patience & faith.
The dreaded p-word
I always used to think that I was already kinda good with patience before this travel journey in the van started. And though that is true to some extent, the reality of our situation has brought me face to face with an immense amount of patience necessary to master the challenges ahead of me.
Patience has this curious capacity to always become apparent when it is lacking - things become hectic, I start to lash out more than I would like and things generally tend to stagnate and stop working the less patience I feel.
Then at other times when I really don't care how fast things are moving I don't feel particularly rewarded. It's like feeling patient is not reward in and of itself but rather a desireable basis of being, one that enables the flow of life to find its way more fluently and without friction and disappointment.
And so these days I am thankful that life has thrown us so many challenges because it literally forces me to learn more patience than I thought I would ever need.
It makes me see that the lack of patience is actually another way of control-obsession, of the constant ego need to have things move as the mind has laid them out in perfectly linear and logical order. And the less patience there is in me the tougher the hickups along the way become.
Not sure I will ever be as patient with ease as I feel I want to be, but I do recognize that my patience is growing in light of all the delays and unexpected hurdles that came up during our travels this past month. And we are still here on our way, still feeling the mission we set out to do and we have learnt some major lessons this way of the kind that I feel only a lack of patience can teach and make apparent.
Why then do we feel lack of patience sometimes? I think it has to do with an underlying fear, the fear of losing faith in the greater mission.
Faith is trust
Faith in what we set out to do with this van project is essential, especially when things start moving in odd or even scary ways. Take the onset of a medical condition for example -- it can be a major candidate to lose faith in the plan and start considering dropout options like quitting the trip and going back to where you started from. And that feels really scary, partly because after these thoughts are entertained long enough they become more plausible as the mind conjures up more and more reasons to quit in light of challenge.
Travel life is a golden opportunity to learn to push through these times of challenge and let-down and to simply trust that things will work out and that the original idea of going out into the world is as sound as it ever was, probably moreso.
This does not mean being naive and clinging on to old ideas in light of drastically different circumstances that warrant a new plan. But what it does mean is that when things seem scary and unclear, when problems appear that are only solved through one's own decision based on fear or trust, it is trust that will bring you through the deepest valleys and darkest nights.
It almost feels like the challenges and hurdles we experienced these past weeks were offers - cosmic offers to lure us back into being scared, into quitting our dream merely due to a fear-based projection of the mind in light of problems that may just as easily solve themselves provided we don't ever lose faith in the meaning and intelligence of life that guides us.
If your mind needs a helping hand rationalizing for faith in uncertain situations of challenge, you might as well look at problems as a savior and trust that it may just be for the better this way. Maybe having left that parking spot yesterday night like you originally planned would have made you crash into a truck on the highway and the only sure way to avoid this is to find that the car battery is drained and that the car won't be moving anywhere that day, saving your life.
We will never know what didn't happen as things happened the way they did, but if I think about the weird delays in this manner and trust that they are somehow just as important as the days where we made great visible progress along our route it makes me feel a lot better.
So it always comes back to trust in the end. Trust it. If you're living the van-life you need to trust it. And you need to find the patience it takes to push through the early offers of life to lure you back to your starting position.
See it as a test. If you have patience and faith in the thing you are doing you will eventually pass. Only impatience and lack of faith could ever hope to bring you to your knees. So when you do feel either of the two just let it go, take a deep breath and try again tomorrow.
You will thank yourself one day that you chose to continue with the mission in light of all the far-out hurdles that appeared but never managed to pull you off-balance completely <3
unsplash.com
unsplash.com