Day 30: Embracing the Broken – Stuttgart to Paris

It’s been days now since I wrote my last blog – not out of the lack of thinking-time but because sometimes I don’t find a charging spot in a train (my laptop battery sucks big time) or sometimes I am too sleepy when I reach my hostel after all the sight-seeing of the day.[Right now I am typing while sitting on the train to Paris from Stuttgart]

Life has changed or maybe, I have changed. Only a few days earlier we were thinking of our student exchange program, planning of the places we would visit – Vienna, Paris, Santorini, etc; And now we are here living that dream of ours we had seen from before joining an MBA program.

Oh, how I love myself to have dared to take this trip despite all the initial doubts of mine and worries of my loved ones. Oh, how I love myself today that I am almost a nomad traveling from one place to another, sleeping in trains, making a living room in train stations, with my backpack that has sufficient clothes to last me for two months.

Of course, it isn’t a piece of cake all the time. We can’t make calls when we want to, I can’t eat whatever I lay my eyes on; my stuffs get lost or misplaced all the time. In the last 30 days, I have lost not only my clothes and jacket but I have also managed to spill water on both my phones, spoiling their circuits so that even three repairing shops have given up on trying repairing them. I bought the cheapest phone available in the market only a few days back so that I can still attend calls and take a photo or two for memories’ sake. And the selfie-stick my sister gifted me for my solo travel? Broken, that too.

It’s disheartening at times when I have to let go of material possessions I adored. It’s disheartening when bad things happen, when I have to carry so much luggage around which is so unlike me, when I sometimes don’t get a hostel to stay and have to worry about where and how to spend the night, and now that the blisters on my feet are taking forever to heal.

But above all the disappointments, the small failures, I guess the bigger picture still remains the same – that here I am, finally embracing life, embracing myself with every broken pieces of my soul. For I dare not repair the broken to let the scars remain, I decide to let the broken forget it was ever broken, so that if it heals, let it be, if it doesn’t let it be. Let it be.

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