Category: THIMPHU

Walking It Into Me: Preparing to Leave Bhutan

Lately, my walks have felt different.

I take the long way around campus, I watch the clouds drift in low over the hills like they’ve done every day.

I’m leaving Bhutan soon.

And I find myself trying to walk it into me. All of it. The sound of monks chanting in the distance. The rhythm of archery matches on weekends.

I want it to stay.

So I walk. Through Changlam’s narrow streets.

Some days I walk with purpose. Others, I let myself drift. But every step feels like a soft recording of memory. A way of telling this place: I’m still here. I’m paying attention. I won’t forget.

Bhutan teaches you how to be still, even while moving. How to see the sacred in the everyday. How to belong, even if only for a season.

I know I can’t take the mountains with me. Or the scent of pine rising after a rain. Or the way the valley lights glow just before dark.

But I can carry the walks.

And the way they’ve changed me.

2024-2025

A Shift in the Wind

For twenty-two years, traveling has been as natural to me as breath. A flight, a bus ride, a long walk to a border—none of it ever felt heavy. I moved through countries the way others move through days: with routine, with comfort, with a deep sense of rhythm. I knew how to land lightly, to observe quickly, to adjust to my new surroundings almost instantly. I rarely hesitated. I rarely questioned.

But lately… something has changed.

It’s subtle, and I almost didn’t want to admit it at first. There’s a strange new hesitancy as I think about the next move. I find myself lying awake, thinking not just of logistics, but of something harder to name. A quiet weight. A kind of unease. The unknowns I used to welcome now feel vaguely threatening. I catch myself wondering if I’ll get to know the next place deeply enough, if I’ll be able to slip into its rhythms the way I always have.

There’s a loss of grip—not on the world, perhaps, but on the way I’ve known myself in it. I used to feel grounded, even while constantly in motion. Paradoxically, I always felt rooted in my rootlessness. Now, though, there’s a faint sense of becoming unmoored. As if the thread I’ve followed for so long has begun to fray at the edges.

I don’t say this with regret. I say it with curiosity. And some caution. But mostly with honesty.

Maybe the change is not in the places, but in me.

When you’ve lived this way for as long as I have, the line between home and not-home becomes blurred. You create meaning in movement. You build familiarity in the unfamiliar. But now, something inside me wants to pause and ask: Where, exactly, am I going? What am I still looking for? Not in the dramatic, life-redefining way. Just in the gentle, persistent way that feelings shift when you aren’t looking.

It’s not fear I’m feeling—not quite. It’s more like… grief. Or the awareness that a chapter is quietly closing, even as the next one begins to open. Maybe it’s the realization that I can’t keep arriving in places expecting them to fill the same space they used to. That’s not what they were meant to do. And maybe I’ve changed, in ways I haven’t fully acknowledged. Maybe I’m asking for different things now.

Still, this doesn’t mean I’ve lost my love for travel. It just means I need to meet it differently. With slower steps. With more intention. With the courage to not know a place fully, and still find meaning in it. With the humility to realize that being untethered can also be a form of freedom—even if it feels shakier than before.

If you’ve felt this too—this shift, this stirring—I want to tell you: it’s okay. The road is still yours, even if it feels different beneath your feet. You haven’t lost your way. You’re just learning to walk it in a new way. That’s not failure. That’s growth.

And growth, after all, is the truest form of movement.

May2025