Marbles

To the ferociously brave women who want to move abroad and see the world, I admire you, I am you, and I am scared for you. 

I’m not frightened that this big bad world, as described by our faint of heart friends, will swallow you up, but that you will not swallow you up. 

Some of us will do our big move right. These women will prepare for their adventure with inner contemplation as to what drove them out of the lives they had grown tired of building. 

But many of us, including myself, have and will do it wrong. We will pack our bags and move away from the lives that were making us sad without ever realizing what created our unrest to begin with. 

My grandmother had a tub of marbles that lived under her coach along with a Chinese checkerboard. I didn’t really like Chinese checkers but I loved these marbles. I would dump them out on her old patterned carpet and run them through my fingers, sometimes sending them flying in all directions. This may explain why the pile looks smaller now.

Today, they live on a shelf in my living room. I like to get them down and dump them on the floor. Occasionally, I dump them into my vegetable strainer and give them a good washing to remove the lifetime of dust that has accumulated on them.

I know how some of them feel heavier in my hand than others. I know that the very old marbles have a rougher exterior than the newer ones. And, I know some of them are made with unfamiliar non-translucent material. Perhaps, lead? Luckily I have grown out of putting them in my mouth. 

Anyway, what I am trying to say is please go on the trip to that country that scares you a little. Quit your job and move to the place that makes you feel alive. And don’t wait for a travel partner, just go. 

But most importantly, dump your fricking marbles on the floor and give them a good hard look before you pack your bags. If you’re feeling motivated, give them a wash in the vegetable strainer. 

Do not leave your marbles unfamiliar and dusty because you're going to have to check them out eventually. I would much rather get this done before heading to a beach in Bali.  

Perhaps I’m projecting, but nobody told me to look deep inside at what was making me sad before I moved abroad. Quite the opposite actually, the real human voices in my life told me life wasn’t supposed to be that great so please stay in the job with the 401k.

The movies portrayed sad single or newly divorced women who moved away from lackluster lives to find fulfillment and maybe a new lover in some tropical country. 

No. No. No.

If you are depressed when you leave the States you’ll still be that way after 48 hours of flying. To top it all of, if you’re a solo traveler you’ll be alone. And let me tell you, intrusive thoughts also love a beach getaway. 

I so badly wish I would have dumped all of my unfamiliar and rough feelings out on the floor before I moved to India. I could have discovered their colors and debunked what made their surfaces uneven to begin with. I could have picked them up by the handfuls and cast the ugly ones aside to live with all the other lost marbles under my grandmother's recliner.

Instead, I chose to carry an unfamiliar bag of dirty marbles with me to the other side of the world. 

This is not a movie and I had no beautiful wavy-haired European man to help me cast my marbles into the ocean. It was just me, learning to brave and not sad in the most beautiful and scary places on earth all whilst carrying a stupid bag of stupid marbles. 

I would get so tired of carrying around these marbles that sometimes I would spend entire days alone in my hotel room. Do I need to tell you the story of when I refused to participate in Holi? Sometimes I could not plan the next leg of my journey because I felt so deeply tired. I even skipped my trip to Bali because I wanted to stay in the safe familiarity that was Sri Lanka.

I know what you’re thinking, how could you be such a boring sad asshole? You were doing what so many people dream of. How did that not constantly make you happy? 

It did make me happy a lot of the time, but genuine happiness is not possible until you look into that bag of dirty marbles that are your life experiences, your traumas, and your fears. 

Real humans are not like Frances from the movie version of Under the Tuscan Sun. We can’t be horribly sad, quit everything, move to Italy, restore a villa, meet a beautiful man during the closings scenes and then feel completely fulfilled. 

I wish that for all of us it was this easy but it’s not.

So, if you do one thing before you make your big move, let it be filling a journal with all of the reasons you feel sad, scared, or turbulent. And then, keep doing it because marbles of a habit of gathering dust even after you’ve cleaned them. 

Then you and your shiny happy marbles will be ready to receive the most amazing adventure and if you happen to meet the wavy-haired European man I referred to earlier, you’ll be ready to enjoy him too.