I felt irrelevant at Ajanta. It was the best thing that happened to me on the trip.
In Egypt, standing at the base of the pyramids or inside the rebuilt temples at Luxor, I felt small. That’s the word most people use. Small, humbled, dwarfed by scale.
Ajanta was different. The caves aren’t enormous in the way the pyramids are enormous. They are carved inward — monasteries, temples, columns, statues, decorated halls, tables, chairs — cut from solid basalt hillside by generations of craftsmen who began at the ceiling and worked downward, chip by chip, removing the mountain to reveal what was inside it.
The largest took centuries to complete. Multiple generations of workers contributed to structures they would never see finished. They didn’t build something. They revealed something, slowly, faithfully, across lifetimes.
Standing inside one of those halls, I felt something I didn’t expect: irrelevance. Not smallness — irrelevance. My plans, my program management instincts, my carefully constructed itinerary, my career, my anxiety about whether I was doing this trip correctly — none of it registered against what these walls represented.
In Egypt I felt like a small version of myself. At Ajanta I felt like a vapor. A true vapor. Here and gone.
And that was wonderful.
Because here is what I realized: I had spent my first week in India trying to be indispensable to my own trip. Controlling the details. Managing the outcomes. Making myself necessary to every decision. And the weight of that had stolen the very thing I’d traveled 8,000 miles to find.
Ajanta didn’t ask anything of me. It didn’t need me to manage it, improve it, or validate it. It had been there for 1,500 years and would be there long after every photograph I took had faded. All it asked was that I show up and receive it.
That’s when I stopped fighting the trip. And started taking it. What would you be free to receive if you stopped trying to manage it?
Talenton 