Surprise me

By the time I reached Rajasthan, I had stopped trying to know what was coming next.

I gave my tour guide three criteria: full logistics handled, show me the regional history, and surprise me. That last part wasn’t in the brief — it was just what happened when I finally ran out of things to control.

I didn’t research the stops in advance. I didn’t cross-reference the sites against travel rankings or optimize the sequence. I didn’t know enough about Rajasthan to even begin making those choices well — and for the first time on the trip, I was honest enough with myself to admit it.

So I floated. Through sites and sounds and tastes I hadn’t anticipated, couldn’t have planned, and wouldn’t have chosen because I wouldn’t have known to choose them.

In Jaipur, my guide took me to Galtaji — the monkey temple. A Hindu pilgrimage site built into a narrow mountain pass, surrounded by jungle. He put monkeys on me for photographs. Ridiculous, grinning, thoroughly undignified photographs.

I walked through the complex with no agenda, no objective, no schedule pressing at the edges of the experience. The monkeys screeched in the canopy. Birds called across the hillside. The jungle sounds moved around me and through me.

It wasn’t a Hindu moment or a Buddhist one. It was something quieter and more personal. I felt God’s presence moving through his creation — the noise, the animals, the ancient stones, the warm air — into and around me. Not as a theological proposition. As an experience. I was simply there to receive it.

That doesn’t happen when you’re managing the itinerary.

———

I started this trip as I start most complex things: with a plan, a structure, and the confidence that my systems would hold. They didn’t — not because India broke them, but because the best things India had to offer existed entirely outside the boundaries of what I could have planned for.

The lesson wasn’t don’t plan. I’ll always be a planner. The lesson was simpler and harder: know which things yield to a plan and which things only arrive when you stop imposing one.

I came home from six weeks in India and Nepal with more than photographs and a cleared-up case of gout. I came home knowing the difference between managing an experience and having one — and knowing, with some precision, which version of myself I want to lead from.

What are you over-managing right now that might reveal itself if you loosened your grip?