Category Archives: Insights

Weekly reflections on cross-cultural education, mission strategy, and leadership — drawing from Talenton’s work and published in parallel on LinkedIn.

What Ajanta Asked of Me

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?

I Chose to Climb

I chose to climb.

The ruins at Hampi stretch across a landscape almost the size of ancient Rome — boulder-strewn, vast, and only partially reachable by car. To see the cliff-side temples, to get close enough to read the decorative carvings on ancient stone walls, to stand where a 15th-century empire once stood and look out across that landscape — you have to walk.

I had gout in my left foot. Every step on uneven ground cost me something real.

I climbed anyway. Because you don’t fly to South India and stay in the car.

But here’s what I remember most about those first days: I wasn’t fully present for any of it. Not because of the pain — I could manage the pain. I was absent because I was simultaneously managing everything else. The next day’s logistics. The transportation I’d arranged. Whether the accommodations I’d booked were actually what I’d been told they were. Whether my planning — meticulous, systematic, the kind I’d applied to billion-dollar programs — was going to hold up in a country I didn’t actually understand yet.

It didn’t. Not really. India doesn’t yield to that kind of control. I was carrying the weight of a planning apparatus I wasn’t experienced enough to run in this context, on top of an aching foot, in 90-degree heat, surrounded by one of the most extraordinary landscapes I’d ever seen.

I had confused controlling the experience with having it.

The temples were magnificent. I know that intellectually. I have the photographs.

But I was somewhere else.

Have you ever worked so hard to manage something that you couldn’t actually be present for it?