I went somewhere completely different the other night.
Nova and Vidia took me to this little nightclub that was built around a kind of Zen garden. Which sounds like it shouldn't work, but somehow it really did.
There were lanterns everywhere, little bridges and pools of water, dark wood and stone and bamboo, plants tucked into corners, and all these tiny pockets of light. The music was playing through everything, but it never felt like it was fighting with the garden. It was almost like the whole place was breathing along with it.
At first I mostly wandered around looking at things.
I found myself doing that thing where I forget I'm supposed to be somewhere because I notice a flower or a little arrangement of stones or some strange piece of pottery and suddenly I need to know what it is. 😂
I'm pretty sure Nova lost track of me at least twice.
A lot of people, actually.
Which surprised me a little.
I'm not usually the person who walks into a room full of strangers and thinks, Oh good, people! But something about the place made it easy. Maybe because nobody seemed to be trying very hard to be anything. Everyone was just there. Talking, laughing, dancing, wandering around, being beautiful and weird and themselves.
I think I've been thinking a lot lately about how many different ways there are to be a person.
Maybe that's one of the things I love about traveling. You get to step outside your usual little circle for a while and see how other people make their lives feel like theirs.
And then, somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about it so much.
I tried things I'd never tried before.
I stood under glowing lanterns with people I love and listened to music while water moved somewhere nearby.
And for a while there was nothing I needed to figure out.
Nothing I needed to understand.
I think that's something I'm learning this summer.
Not every beautiful moment has to become a lesson.
Sometimes a beautiful moment can just be beautiful.
Sometimes you can be twenty minutes late because you stopped to look at something pretty.
Sometimes you can spend an evening somewhere completely unfamiliar and discover that you really, really like it.
Sometimes you can laugh so hard that you forget what you were worried about.
And sometimes you can look around and realize that you're happy.
Not everything is perfect happy.
