Not Everything Is Going To Be For You
A thing I have enjoyed telling people as they ask me about the time I recently spent traveling Nicaragua is, ‘I didn’t like Nicaragua.’
I’m not trying to write the country off as an inherently bad place to visit. I think that travel is incredibly subjective, and your experiences — the people you connect with — in a place are ultimately what colors your memory of it. Therefore, I think it’s ever hard to give anyone else travel advice, and any travel advice given should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt.
I think that life advice works this way as well.
But I have been traveling for a long time.
I have seen some genuinely breathtaking landscapes and some notably less impressive ones. I have fallen in love with cities, obsessed over famous landmarks, become delighted by hole-in-the-wall establishments and vowed to move to foreign regions within ten minutes of my feet touching the soil.
I have also loathed landmarks travel blogs raved about. Sulked my way through luscious valleys. Shrugged off mediocre beach towns and party spots, and felt little guilt about doing so. My judgements of these places reflect the region far less so than my subjective experience of them. But after time, it becomes imperative to make those subjective judgments anyway. Because life becomes meaningless if we don’t.
You simply cannot fall in love with everywhere — nor everyone — you meet.
Every destination you end up in cannot be the best place you’ll ever set eyes on. Every person you meet cannot offer the strongest connection of your life. Assigning a positive connotation to each experience you undertake renders the entire concept of valuing anything meaningless.
And yet, there is a strange taboo in expressing disdain towards a choice that we willingly undertook. Telling someone, ‘I did not enjoy Nicaragua,’ is not enough. It must be backed up with some redeeming quality — ‘But the food scene was amazing in San Juan,’ ‘But I did enjoy Granada’s architecture’ — in order to fit the cultural norm. We must find something to redeem every experience, at the risk of making others uncomfortable.
And this reveals a very prominent issue we face as a society: the fundamental inability to process negativity.
The tendency to whisk it under the rug, find a way to reframe it, instead. The reluctance to simply say, ‘This was an experience I did not enjoy,’ is a baffling one. Why should we not allow ourselves the closure of understanding what we do not want? Why must we find a form of fabricated redemption inside of each story we tell ourselves?
Some ends are dead. Some roads lead nowhere.
The refusal to acknowledge this in any aspect of our lives is a dangerous one. It keeps us running down dead-end streets. It makes us hell-bent on pursuing situations that we intuitively know are wrong for us. The idea that everything is for us — and that we are the problem if it not — is ludicrous.
Not every place, or situation or person, is for us. We are not for everything and everyone, either.
There will be places where we simply don’t fit. There will be situations or experiences that are wrong for us — even if they’re right for other people. This is an okay thing to know. It is a healthy thing to be able to recognize.
The ability to make value judgments — about what does and does not matter to us — is a healthy muscle to flex. We must understand who we are, what we are looking for, what we are not — in order to move forward with intention. Every ‘No’ we utter paves the way for a more meaningful ‘Yes’ down the road. Every place we do not care for helps us to understand which places we’re likely to prefer. Every person we do not fit with teaches us something about which relationships will grow us.
Understanding where our personal dead ends lie is perhaps equally as important to our personal development as understanding our pathways to growth. We must know what is not for us. What we are not for. We have to allow ourselves the luxury of judgment — of deciding, ‘this won’t make its way into my future’ — in order to cultivate the future that will fit us.
We must be willing to critically analyze what we’ve found, in order to determine what we are searching for next.
In order to know our own homes when we arrive, at last, at their doorstep.
