If you cannot learn to trust the universe in Bali, you may never learn.
Bali is an island of paradoxes. It is both sacred and commonplace, prayer temples as far as the eye can see next to 7-Elevens and Starbucks. The broken cobblestone streets are littered with both white, plastic Coco Mart bags and the brightly, colorful frangipani flowers of holy offerings. It smells of stray dogs and also of woodsy, spicy incense. Foods and bits of fruit on the doorsteps of warungs and textile shops as gifts left to the gods, end up eaten by monkeys and dogs. Ubud, Bali is a place where both chaos and peace exist in abundance. When you arrive, you have the notion that you must pick one or the other while you’re there. The mopeds and cars speed by at a frighteningly frenzied pace. There is noise coming from everywhere. A rooster squawks. Motorbikes honk and accelerate loudly, sending plumes of black exhaust through the streets. A shop owner shouts raucously across the street to a man on a bike strapped with what is surely too many unwieldy oversized bamboo stalks. Music pours out from rooftop bars, and out from under the doors of boutiques and into the streets from open air hotel lobbies. Balinese women sit on the curbs in front of nail salons, laughing, smoking, and singing Taylor Swift songs. It’s cacophonous and overwhelming. This is the wise harangue of Ubud. You may only recognize it as chaos for the sake of chaos at first, with no rhyme or reason as to how the city operates. I definitely did. Crossing the street felt like an Olympic sport. The streets are alive in Ubud, overflowing with bikes, mopeds, cars, trucks, pedestrians, dogs, cats, monkeys. You name it, they all take the same route to work. Only it’s not a peaceful, flowing stream of people, politely waiting while you step off the curb and into the current of traffic. This is class five white water rapids. There are no gentle waves, it’s all undertow. If the Balinese people are the lifeblood of Ubud, then the streets are surely the veins that connect the heart of the city. The first time you cross the street in Ubud it’s terrifying. If you are like most Americans, you have been taught to look both ways before you cross the street. In Indonesia, not only is the driver side on the other side of the car, but they drive on the other side of the street. Awareness is vital in Bali. Around every corner is a rusty piece of rebar waiting for you to avert your eyes just long enough to send you tumbling into the street. Cars and bikes are in a constant state of entering and exiting. There is never a break in movement. The streets of Ubud are never empty. There will never be a better moment to commit to joining the torrential rush. One day you become sick of observing. Sick of sitting on the sidelines, watching everyone else weave in and out with ease. So you do it. You close your eyes tight, have faith, and step out into the uncertainty of Ubud. To your surprise you open your eyes unscathed, cowering in in the middle of the road. All around you the people swarm past, smiling, laughing, honking their horns, whistling, singing, going about life. They make no mind of you at all, dodging and dipping around you, brown faced toddlers swaddled on their backs, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. This is how they live, totally unaware and yet completely conscious of the world around them. They trust in the flow. In my own head, I feared that by entering the flow of their lives, I would somehow disrupt the flow of my own. The truth is that in order to live without fear you must learn to flow with disruption. I was still standing in the middle of the street, when the honk of a fruit delivery truck snapped me back into reality. Nobody screamed, “Get out of the road you stupid American woman!” No one even noticed. The Balinese went about their morning, unaffected by the profound revelation I was having in the middle of Hanuman Road. It took two weeks living in Ubud until I learned to effortlessly move with the flow of Balinese life. It’s less of the calculated action I once thought I needed to learn in order to join the flow of traffic, and more of an energetic transfer of movement. A feeling. Universal intuition. Peace in chaos. You can’t leave Bali without learning to trust in the universe.
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