Finding My Flow Traveling Slow in Slovenia
When awareness deepens and everything falls into sync
As my fingertips fly over the keys, I am wholeheartedly, but blissfully restless, distracted and agitated. While without context these three words can often have negative connotations, I mean each as a supreme compliment to Slovenian travels both behind and in front of me. Since my last trip into Ljubljana, it feels like time has been flying and yet I’ve never made such a conscious effort to let go and slow down.
As I try to put what I’m feeling into words, resisting the devilish temptation of the Ocvirkovca and Flancat treats wrapped up on the kitchen table just steps away from me, I’m reminded of the title of a book I read years ago, Daniel Kahneman’s best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. All at once, I feel like I’m making leaps and bounds in clarity and intent, while making barely perceptible alignments in faith, patience and grace.
It’s making writing a challenge but never a chore. The wild part is I’m not stressed. I am open and energized. I’m humoring, coddling even, the pulls in this direction and that. And while the feeling is a touch unnerving and the peace and calm, foreign – I know without a doubt its origin.
The frequencies I will always give credit to for moving me the most when I travel – storytelling, color and taste – are in sync right now, in perfect harmony right here. My thoughts and feelings, all five senses and mind-body-gut-soul are exploring, learning and discovering in surreal but powerful unison. Much of the credit belongs to Slovenia. Before I knew it, I had allowed my edges to dissolve, surrendering and succumbing to this country and its people’s natural beauty and charm.
And yet, there’s another force I must recognize that’s at play here. I’m learning through the text of experts and my own observations, when we embrace our purpose, aligning what’s already inside of us with what the world needs most from us, we feel our most alive and connected. Inside such arresting alignment, we flow with the current of life instead of struggle to stay afloat against it. Choosing acceptance over resistance feels magical. When we free ourselves from the choppy static and interference of excuses and regret, it is as if the world clears a path just for us landscaping it with all the right resources, signals and support.
I keep an updated list of books I want to read. I organize that list by topic but even more specifically by how I want to feel or what I want to learn. A confluence of factors in Slovenia – setting, desire and readiness – motivated me to choose Sharon Salzburg’s Lovingkindness followed by Suneel Gupta’s Everyday Dharma. Both books have been on my list for over a year. Both kept getting pushed back as other titles called out ahead of them. I noticed however, I kept bumping into both Lovingkindness and the concept of Dharma in other books I had been inspired to read, in podcasts I listened to or in meditations I practiced among them Jay Shetty’s The Daily Jay.
I was completely spellbound by the message of Salzburg’s seminal work. I felt her words seep into the fibers of my very being never realizing until right then I had been thirsty for them all along. As I took long walks around Lake Bled and drove around the daunting twists and turns on Slovenia’s mountain roads she helped me see how to open my heart, how to keep it open and how to convert that openness into true and lasting connectivity.
From the other side of Lake Bled, Slovenia
When the time came to pick my next listen, her words still fresh and soaking in, I was drawn to that other overlooked title, the one I had skipped over, again and again. And remarkably, I discovered Salzburg herself had endorsed it – one of those magical, hard to misread signals, the perfect breadcrumb.
Gupta’s insights and distillations of Dharma – our essence and how we express it – didn’t just captivate me, they pierced me. Like with Salzburg’s work, I was ready and primed for his message to land and stick. While his words coalesced inside of me, I was enjoying one wonderful discovery in Slovenia after the other. I was atypically embracing slow travel. And I was confronting, sometimes actually diffusing static that was blocking a more hopeful, positive talk track.
I could feel myself absorbing, recalibrating and even awakening as I took in insights he packaged up from Buddhist teachings like Upekkhā, getting comfortable with discomfort and Kriya, accepting action leads to courage not the other way around. He helped me see being ready is a choice not a feeling.
Two quotes in particular landed where and when they were most needed. Michaelangelo’s, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” and Goethe’s “at the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.” Our purpose, our dharma is already inside of us. It’s up to us to chisel away, consciously and continually recentering and acting in good faith to unlock it. What a beautiful, loving way to go through life and what a special lens to embrace intentional travel.
To have the chance when we travel to connect what we’re reading or what we’re consuming be that art, taste or culture to how we’re feeling – is intentional travel’s transformative power on display. Just one of many ways travel can come to fulfill us spiritually and creatively. How a place goes from the perfect escape and backdrop, to the perfect catalyst and tuning fork.
I am certain Everyday Dharma will remain the most important book I read all year. I am also certain that reading these titles in the order I eventually did, was no mistake but a fateful, illustrative example of how flow materializes in the world when we put our purpose at the center of every choice we make.
After I finished Everyday Dharma, I took the afternoon off from writing. I spent time instead planning the week ahead in Slovenia’s wine country and seaside. I find almost the same joy and burst of energy from planning and anticipating travel as I do when I’m in physically in motion. I spent a replenishing afternoon mapping out winetasting in the nearby Vipava and Goriska Brda valleys, two of Slovenia’s most prominent wine regions. My agenda was very deliberately anchored around a reservation I set months ago at Ana Roš’ distinguished 3 Michelin Star Hisa Franko. Wine tasting would bookend the front of the trip and Trieste and Piran on the coast would flank the other side of this culinary bright spot. Looking out ahead there was no question, the next six days would only continue to fine tune my favorite frequencies – storytelling, color and taste.
Since arriving I can recall a number of times these frequencies sped me up, slowed me down and stopped me in my tracks. The most imposing and illustrious of which had to have been my climb up Blegoš Peak (5,215 ft) in the Poljane valley. Mountains are already such iconic symbols of personal development, and my first climb up a legitimate one in a pair of dainty, sparkling clean light pink APL trainers no less, was a philosophical goody bag. To start with the obvious, I survived, but laughingly only at the help of my delightful, younger and wiser companions – Anže and Ema.
My hiking agenda was three-fold, straightforward. I was climbing to see the spectacular, breathtaking 360 views of all of Slovenia that I heard awaited me at the summit. I was climbing to prove out some of the strongest revelations come on the outskirts of our comfort zones. And I was climbing to taste traditional Slovenian food served in the country’s mountain huts. With taste is my trusted compass, how could I not partake?
At the top, there is a place to stamp Slovenian Mountain Trail passports just next to the Summit marker. Just like the views, I’d heard about the passport book but I didn’t personally have one. I speculate now in retrospect, neither me nor those sad, muddied APL’s will be hiking the other 74 – yes 74 peaks – anyway.
As I climbed Blegoš, I felt energized, proud and impressed not just that I’d committed to something like this – my definition of outdoorsy is a first-class window seat on a luxury train car – but that I was actually doing it! The air was fresh and crisp, the leaves were all shades of Autumn, the temperature was chilly but in perfect complement to the physical exertion required. But then… It hit me the nearer we got to the top and the steeper the climb became, one ridge turning into the other. I had to get down from this thing… Going up I could lean into the slope, but on the way down I could already see how gravity, the damp, leaf scattered ground and the loose scree (loose rocks) would gang up most certainly cartwheeling me end over end into the Slovenian beyond.
Fear wasn’t all that rushed in. As we climbed, it became very, very obvious the thick fog we kept ignoring and wishing away wasn’t actually going to go anywhere anytime soon. Its only worthy adversary, the sun was nowhere to be found. That spectacular, breathtaking 360 view? Completely and utterly fogged over. It was a whiteout.
I could tell my hiking companions were disappointed. They kept apologizing to me like it was their fault. Do I wish I could have seen the view? Absolutely. Was I disappointed? Not in the least. I just climbed a mountain! Mountain metaphors and lessons abound from here. One, I didn’t know what I was missing. They did. Just that perspective made our experiences different. Two, I had a strong feeling the fog was there to stay well before we reached the summit. Knowing that, did I ever want to give up and turn around, after coming that far? Of course I didn’t. I was more determined than ever to reach the top – fog or no fog. Lastly, if I was really being honest with myself, it was starting to feel like I was really only climbing to taste the flavors of old-world Slovenia.
When the most harrowing part of the descent was behind us, I finally got to try a delicious and simmering bowl of Ritschert, a thick soup of barley, vegetables and a succulent pork sausage. As I did, I listened to my new friends talk about life in Slovenia. It was the perfect morning, so different than any other I’ve had when traveling. I was warm from the inside out, full, grateful… and upright. Better yet, I went home with the leftover desserts – the Ocvirkovca and Flancat.
I know this period, this high will be fleeting as that’s the natural way of things, the ebb and flow of life. I’ve already seen it tested and nearly depleted from the road trip I’m on today but that’s a teaser and plug to read next week’s blog post…This one, Blog 31, is about embracing for as long as life allows what it feels like to carry acceptance and alignment to the top of a viewless mountain. It’s about what it feels like to inherit the generous gifts of travel through countless collisions and discoveries in storytelling, color and taste. It’s about having the resolve, self-awareness and courage to act and keep moving.
I sensed just last week, there was a reason I was traveling here in Autumn. The more I connect the dots, the more I have come to believe not every period can be one of harvest. There is a time for color, a time for grey. If we choose to move through the grey with faith, patience and grace, how vibrant the colors will feel when the fog finally clears.
Blegoš Peak on a clear day, photo credit: https://www.slotrips.si/sl/pohodnistvo-in-gornistvo/blegos-iz-crnega-kala/5465
