So as many of you reading this probably already know, I embarked upon my Asian adventure about six weeks ago now. I am currently living with a beautiful family in the heart of Kathmandu via a Workaway scheme, and though I set up this blog months before my arrival with visions of posting regular updates of my journey, up until now I haven’t quite found the right words to share.

There are countless half-filled scribbled pages in my journal and incomplete notes on my phone. Every time I start to write I am overwhelmed by either embarrassment or hilarity at my distinct inability to convey my own thoughts and experiences. Every time I re-read an attempt it reminds me of when I was 14 and wrote my diary as if it was a best-selling novel; trying to please and entertain an imaginary reader with handpicked details and rose-tinted truths.

Writing this, maybe attempt number twenty-something, I am on a seven hour bus ride back to the city after a trek in the Himalayas. For the first few hours I had been reading Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and after waking up from a post-completed-chapter nap, sun streaming through the window, dribble pooling on my shoulder – I heard that, somehow, in some way, the mountains had spoken to me.

They told me that I need not stress myself with attempting to convey the beauty I am witnessing on this trip via my blog posts. ‘Don’t try to explain what you are seeing‘, they said.

Indeed, the mountains are beautiful, the houses are beautiful, the people are beautiful – this is all true. I could tell you lots about them. There are countless amazing travel blogs that have pictures to share the world and words to describe it.

But what comes before such beauty? What fortifies a tall mountain or a strong house or a kind person?

The mountains told me of this inevitable predecessor, the crux of beauty and the path for it’s very existence;

destruction.

The earth’s plates had to crash against each other to form the tall mountain. The strong house had to fall in an earthquake to be built again. The kind person had to struggle in order to find peace and forgiveness in his heart.

It was my realisation in the mountains that therefore inspired this post and the vein in which I will from now on attempt to write. I will look to, amongst other inevitable ramblings, share stories and experiences of destruction and hardship and struggle and how they, in their many forms, lead to such beauty in places and things and people.

My hope is that by directly addressing the ‘ugly’, unity may be found in the struggles we all witness as human beings across the world. I would like to promote the open discussion of problems we so often bottle up inside to normalise and accept the lessons to be found in hardship; to remind ourselves that beauty and happiness can blossom from sorrow.

I would like this blog to help and relate if only to one person, and maybe, just maybe, become your fortuitous friend.

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I feel it only right then, that I start things off with one of my own, most pertinent, personal battles. How through the destruction of one part of my life, another was able to blossom in the form of this adventure in Nepal. Please click here if you would like to read this post.

All my love.

T xx