visa run.

A fellow guest at our hotel this week told a story about a friend of his, an ex-pat living in this country.  Even after spending years here, the friend found it impossible to adjust to the 24-7 noise and crowds of this country, so one evening, feeling at the brink of madness, he drove his jeep as far as he could out into the desert, parked it, and climbed on top for a whole night’s sleep all by himself.

And there in the desert, with nothing but sand in every direction, he was awoken the next morning by a man pressing his face in close, asking, “What are you doing?”

This story makes me laugh and groan, and, most of all, helps me understand something about our life here, and that something is this:

We work hard to take care of ourselves, to exercise regularly and get enough sleep at night, to carve out days off and date nights and lots of trips to the park.  But even with all of that, there is a level of constant, simmering stress that comes simply from living in a place like South Asia.  A place of too-bright colors and too-loud noises and too-acrid smells and too-thick pollution and too-many people.

And, as you learned from Joshua’s birthday party, there is nowhere you can go to escape.

People warn you about it before you arrive, give you advice and tools to cope, but nothing can fully prepare you for living in it, day in and day out.

After a time it’s easy to become numbed to the constant, simmering stress.  To carry on with your life and think that everyone lives this tightly wound, this filled to the brim with over-stimulation.  You may even grow to love it.

And then, you step out of it.

And the shock of that stepping-out is a physical one.

It may take a couple of days before you can even name it.  But suddenly, you find yourself in a country that is not this one, and your eyes widen with wonder at a way of life you once knew.  You ride on the streets and marvel at the absence of stinking trash piles, of gutted cats and rats on the roadside, of whole stretches of road where you encounter only one other car.

You lay awake in bed at night and the silence—the simple sounds of crickets and the whir of the window A.C. unit—roars in your ears.

A lady you meet tells you about her husband’s illness and in a heartbeat your whole body tenses up, waiting for her to ask for money for the hospital bills.  But she doesn’t.  She’s just making conversation.

No taxi driver argues with you about where you want to go or how much money you pay him.

Nobody stares at you in a town where foreigners are a dime a dozen, and no one cares how cute your kids are.

The shock is a good shock.  It’s an easing in the shoulders.  A sigh of relief.

And in that sigh, you find rest.

I am deeply grateful for the rest we found in the last five days.  I’m grateful for the simplicity of a quiet candle-lit family dinner, for the low murmur of other guests in our outdoor dining room, for clean bathrooms and for a stretch of sandy beach for my kids to play on, uninterrupted.

And now we’re back, and ready to embrace the madness.