“You don’t choose the things that happen to you, but you do choose how you let them change you”.
—Arrival (2016)
Looking back, I don’t think I ever chose the direction of this journey. It kept choosing me.
Costa Rica began with a single yes —my first Workaway host agreeing to take a chance on me. Costa Rica had never been on my travel list. Not even a distant thought. Yet it became a place that held me when I needed holding.
Gran Canaria came the same way. I applied to Spain, thinking mainland. I didn’t even know Spain had islands. Another yes. Another place I hadn’t imagined myself in, suddenly becoming home for a few weeks.
The idea of crossing to Asia didn’t start with a plan either. It came from a conversation in Golfito —an expat casually mentioning cargo ships you could travel on cheaply. I looked it up: no frills, long days, about $200 a day. I dismissed it quickly. But the idea lodged itself somewhere quiet and persistent. That thought eventually transformed into something else —a cruise. And somehow, through coincidence layered on coincidence, I found myself booking a 27-night journey from Vancouver to to South Korea.
I didn’t know where I would go after docking.
I still didn’t have a map. Then another thread appeared. My daughters were invited to travel with my parents to China. Suddenly, China entered the picture —not as a destination I had been dreaming of, but as a possibility. China had never been on my list either. And yet here I am.
What surprises me most is how safe I feel. I remember feeling the same way in Japan years ago —that quiet astonishment of being somewhere unfamiliar without the constant need to watch my back, guard my belongings, scan every corner. It makes me realize how much fear I still carry about the world, and how much of that fear doesn’t always belong to the places themselves.
There’s another invitation sitting quietly in the background. Africa.
From someone I met for only a few hours in Costa Rica.
It scares me enough that I know it matters —but not yet.
The journey keeps unfolding this way not through bold declarations or long-term strategies, but through chance encounters, borrowed ideas, and doors opening where I didn’t even know to knock.
Maybe direction doesn’t always come from choosing.
Maybe sometimes it comes from listening.
I’m in China now. I didn’t plan it.
But I’m glad the universe insisted.
“It’s funny how the things you don’t plan end up being the most meaningful”.
—Before Sunset (2004)