Pura Vida Vibes for One, Please
I love travelling and there’s so much of the world to see, I feel there’s not much urgency in visiting a place twice. I’d typically prefer to see someplace new. Costa Rica changed all that.
As soon as I booked my ticket, I started planning my trip to create a list of sites I knew I had to try to see while I was there. As I read up on Costa Rica and realized I’d have 14 days to spend any way I wanted to – with no family, no significant other, no one else’s agenda, just mine – my mind expanded and I wanted to do so much and also nothing at all. FYI, nothing doesn’t only mean laying on a beach to tan, it means sitting at a local soda (Costa Rican family-run eatery) to people watch while eating the local food and dancing to the music on the local radio stations, it means walking down main streets, side roads or dirt paths for two hours to find hidden food spots or cute local boutiques and other businesses to better understand the local lifestyle.
It was the first time I was excited and had the feeling of knowing I’d revisit a place before even being there for the first time. I knew I’d need to visit Costa Rica again, so I focused on what was possible to see within the 14 days I had.
I’ll outline my 14-day itinerary in another post, this post is about the emotional and mental gifts I received when visiting Costa Rica and travelling solo for my first time.
Travelling solo requires you to step outside your comfort zone.I’m a pretty social person but if I wanted to talk to someone every day, it required me to make a new friend every single day. So every day, I faced the possibility of being rejected by a stranger. Fortunately, my icebreakers were natural and I genuinely do like talking to people, meeting strangers and learning about people’s stories. Some days, this led to long late night conversations with locals or travellers and other days it was a quick fifteen minute conversation while I waited for my fruit shake to be made. Costa Rica is such a warm-hearted country, the people tend to be friendly and open and in turn, I think most of the tourists and travellers in the country seem warm and able to open up to anyone. This helped tremendously, as it lowered my perception of the risk of rejection. Though even if rejected, who cares, move on to make friends with the next person - at least that’s how I coached myself.
Travelling solo gave me time to think and just be. I remember picking up my shake from a spot that I visited daily once I discovered it. Instead of grabbing my shake and leaving, I decided to sit and just be in the shop. I watched the local music videos on their TV, I talked to their staff, made conversations with customers while they waited for their orders and also just stared out the window being thankful for a day that consisted of fruit shakes and watching surf waves! Pura vida, baby.
Travelling solo also healed me. It gave me time to be by myself and realize all the things I was good at and what I need to improve. I had gone through some emotionally-heavy things earlier in the year and taking the time to process them in Costa Rica was something I didn’t plan for, but was quite necessary. I learned to forgive. And here’s what I wrote the day I left that lush country:
A love letter to Costa Rica
Thank you for helping me find my peace/inner calm. It’s a struggle to stay zen without your natural elements. But that just makes me realize that feeling zen is a practice. The most important lesson I learned was the power of forgiveness – learning to forgive helps overcome negative experiences and shitty vibes faster and effectively. More importantly, it allows you to control what you can accept and what you can’t.
Allowing myself to slow down and just breathe gave me time to reflect and understand what I wanted in life, what made me truly happy, rather than pursue what I was told would make me happy.
Most of us are so busy pursuing life and hitting the blueprint we’ve been told/sold. We been showed this life plan since we were babies: what type of job we should pursue, what school we’re aiming to get into, what we should major in, so that we’ll find the right job and be able to afford the right home. We’re told to find someone at an age-appropriate time and make babies so we can take care of said babies and keep working at our jobs to take better care of our babies in hopes that they will grow up and follow the blueprint that we were given and soon realize is a blueprint we’ve been creating for our babies since we were babies. Man! When does the cycle stop.
When do we get to pause and think, is this truly what I want or is this what society wants from/for me? Often the two are so muddled with each other, we can even differentiate if what society wants is different from what we want. This is where Costa Rica rescued me when I didn’t even realize I needed rescuing. It gave me a break from my society. It gave me the pause I needed to think about what would make me happy. And whether or not what makes me happy even comes close or is further than far from society’s blueprint for me. It reminded me that it’s my choice – my conscious choice – to follow what makes me happy.
And while a mainstream blueprint can be great (I have tons of friends happily following theirs), it may not be what all of us want or need. And it needs to be okay to stray. I hate saying “stray” because that means deviating from the norm and there really shouldn’t be a “normal” when choosing the life you want.
Create your own pura vida and pause (preferably in silence and in a place that allows you to think in solitude for prolonged periods of time) and ask yourself what makes you happy. We rarely ask ourselves this question these days or sometimes we ask it too often and then don’t do due diligence in reflecting and answering it. So take time and celebrate life by living it your own way. Thank you Costa Rica, for teaching me that reflection on life can be a celebration of life.
pura vida.
First written by me on madderandshade on December 29, 2017: https://madderandshade.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/pura-vida-vibes-only/
Reposted on this final madder and shade site in 2018