Second Stage

by Lane Eger (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Indonesia

“People only travel for one of two reasons,” my friend Nicole told me. “They’re either running away from something or they’re trying to heal.” I’d only known Nicole for a few weeks, but as I swam in the ocean off the coast of Bali with Ketut, my diving instructor, her words echoed in my mind and I knew I was the latter. Ketut was facing me, his long hair clouding around his head like a dark halo, and he tapped on his second stage. This meant it was time for me to remove my air source underwater for the first time. It was just a training exercise, but still I gasped. I tried again. I inhaled one breath that manifested as three jagged breaths. I grabbed my second stage. I threw it to the side like Ketut had shown me. I had done this before. Not exactly, but basically. A year prior I had been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. The traumatic way, via emergency hospitalization. It had happened right after I’d decided I wanted to make world travel a bigger part of my life, and it shook my world, to say the least. So when I’d booked this trip, the one where I’d be solo traveling through Southeast Asia and then living abroad in Australia for a year, it had felt exactly like throwing my air source to the side for the first time. There goes safety, there goes my life source. And without thinking the actual words, I could feel a deep undercurrent that whispered: “Will I be able to survive?” Still I had booked the one way ticket to Bangkok. Still I removed my breathing source and tossed it into the ocean. “You will be healed,” Ketut told me as we climbed out of the water. “I can see this makes you happy. If you keep doing of things that makes you happy, you won’t have the diabetes anymore.” It was hard for me not to think, “Am I having an Eat, Pray, Love moment right now in Bali with a man named Ketut?” As a human who has read that book seven times, this was an important moment for me. But also I felt his words deep in my soul, and I believed him. Later that night at the hostel Ketut and his wife owned, he appeared from around the corner looking different. He had pulled his long hair back and wrapped it in a headscarf, and he wore white from head to toe. “You say you like the culture?” he asked me, a wide smile stretched across his face. “Yes!” I cried. “Always!” “I make the culture right here!” He disappeared again around the corner, and I followed. I sat near Rani in the back corner of their little prayer room on a plastic mat printed with little cartoon children playing football. Gold flags had been pinned to the walls and billowed when the circulating fan blew against them. The altar had been crafted from the same gold flags, taped to a table where flowers and bowls and candles had been arranged. Ketut rang bells, chanted various prayers, played the drums and sang his heart out for about an hour, throwing holy water on us at regular intervals. I’d never seen anything like it, not even in church, probably because he spent that hour singing, praying and blessing with his whole heart. “Holy water makes you clean,” Ketut later explained. “I was praying that you be healed.” To retrieve your second stage, you lean over, slide your hand down the side of your body, and scoop up the breathing source with your arm. It turned out to be a very simple exercise, and soon after learning this technique, I was swimming through a universe I’d never seen in person before. And soon after throwing caution to the wind I was getting blessed by holy water and meeting medicine men in the most unlikely of places, learning how to be devoted to life with my whole heart. I would survive. So I cast safety aside and used my whole heart to book another one way ticket.