Do you believe answers exist? Essential answers to weighty questions that offer meaning for why you exist in the world? Answers that, by their very nature, are vague on a good day and vanish behind “supposed to’s” and “real”, “adult” life? Should we believe? I wasn’t sure if I did. Recent events in life had twisted and toyed with me mercilessly and I was tired. Tired of playing the game of almost winning, disguised as yet another pretense of failure. I was growing tired of traveling. A shocking realization toward my first true love, but not something I was willing to appease. “Hope springs eternal” and the excitement of the unknown is too thrilling to leave behind. So while I was spurred with anticipation for my first trip to Asia, I removed any expectations of my usual fervor for life changing insights. I would let the places speak to me on their own. Bali would soon teach me that answers appear when we give them space to speak and we’re still enough to listen. I broke up the twenty-three-hour flight to Bali with a stopover in Doha, Qatar. I enjoyed the splendor their abundant economy offered. Safety and hospitality effervesced from the cracks in the market streets disrupting a stigma that plagues many Americans about Muslim culture. I found a richness of family values, loving couples and honored traditions as intense and refreshing as the exotic incense wafting through the market air, so sweet and intoxicating. My respect grew but also met a sadness at how misunderstood this culture was by those in the foreign world. I thought seriously about donning a burka in solidarity and admiration. Perspective changed? Yes. But no answers found. Landing in Bali, I found it to be a mixture of haggling taxi’s, tangled traffic, jungle drenched, cliff hanging natural beauty and overloaded markets, miasmic with garbage. Inhabited by a gentle local people, rife with creative talents and eager to give of themselves, it was not hard to linger in conversations. Any personal interest was rewarded with a proud description of one’s family, their ceremonies and God’s, intrinsic to the whole of their daily life. Fascinating to absorb, but still no answers. I braved hours-long rides into the mountains, visited magnificent waterfalls, walked city streets, and journaled by turquoise waters. An overwhelming anxiety was growing. I didn’t know why and I couldn’t shake it. I guess when answers are needed, we can't ignore searching for them. Then it happened. On my last night, sitting in a candlelight-soaked Trattoria pocketed into the coastal town of Uluwatu, It was a warm and breezy night in the open air platform of a restaurant, brimming with lively characters in spirited conversations. Elbow deep in pasta and a dry red, with a couple from Australia who now called Bali home, our dialogue centered around their decision to make the move, how they spent their time, and how their affinity for the simple life they’d built surpassed anything left behind in Sydney. A few days prior, I had met friends of theirs who I felt an instant connection to. Their simple, yet happy, lives sent ripples through my soul. I felt a comradery with these strangers as foreign to me as the land I was sitting on. As the night twinkled on, my anxiety lifted. I started to become aware of a growing sense of a deeply grounded perfection. A reassuring clarity that I belonged nowhere else on the planet. Mesmerized in my emotions and the realization that an answer was rising, I was humbled with gratitude and silently begged for more. People, not things. Simple and uncomplicated. That was it. All I needed. Blanketed in the glorious shade of night, where I least expected, my answers appeared. A direction offered. I was also gifted living examples to emulate, to keep in contact with, to ask more questions of and receive more answers. A greater gift to a clearer path. Answers emerge when we give them space to speak. I won’t say that Bali is the greatest place on Earth and I won’t say you’ll find answers there too. But is my place on Earth and what I needed to begin anew.