Forest bathing made me fall back in love with my job
It was the kind of exhaustion that has accumulated slowly. I worked with the best of the company as a traveling writer, but the routine had exhausted me: mentally, physically and emotionally. I left my job, removed the applications and tried to remember what silence looked like. I stopped writing completely. Professional exhaustion was not urgent, but something felt turned off.
A month later, I made my luggage for a family trip to Madikeri, Coorg. Normally, I would use time to hunt stories. This time, I left the e-mails of pitch behind. If I were Ethan Hunt in a Mission: Impossible Film, I would have said “no” to any mission that came to me.
Branch
In Coorg, I spent nine days out of ten in the following that my parents had booked, cocooned in a lush coffee plantation. The trip, which had always fueled my passion for writing, now pushed me back. It has become more a chore: one of the potential risks to make your passion your work. The only time I left was when my mother convinced me to join the family to go swimming in the forests in the flourishing fields of Madikeri. “Come for vitamin D,” she said. I did not expect much.
It’s strange how things open when you stop trying to optimize every moment. As a travel editor, I was trained to find the strengths, to find the hook. But that day in Coorg, without a agenda, I felt something change.
After the way, not the plan
We walked for more than an hour and I remembered why I had continued travel writing in the first place. Silver oaks are stolen above us. The path was wet, slippery and alive. The Japanese call it Shinrin–yokuAlso known as the forest swimming, only I did not expect to meet him in Coorg.
I watched my father chat with our guide on Arabica beans, my mother collected fallen lawyers and my sisters fought against insects. I finally traveled as I always wanted. Instead of continuing moments, I was inside them. An wandering dog began to follow us. I was afraid at first. But the more we are deep in the forest, the more I stayed near him. We continued to walk together, as if we had already done so. As the rain stopped, we heard the lively call of the rare Calaal Gray Malabar. We spotted him a few minutes later when he was passing.
I did not feel the need to understand it all. And that may be why my senses have been awake, for the first time, for a long time.
