Finding the Infinite

Choosing Fear or Love

After 3+ months of travel in Latin America, and almost a month back in Virginia, I’ve spent the past few weeks reflecting a lot on life. The America I left in January is not the same as America today. Mundane daily life feels eerily normal, but the past three months of news starkly suggests that we're spiraling into totalitarian darkness.

I am also not the same person I was when I left.

One of my main goals of traveling was simply to enjoy myself—to be present and not worry about what I will do next. I felt, and in some ways still feel, that I have some major life decisions to make, and the not-knowing weighed on my mind as I started my travels. On top of that, traveling always tests us to let go of control: plans change, obstacles arise, and you can either go with the flow or suffer constant disappointment. I am grateful for all the challenges that illuminated my own fears and self-blocks. I am grateful for the lessons I received about trust and approaching life with an open heart. I am still learning these lessons, in every moment, and I will be for the rest of my life.

Part of learning flow and trust is to experience discomfort and look at it as a teacher. Another part of trust is recognizing that each moment is just one dot on an infinite spiral. Each decision is one in a series of infinite decisions. We are constantly creating our reality by choosing what we pay attention to, how we perceive it, and how we react.

An ‘infinity’ root I spotted in Semuc Champey, Guatemala after a taxing morning. A reminder that we are all just moving in the infinite loop of life.

I started my travels with one plan: go to Colombia to volunteer on a permaculture farm that I saw on Workaway and felt instinctively drawn to. A week before my scheduled volunteer stint, I arrived in Medellin, one of South America’s megacities, known for cocaine, Pablo Escobar, and formerly being one of the most dangerous places in the world. My bienvenida was waiting in the line for passport control for 3.5 hours. Then, I got scammed by a taxi driver who also hit on me. I arrived, exhausted, to a party hostel in a neighborhood filled with drunk tourists and trinket sellers who whispered want cocaine lady. After being with my family for a month in the comfort of my own home, I was suddenly alone, in a new place, overwhelmed, and decidedly not in my element.

Two days in, I was doubting my entire trip. It wasn’t what I expected (which was… to immediately love everything?). I was feeling very sensitive to the intense energy of the city. I started wondering if I had made the wrong decision. I spontaneously left for a few days to the Eje de Café because I knew I needed more nature. I felt better in Salento, but I couldn’t shake the larger doubts that had started growing roots in my mind.

By the end of the week, I cried for a full day, wondering, What am I doing here? (And what am I doing with my life? Cue existential crisis).

This was my first shedding.

A layer of control, of logic-brain, and fear inside of me needed to be replaced with surrender, feeling, and love.

My experience was being tainted by my own narratives of fear—that something bad would happen to me, that my travels would be a disaster, that I don’t feel happy right now thus I won’t be happy… ever, that I would lose new relationships I was generating back home, that I wouldn’t make any new friends, that everything would … change… for the worst!!

Fears that, when said aloud, start to sound a tad bit dramatic, that were more intense by an extra potent hormonal cocktail of PMS, and that fixated on some future outcome I could never actually control. Yet, I am grateful for these fears. I needed to see, accept, and release them in order to make room for trust in myself (and the universe).

A week after my day of fear-panic-breakdown-doom, I was on the farm, having spent almost a week in a completely opposite, hippie-peace-love-beauty frequency.

In just a few days, the strangers that surrounded me felt like family. It was hard to believe I had been feeling so negative just a few days prior, fearing that I wouldn’t connect with anyone. On our morning off, a group of the volunteers when to skinny dip at the river, as we did everyday after work. After a night of heavy rain, the sun was dancing in and out from behind the clouds. I spent half a day there, laying on a rock, scrambling up and down the rapids, watching the clouds pass by, listening to the sounds of the cascading waterfalls and surrounding jungle, immersed in all shades of green, basking in the sun, eating mango and passion fruit.

I felt utterly free. Light. Filled to the brim with love. Unmasked. In my element. Completely me.

Here is what I wrote in my journal (16/2/2025) this morning.
It is a page I keep returning to:

What I am feeling right now is so beautiful that it is impossible to capture with words alone. I feel liberated in my freedom to be authentic. Everyone around me feels so purely themselves in this environment, myself included.

Just a week ago I was questioning everything—trying to trust but not fully there yet. I feel like this moment is the universe telling me—see, I told you, you needed to trust.

See what was coming for you, silly girl?
Connection—to self and others.
Serenity—the moments of meditative peace.
Grounding—to the Earth, to nature and her wisdom.

And here I was doubting so quickly.
This is a page to come back to when I need faith, trust, when I am doubting.

Thank you universe for giving me this lesson.
Thank you Earth for holding me.
Thank you because I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

(Yes, this is how I write to myself sometimes, haha!)

The thing is… I always knew, deep down, this beauty was waiting for me. I had known, in my body, that I needed to go on this trip. I immediately felt drawn to the farm for a reason. Feeling often holds a deeper truth than we can logically understand. Even when we know in our hearts that things will be okay, it becomes so easy to spend our energy worrying.

Thinking there is a right or wrong choice assumes there is a right or wrong outcome, but there is no such thing.

There are simply choices and their consequences.

Sometimes, when we don’t like the consequence, we revisit the ‘choice’ in our mind and decide that it was objectively wrong, but that tends to be more of a distraction from confronting the consequences than an objective reality. Often, we learn the most from the retrospectively-deemed wrong choices that we make. The ‘wrong choices’ are actually our greatest teachers. They allow us to observe our raw desires, our intentions, our hopes and our fears. They give us the chance to sit with the inevitable human experience of feeling loss or loneliness or regret. Perhaps they remind us of our gratitude for the little things we easily overlook.

Each obstacle is an opportunity to learn, to break a pattern, to stay open and loving. No choice is ‘wrong’, no outcome is ‘bad’. Doubting our choices or trying to control the outcome only keep us in a cycle of self-inflicted suffering.

Things never turn out exactly as we expect, but sometimes they turn out even better than we ever imagined.

The more rigid you are about the outcome, the more likely it will slip between your fingers entirely. The anecdote for this rigidity is trust: if you have faith that things will work out, then things inevitably will work out… maybe not in the exact way you envisioned, but some almost-certainly-unexpected goodness will come.

This was one of the main lessons I learned on my travels, and one that I have been challenged to apply many times since this aha moment of surrender in Colombia. After leaving the farm, I caused myself angst in more than one instance because I tried to logically force decisions—before quickly flipping back to my reminder of trust, listening to feeling, and remembering that there is no right choice.

Since I got back to Virginia, I have been reading a book called Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch and... God him/herself... who apparently spoke to Walsch through dictation. I bought this book over the winter and never started it, only to have re-encountered it at a moment when the message feels perfectly aligned with my own spiritual reflections.

There are two ideas from this book that I keep coming back to.

One is about ‘messages from the universe’—which are described as those that hold the Highest Thought (joy), Clearest Words (truth) and Grandest Feeling (love).

Most of the time, we struggle to hear them because the ego is too loud. These messages tend to be crystal clear. We don’t need to weigh them endlessly, considering the pros and cons. They are the ideas that emerge unclouded. Our bodies often feel these messages, although our minds may misinterpret the meaning.

As long as we ignore these messages, we will keep re-living the same experiences over and over again. Most of the time, we repress our own feelings because they scare us or we fear they are not reciprocated, we decide that something we yearn for can’t be because of self-imposed limitations, and we allow the ego voice to convince us of many false-truths about ourselves. And we thus remain stuck in a cycle of repetition.

The amount of times that I have experienced repeating patterns in the past months feels uncanny to me. The difference is, I am now grateful for these repeating patterns, for they show me where my ego is blocking the wisdom of my heart and soul (my Highest Thought, Clearest Words, and Grandest Feeling). From this perspective, I can recognize that any ‘major life challenges’ I am confronting are really opportunities to break patterns that bind me. To liberate myself.

The difficulty is we are taught to live in fear.

Fear often sits in the future, conditioned by the past: Something bad happened before so we fear it will happen again. Sometimes we fear that we are one way and can’t change, and other times we fear change—how preposterous, to spend so much time and energy in a fuss over something as inevitable as change! And yet how much time I have spent doing exactly this!

According to God, we have the chance to liberate ourselves in each moment.

“Every single free choice you ever undertake arises out of one of the only two possible thoughts there are: a thought of love or a thought of fear.

Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms.
Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.

Fear wraps our bodies in clothing. Love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings and clutches to all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.

Every human thought, word or deed is based in one emotion or the other. You have no choice about this, because there is nothing else from which to choose. But you have free choice about which of these to select.”

—God, via the pen of Neale Donald Walsch

In the moment, it’s not always obvious which emotion our thought or action has arisen from. It is difficult to differentiate between the two.

Fear can dress itself up as logic, pragmatism, caution. Fear can feel like the safer choice. Love, meanwhile, can feel terrifying: it demands vulnerability, presence, and surrender.

With hindsight, I can see the emotions driving my thoughts and actions more clearly. When I trace the choices that led to the most beautiful experiences during my travels, they were made from a place of love: seeking growth, truth, and opportunities to experience life. They were choices I didn’t have to spend hours thinking about—I instinctively knew. When I look back at decisions that were clouded by fear, it always felt like nothing flowed. Fear would make my thoughts race around in circles, unable to settle on any decision. I couldn’t quite quiet my mind enough to feel my truth.

I felt I needed to go to Rio del Ritmo, and the beauty of the experience made me feel rewarded for listening. Two weeks later, I found myself floating in uncertainty once again. I told myself I should go work on another farm, for longer, because that logically made sense (it would be good for that career I was supposed to be not thinking about, and then I wouldn’t have to make another decision for a while). For one week, I decided that I must do this, and messaged a ton of farms in a scattered flurry. I caused myself stress worrying that I wouldn’t be able to do this thing that I had simply decided a week before was the only option for me. I felt a desperate need to have a plan. In the week I was anxiously awaiting responses, I started to flow more with traveling, enjoying the spontaneity of my days. When I finally received a response to come volunteer, I didn’t feel excited. In fact, my body felt dread at the idea of committing to one place for a full month. I had been trying to control my future experience instead of letting it naturally unfurl. In retrospect, I can see that I was trying to logically convince myself of something that wasn’t in my heart, caught up in fear-driven shoulds.

On the other hand, my choices coming from my heart often defied logic in some way. In the midst of my should-I-go-volunteer-again stress, a number of travelers I met kept telling me you would love Mexico, you HAVE to go. It felt like a sign, but flying to Mexico wasn’t my plan, wasn’t the cheapest option, and didn’t really geographically make sense. I was in the midst of committing to work on this farm. But the following morning, I woke up and I just knew that I must go to Mexico and eat corn there. There wasn’t really much more to it.

Perhaps this was my second shedding, trusting the feeling.

I reserved my ticket for a few days later, and miraculously, everything flowed. I loved the first hostel I stayed at. I went for a walk and immediately found blue corn quesadillas, which felt like a sign. My best friend of over a decade spontaneously joined me. I found magic there—belonging, inspiration, humility. Mexico was the place where I made the closest friendships and the place where I felt the most expansive. It’s not that I chose correctly, for there is no right choice. The farm could have also been amazing. But looking back, it becomes so clear that I was trying to mentally force one path from a place of fear, from limitations I imposed upon myself about what my trip should be.

So here I am, back in America, without any real life plan, which is actually a resounding success for me, a Virgo. I am trying to release the shoulds and listen to how I feel. I return with more faith in the universe that things will figure themselves out. Not in a a I’m-becoming-passive-about-my-future kind of way, but in a I-accept-that-I-can’t-control-what-I-can’t-control kind of way. All I can do is focus on the now, observe my intentions, and try to listen. It’s not easy, and I continue to confuse the messages, but I think I am getting better at feeling.

When I start to doubt, I come back to asking myself, gently and often:
Am I choosing fear, or am I choosing love?

This is the simplest question I have found to guide my life right now. I am trying to choose more love.