Always try everything once

At eighteen years old I stood on what felt like the edge of the world and I felt totally calm for the first time in my life.

In the summer after my first year of University, I decided that after many years of yearning to find a place where I belonged, I should volunteer halfway around the world teaching English in a kindergarten in Romania for two months. So I packed a bag, and after three long days of flying and airports and trains I arrived in a small city called Suceava, where I met my local hosts and began my journey of teaching and making extraordinary new friends.

Having had problems with anxiety, my natural instinct in unfamiliar situations is to say no, so when a few of my friends offered to take me on a roadtrip I decided that from now on in my life I would adopt a new philosophy;

“Always try everything once.”

So I said yes.

I jumped in a car with my friends Andrei and Claudiu, and we started our day trip to a nearby town called Gura Humorului, where two more of our friends joined us as we bathed in the public pools overlooking a ski slope. After the swim, we returned to the car, and the two boys told me they had a surprise for me.

We drove for nearly an hour, getting further and further away from anywhere vaguely familiar, and we started to drive up a mountain that I later found out was called Vârful Rarau. After crawling at a snail’s pace up the 6 mile road to the summit, we finally decided to stop near the top as the road became too snowed over for the car. The group led me up a track to the top of the mountain, where we slipped and slid across rocks before coming across what can only be described as a lookout.

I went first, climbing up onto the few planks of wood and the metal bar to hang on to and there I was, standing on the edge of the world. The sun was setting, and a profound silence settled upon the group as I looked out at the twinkling faraway cities, standing on three hundred feet of nothingness as the sun disappeared behind the mountains nearby.

I’ve never experienced true speechlessness before, but standing at the lookout on Vârful Rarau I knew that this was where I belonged. This was the place I felt all my anxiety leave me, and this was the place where I’d found what all travelers spend their lives looking for.

Standing on the edge of the world, on a cliff in Romania, was the first time I saw what travelling was meant to be, and I felt true serenity.