Slowing Down — Suzey Ingold

“Don’t worry,” my driver said as I got into the car on a rainy Friday December afternoon in Nadi. “You’re on Fiji time now.”

As we drove through a downpour toward the main road, with mud clinging to the tyres and the crystal blue ocean on the horizon, I quickly came to learn what Fiji time meant – or, at least, what I took it to mean. Pace of life here was slower than what I was used to back home, whether in the town, or the huddled villages we passed on our drive toward the Coral Coast, or on the highway itself as we veered around cows and strays dogs and roadside vendors selling fresh fish.

I tried to embrace this notion of Fiji time in my days there, with little in the way of plans or things to do – just me, the sea, and a hefty Dostoevsky novel for the week. Relaxation didn’t come easily, my mind buzzing with every turn of the page. Restless, it flicked through the roster of things it thought I ought to be doing; things more productive, more important than swinging from a hammock chair with a cup of coffee in my hands and my toes digging into the sand below. All things I couldn’t much do from a beachside backpacker resort with a barely-there internet connection and a time difference that put me on the opposite side of the world from both my job and most of the people I know.

Only on on my second-to-last day in Fiji did I learn the true meaning of Fiji time – it is not so much about things moving slowly, as it is about letting go of expectation. If something happens, it happens; if it doesn’t, that’s just fine, too.

As I climbed into a crowded bus to head back toward Nadi on a even-more-rainy Thursday morning, condensation clinging to the windows and sweat dripping down the back of my neck, I mulled over this concept of expectation. I’ve lived with so many expectations, for as long as I can remember.

The expectation that I would go to school and to university and get a good job. The expectation that I would find a partner by a certain age and settle down and get married and have children. The expectation that my life would follow a known, familiar path, in which I could be happy, healthy, and safe.

My life hasn’t quite followed the path of expectation – but that is not to say that I am not still happy, healthy, and safe. Just as much so as I might have been had the circumstances been different; perhaps, even more so. And yet, even in that knowledge – even with a sense of surety that the decisions I’ve made have been the right ones that have led me onto the life journey best for me – it is hard, at times, not to let expectation cloud my judgement.

I’m not alone in these feelings. On New Year’s Eve, as I sat in a crowd of people I’d just met on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we spoke of where we’d expected our lives to be by now. Many of us spoke of the marriages we’d expected to be in, or the countries where we thought we might be living. Some of us spoke of families we had yet to have, and career paths changed and reimagined. Not one of us was where we had expected to be at the age we are now.

But none of us felt resentful for it – how could we? We were ringing in the new year from paradise, dancing to music from a live band with cheap beers in hand. Shortly after one year tipped to the next, we were tossed headfirst into the pool by the locals and emerged, dripping and exhilarated and happy.

I, for one, could not have wished for a more perfect way to start the year.

Even as I melted into the easy routine of island life and reflected on the past month I’d spent on the road, the real world was already trying to creep back into my subconscious, with all of its expectations in tow. Travelling seemed the only time that expectation took more of a backseat, as I grew to learn to expect the unexpected – to be ready for the unknown at every turn.

Maybe, in part, it comes from this feeling that your real life is suspended in time while you are away from it. That for these fleeting weeks between the tedium of meetings and workout classes and trips to the grocery store, you are living in some other dimension, in which each day is its own unique thing. I wish it were so easy to bring that mentality to my everyday life, and to make each day less the mundane and more the cherished.

But it is in the fleetingness of travel that the magic is captured. It is the moment you are walking through the rain in Fiji with frogs hopping before you on the path, a flash of lightning somewhere in the distance. It is the moment you are knocked off your surfboard for the dozenth time, the salty waves spitting you back to the shore. It is the moment you turn through the undergrowth and a kangaroo meets your gaze. Moments you can’t get back. Moments that exist only so long to form a memory.

But then, isn’t life itself fleeting? Each moment we live, whether at home or away, is fleeting. Each moment deserves its memory.

I brought back a lot with me from Fiji: a seashell bracelet that still sits tight around my wrist; an entire suitcase of damp clothes, and an array of mosquito bites that have left scars on my legs. But the one thing I’m determined to keep is my sense of Fiji time. Of worrying not so much about what I expect from my life but, rather, enjoying that which I am given.

For the fleeting moments we have, let them be worthy of memories.