My time in India last year showed me how little humans actually need to survive and how little we need to experience real happiness. I was traveling with just one backpack and a few hundred dollars in my bank and yet when I was in Nepal, standing in front of those one hundred school children, I felt more alive, more rich, and more full of potential than any other person alive.
Then I returned home to the United States and felt incredibly homesick in what suddenly felt like a strange and privileged land. As weeks turned into months, those feelings of extreme appreciation began to slip away. But I vowed not to forget. I vowed to continue living a simple life so that I could focus on what mattered.
That life-changing experience tugged at layers and layers of materialistic complexity and egotistical naivety, accumulated as a result of growing up in a middle-class society and having everything. My journey through rural parts of India, Vietnam, and Nepal cut life down to the core, leaving in its wake a stronger, simpler, more compassionate human being.
