For years Nancy King resisted buying a smartphone. One day, to celebrate her 84th birthday, she ordered one. A flashback to childhood abuse and the resulting PTSD reactions triggered by the phone’s arrival wasn’t the journey into modern technology she’d anticipated.
Chris Pady was skeptical that enlightened beings walked the earth; that was until the day an enlightened being flicked him on the forehead and forever changed his mind.
Cliff Simon has carried memories and told stories about his family ever since he was an unhappy teenager. There’s just one problem:, they weren’t true.
White, college-educated, compliant, and in his late sixties, BJ Stolbov shares his personal experiences with the police and why cops scare him.
Compelled by necessity, Carolyn Handler Miller and her husband, Terry, set off for California from Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the coronavirus still gripping the country. Finding themselves in an unpredictable new world, they returned home safely and wiser, but would they do it again?
Elyn Aviva decided that culling her computer contact list would be a productive Corona project. Easy, right? In theory perhaps, but the reality wasn’t quite the cleanup she’d anticipated.
Like many people during this pandemic, Cliff Simon has been baking. Baking cakes has been a lifelong pleasure but under the lens of quarantine, baking and sharing have taken on new meaning and revealed new insights.
Are there some stories that are best left untold? In this essay, American expat BJ Stolbov recounts a decades-old experience which—until now— had remained private.
Homebound with some time on her hands during the COVID-19 pandemic, Melissa Devor, reaches out from Santa Barbara, California, to share what’s happening in her world.
Making plans in Fez for a last-minute Sahara excursion during Ramadan proved to be a bit of a gamble for retired American Michael Papas. As he handed over a stack of cash, he wondered if he was being foolish or if trusting a stranger in a foreign land would pay off.
We challenged YourLifeIsATrip.com writers to tell us their Mother's Day tales in 25 words or less. But don’t let the small size fool you. At the heart of each of these very very short essays is a powerful story. So this is our gift to you — some very very short stories from the YourLifeIsATrip.com family.
Rinki Cohn proudly reports from South Africa about how the country, with just a fraction of the resources of a lot of countries, has successfully flattened its COVID-19 curve and how leaders there are really trying to do the right things.
Thirty-seven days into self-isolation Ellen Barone asked her husband Hank, “Are you lonely?” Like much of the world’s population, they are physical-distancing and staying home to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Would this, she worried, lead to loneliness? And, in turn, to biological effects as deadly as the virus itself? Instead, isolation has brought clarity to something they’d innately suspected all along.
With a successful gallery business shuttered by COVID-19, Susanna Starr muses on adaptation, aging, and life in isolation in northern New Mexico.
It was 1976 and Mike Chambers was in Afghanistan on his way to see a standing Buddha that had been carved out of the walls of a canyon some fourteen hundred years earlier. Not long afterward, Afghanistan slipped back into the chaos it was to suffer for decades. and the experience had faded into memory until, 25-years later when Bamiyan's Buddha appeared in a TV news post.
BJ Stolbov, an American expat living in the Philippines, reminisces about changes in human freedom of movement and the futility of nationalistic boundaries during a global health crisis.
Elyn Aviva has spent more than half of her life going on, studying, or writing about pilgrimage—specifically, the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Today, as she adjusts to the disorientation of isolation, she poses the question: Could it be that like a pilgrimage, this pandemic offers an opportunity to journey inward and engage in deep self-exploration?
As more and more folks seek their tribes, author Jules Older adds one more tribe to the list. It’s more significant than Jewish or Buddhist, Italian or Iranian, male or female, maybe even gay or straight—goers and stayers.
Each one of us is adjusting to the new normal of social distancing and self-isolation in different ways. We thought we’d open a door to the private lives of our writers, so you can see what they are feeling and thinking and doing —expressed in 25 words or less.
Perfect vacation spot. Check. Perfect partner. Check. So why did Stephanie Ambarsumyan feel anything but perfect? It was an important question and one that she hadn’t realized needed asking until she went away.
