There are moments when life takes an unexpected turn. When everything seems to work against you, nothing falls in your favour, and you’re left with a strange, hollow stillness. A kind of stagnancy that settles in and doesn’t seem to lift.

It was in the middle of one of those stretches that I had a beautiful dream. Walking barefoot through a forest, nothing dramatic happening in it, just walking. Somewhere in that dream, for reasons I still can’t explain, I started to feel good. Genuinely good, in a way I hadn’t in a long time. I woke up and the feeling hadn’t left. So I did the only thing that made sense at the time: I opened my laptop and searched for a forest.

Sri Lanka was close, and I’d never been. A property came up. Cabins built into the trees, a few open villas, a river running directly beneath it, everything grown or sourced without shortcuts. Rafting, cycling, hiking, a waterfall you could jump from. I called my siblings, a close friend, and we booked the flights.

The first thing we did, before anything else, was walk barefoot toward the waterfall, the path too slippery for shoes. I hadn’t stood on bare earth in years, and something about the ground itself, cool and uneven under my feet, made me feel more awake than I had in months. It happened to be close to my birthday. I remember thinking that was, quietly, a good way to begin a new year of my life.

At the waterfall, I hesitated before jumping. But I did, and when I surfaced, whatever fear I’d been carrying into that pool wasn’t there anymore. I floated for a while afterward, small fish gathering around me, and I let myself just be still. Water, nature, nothing asking anything of me.

The next day was a two-hour hike, crossing streams, leeches finding their way onto our legs at almost every stretch. I noticed, almost with surprise, how calm I was about it. We’d rinse them off with a little saline, and move on. Nothing about it unsettled me. It just felt, oddly, like the forest was working on me in a way I couldn’t quite name.

Rafting came after that, and it was pure, uncomplicated joy. The kind I hadn’t let myself feel in a long time. That same evening, cycling uphill, a scorpion crossed the path ahead of us, a species I’d never seen before. We ran out of water partway up and stopped at a stream, drinking straight from it. By the time we reached the top, the sky opened into rain. After the heat of the climb, it felt less like bad luck and more like something we’d earned. Coming back down, the air had turned cool, the sun gone soft, and I remember not wanting the ride to end.

One night, the electricity failed. The room turned hot almost immediately, the way tropical air does the moment a fan stops moving it. Thunder was rolling in somewhere close, the first hints of rain starting to gather. Just then, against the glass pane, fireflies. Dozens of them gathered right at the window, as if drawn there on purpose. For close to fifteen minutes, there was nothing to listen to except the river running below us and the quiet, unhurried blinking of light against the glass. It was, without question, the most beautiful thing I saw on the entire trip. Nothing about it needed electricity, or plans, or anything I’d arranged. It simply arrived, the way the best things in nature do.

Four days. That’s all it took. I came back a different person, steadier, more certain of myself than I’d been in a long time. In ways I hadn’t expected a single trip to change. I don’t fully understand why nature does what it does to us. I only know that when everything else had failed to reach me, it did.

That’s what travel does, when you let it.