Your book, Steeped: My Search for Tea and Transformation in India, shares your ten-week journey across India and how this experience took you on a journey of self-discovery and transformed your life. Could you tell us why this book was essential for you to write?

I went to India naively, thinking that the subcontinent would simply bestow upon me some transformation into an elevated life and I would come back an improved human. The trip changed me for sure, but it was really just a step along my path. A BIG step, but not the fully wrapped-up evolutionary product of my fantasies. So, you ask the question accurately. The trip to India took me on a journey, and that journey continues to this day.

Writing the book, then, was another step on the journey as I challenged myself to go deep and explore what gifts my travels did bestow upon me.

Your journey took you to some amazing places and gave you a new perspective on many areas of your life. What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?

One theme that arises in the book is acceptance, which, turns out, is at odds with a search for transformation. Striving toward evolution, in my case anyway, is borne of dissatisfaction with myself. The puzzle is that happiness comes from contentment, and contentment comes from acceptance. I mean, like, true acceptance of exactly what is.

So, as I left my job and my home and went to the other side of the world looking for self-improvement, what I really needed was self-acceptance. The frustrating paradox, then, is that the more I demanded transformation, the further I got from it. What I was looking for could only be found by no longer needing to look for it.

I appreciated the candid nature with which you told your story. What was the hardest thing for you to write about?

In my earliest drafts of the book, I allowed that what I’d undertaken was bold and brave, and thus I presented a fairly together protagonist handling the challenges of travel with relative aplomb.

But the truth was, I was terrified as I quit my job and undertook these travels. I was riddled with anxiety at every turn of my journey. Exposing the messy reality of that felt vulnerable—both because it revealed unflattering truths and because it felt self-indulgent. I learned along the way, though, that the more I revealed, the more my readers wanted me to reveal. In the end—and by no surprise as I look back—the vulnerability is what pulls people in, even as my ego imagines the opposite to be true.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from your story?

It’s funny, because while there were so many lessons like the ones alluded to above, the big lesson is sort of the starting point of the book: Just do the thing! If I could inspire one thing for readers, it would be that they find the courage to get their own bold ideas off the bucket list and onto the calendar—in any area of life, not just travel. But Steeped is first and foremost a travelogue. So, maybe the one thing is that readers sink into and delight in the sights, sounds, scents, joys and struggles of travel in India.

Author Links: GoodReads | Website

Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2024/04/10/just-do-the-thing/