“When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation, or accept it. All else is madness.”
- Eckhart Tolle
Ah, travel…there never seems to be a shortage of challenging situations.
In fact, I suspect this is partly the point of travel. The more traveling I do, the more I realize that repeatedly being pushed outside my comfort zone – day after day – in one way or another, is rather like taking an accelerated class in personal growth.
Although I would certainly get a lot more writing accomplished in the quiet, solitary comfort of my cozy home back in Canada…the experience of living out of a suitcase and lugging the damn thing across multiple countries alongside a traveling companion is teaching me things about myself, relationships and the world that I would not learn at home. And I suspect (I hope!) that this life experience will make me a better writer. It’s certainly making me a more tolerant human being. At least, I hope so.
My friend and I are traveling through Europe for three months. We’re on a pretty tight budget, so some of our accommodations have been, shall I say, less than stellar. But for the most part, our hotels and apartments have been cute, cozy, fairly clean and well-located. But I had to pull the plug last week on a stinky studio in Milan. And in light of what happened after we left, I’m awfully glad I did.
The studio was a dive…but Milan is super expensive, so that’s that: you get what you pay for.
Unfortunately, what we also ended up paying for was a studio that stank of air freshener. The moment I walked into the room, I was hit by the smell. It was overpowering, almost to the point of nauseating. We immediately opened the balcony doors. Although the traffic and tram noise from the street below was ridiculously loud, the racket outside was better than the stench inside.
“The smell of air freshener is REALLY strong!” I said to my friend. She has no sense of smell. She also has asthma, an ongoing cough and a compromised immune system.
Then I texted our VRBO contact person and told him about the smell. He ignored that part of my message. But he did send someone over with bedding to make up the second bed for me (a tiny cot tucked under the staircase)…always nice to have a pillow, sheets and a duvet of some sort on one’s bed. So I told that person about the smell. To which she smiled, waved her hand and cheerfully said something to the effect of, “The cleaner sprayed air freshener!”
I smiled back and said something to the effect of, “Yes…I gathered that.” Then I pointed to the wide-open door and deafening noise from the street and said, “We are trying to air out the apartment.”
To which she smiled again, shrugged, then left…rather quickly.
And so, my travel companion and I went out for dinner…leaving the balcony doors wide open, hoping that would do the trick to air out the studio. Nope. When we returned a couple of hours later, the smell was just as strong. I texted my contact guy again. He ignored me.
Resigned to accepting a lousy situation, I closed the balcony doors and crawled into my Harry Potter bed beneath the stairs…which is when I noticed the air freshener smell was even stronger! Thinking perhaps there was a plug-in air freshener of some sort hidden under the bed or in the cupboard above my bed (that held the kitchen dishes!), I climbed out of bed again and searched the entire studio for the source of the smell. No luck. Then I thought that maybe the air freshener was IN the air conditioning unit. Nope.
Puzzled, concerned, irritated, uncomfortable…but also exhausted, I finally fell asleep. As did my friend in her bed upstairs.
The next morning, I woke up feeling a little nauseated…and the smell was still just as strong. I made a cup of coffee but didn’t open up the balcony doors right away because my friend was still asleep upstairs. But not for long. Because as soon as she woke up, she began coughing. I mean, even more than usual. I was coughing, too, but not nearly as bad as her.
I texted our contact guy again and told him the smell was unacceptable and if they couldn’t fix the situation, we were going to have to leave. To which he responded with, “I don’t know what smell you are talking about. I was there yesterday and there was no smell.”
By this point, I had run out of patience. I was feeling nauseous and couldn’t think straight. We walked to the hotel next door to see if they had a room for the night. They did. So I booked it.
Which is when things at the stinky studio got rather nasty. The contact guy finally decided to pay us a visit and check out the smell for himself. And how did he handle the situation? He came in, took a few sniffs and promptly announced: “That’s air freshener!”
“Yes,” I said. “I realize that. But it is way too STRONG! We have had the balcony doors open and the smell will not go away!”
Then I pointed to my tiny cot under the stairs and said, “It is really strong there…right where I slept!”
So he went over and took a sniff. Then he looked at me and shrugged. “That’s the smell of CLEAN!” he says. “Don’t you want the apartment to smell nice?!”
“That is NOT the smell of clean!” I snapped. “That is the smell of way too much air freshener!”
Then I pointed to the white gauzy curtains hanging in front of the open balcony doors. “And these smell like they have just been sprayed!”
The conversation continued to escalate…which is when he let it slip that prior to our arrival, the studio had been closed up for a month.
Ahh…now things were beginning to make sense. After he left (after telling us that we were free to leave but there would be no refund for our two remaining nights), my friend I put two and two together and realized that the studio had likely been closed because of a mold issue. Because when we looked again at the VRBO listing, we realized one of the reviews (2 out of 10) had mentioned mold. So goodness only knows what sort of chemicals they had used to get rid of the mold…and then how much (and what type of) air freshener they sprayed in that studio to cover up the smell!
But this much I know: the air quality in that studio was a health hazard. Continuing to accept this situation would be stupid. We packed our suitcases and moved to the hotel next door.
For the rest of that day, my friend could not stop coughing. When she woke up the next morning, she was coughing up black specks in her phlegm. She looked at me, terrified. “That’s never happened before.”
Thankfully, the black specks—a sure sign of being exposed to a pollutant—didn’t last long. Hopefully her (already compromised) lungs were able to get rid of the toxins. However, it is now a week since the stinky studio incident and she is still hacking and coughing far more than usual.
I am SO glad we had the wisdom to leave that horrible studio and not accept a lousy situation, simply so we wouldn’t lose money. On that note, they still haven’t issued us a refund and I doubt they will. But we have submitted a detailed formal complain to VRBO to let them know about the health risks the studio is exposing people to.
From a life lessons/personal growth perspective, now that I’ve had time to reflect on the situation, I think what I was struggling most with (while we were still in the stinky studio) is: when to accept a lousy situation…and when to leave it.
So I looked to Tara Brach, the author of the book, Radical Acceptance; Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, for guidance. “Radical Acceptance,” Brach explains, “is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.”
But what I realized is that just because we accept something unpleasant doesn’t mean we have to live with it! In fact, the sooner we accept the reality of a truly lousy situation, the sooner we will be able to move on from it.
“A moment of radical acceptance is a moment of genuine freedom.”
- Tara Brach
In hindsight, accepting that the studio was a potentially dangerous situation that could compromise our health was actually a really important moment to experience. Because when I did that (because my friend with no sense of smell was unable to), I realized that we had the freedom to do one of four things: stay where we were and hope the smell would go away; keep complaining about the situation to someone who wasn’t willing to change it; pretend the situation wasn’t as bad as it was (denial/madness); or leave the situation.
“Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.”
- Michael J. Fox
Or, put another way:
“Radical acceptance is not about giving up; it’s about acknowledging reality and finding a way to move forward.”
- Diana Partington
How about you?
Is there a situation you are currently experiencing that you are struggling to accept—because it is not the way you want it to be? What would happen if you did fully accept it, exactly as it is right now? Might that moment of radical acceptance give you the freedom to realize that you do, in fact, have many options?
Because this much I know: denying the reality of a lousy situation does not make it go away.
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