There Is More to Holidays Than Pad Thai Around a Pool. Mongolia certainly proved that to be true

I have been attempting to write this post for the last couple of weeks since we got back to Hong Kong, but it has taken me longer than I expected. The trip was more than an experience. It has begged a lot of reflection, individually and collectively as a family. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been talking, reminiscing, laughing about things that were not so funny at the time, and through the process, slowly making sense of what we had all been through.

I write with the benefit of hindsight. I say upfront, that the trip evoked so many mixed emotions: the wonder and the discomfort and the gratitude and the frequent desperate longing for a functioning shower, the sheer spectacle of nature, while trying not to think about the intrepid journey to get there. It took several weeks to settle into feeling, processing and naming those experiences.

Which is, when I think about it, exactly the point.

Mixed emotions, the evidence that we took the time to really work through the significance and complexity of those experiences. The whole goal of emotion coaching and emotion regulation. The journey of reflective processing to be able to hold the complicated, less desirable ones alongside the positive ones. Mongolia gave our whole family a masterclass in that.

Let me start with a throw-away comment I made, the month leading up to our trip.

Somewhere in the planning process, in a conversation with my husband about where to go this summer, I said, with some confidence,  "there is more to holidays than pad-thai around a pool". I wanted time in nature. Authentic experiences. The way people actually live, not the ease of hanging by a pool at a resort. I have had some of the most beautiful experiences of my life in trying to live like the locals do. With places like the Alps and Whistler out of bounds due to prevailing unrest in the Middle-East, I looked to our region, something in Asia that scratched the same itch.

I looked at the options. I found Mongolia.

Nothing could have prepared us. Nothing. Could have prepared us.

The discomfort was real for all of us. We were pushed well beyond our comfort zone, beyond the bubble as my mother-in-law aptly calls our life in Hong Kong. The children were struggling. They were loud and clear. I was struggling. Quietly. The budget and the photos had built an expectation that the reality was somewhat slower to match.

There were meltdowns. There were moments where I genuinely had nothing left to offer except presence and the very sincere hope that grace would arrive before I did or said something I would spend the rest of the trip repairing.

And here is the thing I kept coming back to, as a therapist and as a mother trying to hold it together in the middle of the Mongolian wilderness.

It is my personal approach that creates the climate. Haim Ginot

I could not take away their discomfort. Nor could I change the journey. And yes, in case you are wondering, I tried to get us back to Ulan Bator earlier without any success.

But I could hold them. I could validate what they were feeling. I could affirm that we were going to support them through it, even when I was not entirely sure how.

They needed my calm, steady, sturdy presence. On the days I managed it, things shifted. On the days I did not, we repaired.

Solo time most mornings before the family woke up was the thing that saved me. I walked most mornings and would sit with my coffee and my prayers and the most extraordinary natural silence I have ever experienced, and I would ask for the grace to show up in the way they needed me to.

Grounding myself during the transitions, breathing through the moments when everything felt like too much, choosing to anchor in what was true through Scripture affirmations, rather than ruminate on what was difficult. My professional training in these tools may have helped. But what allowed it to become my default in the moment was the practice, grounding, and anchoring outside the moment. And they worked, more times than they did not.