![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_3.mp3]] Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern that’s hard to ignore. The more tightly I grip my expectations, the narrower my experience becomes. When I loosen them—when I meet reality as it is instead of insisting it conform to what I thought it should be—life tends to feel richer, stranger, and more generous. Put differently, my happiness seems to expand with acceptance and contract with expectation. That understanding didn’t arrive all at once. It emerged gradually, shaped by a book I read after college, by two formative trips where I learned as much from regret as from success, and by the very deliberate way I approached this trip to Brazil. This openness wasn’t accidental. I took specific steps to prepare for curiosity rather than outcomes. ## The Foundation: What _Vagabonding_ Changed for Me Shortly after graduating college, I read _Vagabonding_ by Rolf Potts. At the time, I thought of it as a guide to long-term travel. Looking back, it was really a guide to dismantling expectations. Its central idea is that the value of travel doesn’t come from how many places you visit, but from how deeply you inhabit a place. Staying long enough for novelty to wear off. Living more like locals than tourists. Traveling light—not only in what you carry, but in the assumptions and routines you bring with you. One idea stood out to me even then: preparation isn’t about knowing exactly what will happen. It’s about trusting that you can respond well to whatever does happen. Your attitude matters more than your itinerary. I understood that idea intellectually almost immediately. It took years—and a few humbling trips—to live it. ## Why Expectations So Easily Undermine Experience Expectations are powerful because they don’t just evaluate experiences after the fact; they actively shape them in real time. They focus attention. They decide what we notice, what we ignore, and what counts as success or failure. Psychology supports this. When we believe someone—or something—will succeed, we behave differently. We’re more patient, more generous, more willing to invest time and care. When we expect failure or disappointment, we subtly steer ourselves and others toward that outcome. The same mechanism operates inward. Our minds quietly generate rules: life should be fair, people should understand me, this experience should make me happy. Reality inevitably violates these rules. When it does, frustration follows—not because something went wrong, but because reality didn’t comply with an unexamined story. For a long time, my response was to avoid expectations altogether. But that doesn’t work either. Unspoken expectations still exist; they’re just harder to see and easier to resent. What actually helps is choosing expectations carefully, keeping them minimal, and making them explicit to yourself. That lesson became clear through Honduras and Idaho. ## Honduras: Meaning That Arrived Uninvited My trip to Honduras began with a narrow, practical goal: improve my Spanish. A family friend named Sandra had grown up in Choluteca, Honduras, and still had family there. When I mentioned wanting full immersion, she offered for me to live with her mother for part of the trip and her sister for another part. Sandra helped me get settled and visited at times, but most of my days were spent without any English speakers. That alone did exactly what I hoped it would linguistically. But Sandra’s role extended beyond that. She later returned to Choluteca to do humanitarian work. Her goal was to record videos of families living in extremely poor housing—structures made of corrugated metal, poorly sealed against rain and animals—and send those videos to people and networks in the United States to secure funding for permanent homes. I was not meant to be part of that effort. I was simply tagging along while she was there. She didn’t expect me to be a vector for anything. Through her work, I met Olga and her son, Edwin. Families described nights where snakes bit them while they slept, or rain soaked them through the roof. Children spoke calmly about conditions that were anything but. When we entered Olga’s home, she offered me an avocado. By then, I understood enough about Honduran culture to know that refusing food would be deeply disrespectful. Hospitality is not transactional; it’s relational. To refuse would have been to elevate myself above her generosity. So I accepted it. And I felt deeply uncomfortable. I came from abundance. I had never worried about food or shelter. And here I was, eating what might have been a meaningful portion of someone else’s limited supply. That moment wasn’t about guilt; it was about clarity. Reality was no longer abstract. After that interview, something shifted quietly inside me. I set myself a mission: to help secure housing for Olga and Edwin. I succeeded. Their house was built for around ten thousand dollars while I was still in Honduras. I was there when it was completed. I celebrated with them. When I visited after the house was finished, Olga embraced me like a son. Her gratitude wasn’t performative or polite—it was overflowing and embodied. That moment has stayed with me for years, precisely because it was never part of my plan. It only happened because I had left room for the trip to become something other than what I intended. ## Idaho: Going for Money, Learning About Life The trip to Idaho began with a very different purpose. I went to stay with a family friend named Gary specifically to learn about personal finance, investing, and financial independence. Gary had built a life around those ideas, and I wanted to learn directly from someone who lived them. We did talk about money. I learned a great deal. But Gary and his family lived on a farm, and that environment taught me far more than I anticipated. They raised sheep. They grew corn. Life followed seasons rather than schedules. I learned how to set siphon tubes for irrigation ditches, how to run a tractor, how to corral sheep. I also learned what it means to live with death as a normal, visible part of life. Animals are born and die. Crops grow, are harvested, and then the land rests. Winter isn’t failure—it’s part of the cycle. I buried sheep while I was there. Over time, it stopped feeling shocking. Death wasn’t dramatic; it was integrated. That worldview crystallized in one moment involving Gary’s father, who was elderly and still working relentlessly. I asked why he kept working at his age. The response was calm and factual: if he stopped, he would die. At first, that sounded bleak. Eventually, I understood it differently. Work wasn’t obligation for him—it was purpose. It was why he got out of bed. He had chosen a life that required him, and that requirement sustained him. That realization quietly challenged my assumptions about comfort, retirement, and what a “good life” is supposed to look like. ## Brazil: Preparing Openness Instead of Understanding By the time Brazil entered my life, I had learned something important: the most meaningful parts of travel tend to happen outside our expectations—but only if we leave space for them. Before the trip, [[2025 Trip to Brazil|I wrote a letter to Laio.]] It wasn’t a schedule or a list of demands. It was an explanation of how I hoped to approach the experience. I told him I wasn’t looking for constant plans or daily depth. I wanted to observe, to compare, to feel how life moved in a place I barely understood. That mattered, because Laio was planning much of my time. I was entering his world—his routines, his relationships, his sense of normal. In that context, rigid expectations wouldn’t have made sense. They would have been a form of control, a way of grading the experience rather than receiving it. I also want to name something clearly in hindsight: when I arrived in Brazil, I didn’t understand much at all. Laio was among a very small group of Brazilians I had ever met in real life. I had no lived sense of the culture, the rhythms, the assumptions, or what daily life actually felt like. That lack of understanding could have been a liability. Instead, it became an asset. Because I didn’t know, I stayed open. That openness—approaching Brazil without confident interpretations or hidden benchmarks—turned out to be essential. It allowed moments to arrive unannounced. It allowed meaning to form without being forced. It made the trip not just enjoyable, but deeply useful to me. Looking back, the work wasn’t in planning what Brazil would give me. It was in preparing myself to notice what it already was. Continue to the next post: [[4. Eight Hours at the Gate]]