🔎 How to Recognize Epiphanies and Change Your Mind

On wildness, beliefs, and Bali.

I’m writing today from Penestanan, a quiet village just outside the town of Ubud in Bali. The two places are connected by roads, staircases, streams, and rice paddies, yet they feel very different. The first is still charming; the second, terribly over-crowded.

My work station is a wooden table in a lush garden with a daytime view of silver-gold skinks and spotted doves, and a nighttime soundtrack of guttural tokay geckos, smacking tokek geckos, cicadas, and frogs.

Overdeveloped as Bali is, natural wildness has not fully surrendered yet to our human invasion. Only a few minutes away from the road, we’re surrounded by banana trees, frangipani, palms, vines, hibiscus, ferns, orchids, and mighty banyan trees (locally known as waringins). Even inside the house, baby ants will crawl all over my keyboard. More than once Daniel had to escort a mating dragonfly couple from our bedroom or convince a black bumblebee to continue buzzing elsewhere.

A waringin tree and the ubiquitous heliconia aka lobster claw.

Breaking Free

The jungle has changed enormously since the arrival of humans, yet it’s still a jungle: green, dense, and tangled. More wild than tamed.

I cannot say the same about myself. As adventurous as I’d like to be, I feel more tamed than wild. My body is showered, groomed, and dressed. My mind is conditioned by society and personal history.

This is why I celebrate it when I break free in small ways. When I swim nude where it isn’t allowed, or better: When I liberate myself from an old belief and change my mind.

We typically don’t change our minds overnight. Beliefs tend to shift gently when we accept new knowledge or have new experiences, then slowly morph over time. But there are moments when our beliefs pivot suddenly. If we take the time to reflect, we can often identify what triggered the switch: a book, a dinner party, an accident. Or in my case: a turtle.

Here are my five best epiphanies of the year, moments on which I changed my mind and… felt a bit wild. I hope they will inspire you to find your own.

It’s easier to change your mind when light falls on your head. This statue at the Ubud Palace touched me more than the elaborately carved entrance gates.

1. A Turtle

Until recently, I feared that good ideas are short-lived. I had to write them down the moment they appeared or else they would be gone forever. I was often nervously scribbling down half-baked thoughts that made little sense to me later.

But then I spent several days snorkeling in the water off the coast of Amed in Bali. Floating above the coral reefs felt like drifting into the realms of my unconscious. Here were the myriad of shapes I’d dreamed about since childhood, soft-colored, amorphous, and responsive—alive in more ways than I could comprehend.

I felt giddy with excitement when I spotted my first sea turtle. It was large compared to the reef fish and swam elegantly slow, as though the water were a viscous medium. We swam together for a while, me above the turtle.

When I reached for it, knowing my arm wouldn’t be long enough to stroke its back yet wanting to approach regardless, the turtle immediately sank lower toward the ocean floor. I stayed on the surface, tied to my need for air, and watched the turtle disappear from sight.

Briefly, I regretted my move and my inability to follow the turtle. But this regret was shallow; deep down I felt at ease. The turtle was out there, enjoying the ocean and would rise again when feeling called.

2. A Book

In the spring, I set out to rewrite my memoir based on my agent’s feedback. I needed to add more backstory and focus my narrative. Just as I began to lose confidence in my fragmented structure and worried that my choices might diminish the book’s potential to find an audience, I read You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith and I felt validated. Here was an author who seemed to follow her own voice, in life and in writing, who boldly added chapters of just a few lines long, who repeated questions and chapter titles, who addressed the reader directly and reflected on the writing process on the page. And here she was with her unique, non-classical memoir, storming the bestseller lists all the same. She wasn’t an unknown, of course, but neither was she a Hollywood celebrity. How I adored her book and its success in the market, how it gave me hope.

Maggie Smith

is on Substack with

For Dear Life with Maggie Smith

.

3. A Ritual

In September, Daniel’s father died after an illness of several years. We were in Japan and sat heavily with our grief. Having lost our mothers in 2020 and 2021, we were done with loss. But loss was not done with us.

I took inspiration from the Japanese, who refuse to break bonds with their dead, and who call back their loved ones in an annual ceremony known as obon.

Seated in a Buddhist temple, wondering why this ritual touched me so, I was able to accept an ambiguity I’ve long rejected. My disbelief in a life after death can exist side by side with my belief in the possibility of reunion.

4. A Writing Residency

In August, I was invited to attend a month-long writing residency at the Toji Cultural foundation in Wonju, South Korea. I felt more pressured than usual to be productive: If a foundation is paying for your room and board, you must show results. My goal was to draft a good chunk of my second memoir.

But I also felt called to write about Korea and Vietnam, a friend’s fascinating shoe business there, a book the author had contacted me about months before, the story collection of the foundation’s founder. And what about the newsletter I planned to launch?

I finished several smaller projects, yet left Korea with the idea I hadn’t accomplished anything. I rebuked myself, You always waste time like this! You don’t focus enough! Instead of sticking to the plan, you go with the flow!

And then I stopped myself. What was wrong with going with the flow? Perhaps I’d wasted far more time by trying to stick to the plan. I vowed to be kinder to myself and listen more to that strange voice inside of me, the voice that sounds intimate and familiar yet is never truly mine.

5. A Birthday Present

As a birthday present to two friends and myself, I booked us an aerial yoga class in Hoi An, Vietnam. I’d first learned of this type of yoga from a friend in the Netherlands and soon after saw it advertised wherever I went—an example of how our attention determines the reality in which we live.

I showed up ready to lift myself into the air. I’ve been practicing yoga for fifteen years and assumed the class would be easy for me. But balancing and twirling on a silk-like hammock requires different muscles and different techniques than vinyasa yoga, and I found myself to be an absolute beginner.

Insecurity rushed in, along with frustration and shame. I dislike being confronted with a sobering reality after I’ve overestimated myself.

But as I followed the teacher’s guidance, step by step, I was able to accomplish the poses and turn my world upside down. And it felt all the more wonderful: free from my certainties and expectations, I could just be, swaying in a hammock, laughing when almost tumbling out, feeling connected to the others in the class.

I returned home rejuvenated and reassured: how great to be an absolute beginner!

This is not the sea turtle of my dreams. I don’t possess an underwater camera. But this is the first turtle I met in Bali, a pool turtle who didn’t mind posing (and basking in the sun).

Desk Journeys aka Book Recommendations

While I’m still working on my next Bali travel post, let me leave you with three reading recommendations for Indonesia:

Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, by Multatuli.

This is a classic of Dutch literature, originally published in 1860, yet still relevant today and made newly accessible by a recent translation into English published by NYRB in 2019.

The novel, written under a pseudonym by a former civil servant posted in the Dutch East Indies, has been called the Dutch version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was written to criticize colonialism and inspire revolt and many claim the book did its job.

The novel is also a brilliant breakdown of narrative structure. There’s a frame story about a Dutch coffee merchant in Indonesia who uncovers unpublished papers telling a touching love story. Both story lines are interspersed with short essays on colonial life and politics.

When I first read the book as a teenager, its nonlinear and fragmented setup opened my wannabe-writer eyes to the possibilities of the novel as a genre. The famous Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer claims Max Havelaar is one of the most important novels of all time.

Read this review in Cleaver Magazine to learn more about Max Havelaar.

Speaking of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, please check out his epic Buru Quartet or get at least started with book one, This Earth of Mankind. It’s a bittersweet coming-of-age novel set in the last years of Dutch colonial rule. Pramoedya wrote it while being imprisoned by the Dutch and later by the Indonesian government under Suharto on the political island prison of Buru in eastern Indonesia. Denied materials to write inside his cell, he memorized chapters and dictated them to visitors, so they could write them down.

The best nonfiction book on Indonesia I know of is Elizabeth Pisani’s Indonesia, Etc.As she travels from island to island, she takes you with her to meet the people and their cultural practices, giving you the opportunity to experience Indonesia far more intimately than the majority of tourists on a Bali beach ever will.

Author Updates

Cincinnati Review nominated my very short story on theft in Amsterdam for Best Microfictions 2023. ICYMI in April, you can read “Mirror” on their website or even hear me read it to you.

Time to Say Goodbye

I’m wishing you a warm end of the year. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, whether you’re in a position to celebrate or not, whether you’ve chosen to be alone or have planned something with family or friends, I hope you’ll spent your days feeling part of some type of community.

Daniel and I will be together, just the two of us, for the first time in over two decades. Ever since we met, we’ve celebrated Christmas with his parents in Florida. Will we ignore the holidays this year (not hard to do on a Hindu island) or seek new rituals and meanings? Knowing I rarely find things when I seek them, I will probably leave it up to chance to invoke some magic. Does that sound familiar to any of you?

See you again in 2024!

All my best,

Claire

P.S. If you enjoyed my previous piece Possessions as a Liability: Illegal Dumping Is a Disgrace, you may also enjoy this article recently published in the Guardian, on one family’s effort to solve their addiction to consumerism.

This is how the Balinese invoke magic, by making offerings to the Gods. They do so several times a day and more elaborately several times a month.