Seven days before I left on the furthest and longest trip of my life, I hurt my back. It wasn’t just an ‘ouch, better ice this and not do it again’ kind of hurt. It was the kind that kept you face down on the bed or else you’d be crying in pain. I had been preparing for this trip for five years and now I might not make it. 

Before marrying my husband, Nepal was a country that had never crossed my mind. A small country nestled beneath the Himalayas, it is as far on the other side of the world as it can get. Its a place talked about by hardcore mountaineers, where movies show earnest characters going to get some kind of spiritual wisdom. A place of endless temples and wild traffic. The place where I would be meeting all of my in-laws for the first time, a veritable army of five hundred people.

Now, here I was laying on my stomach in excruciating pain, my fear of going pitted against a new fear: that all this preparation, and money, would be for nothing. My husband stood over me, arranging things into the four massive suitcases that would accompany us. One was for him, one for myself, and two were filled with gifts to be given away. 

“It is okay if we don’t go,” he said sympathetically, and I knew he really meant it. That’s the kind of person he is. 

“It’s not okay!” I wailed, prone on the floor. We had gone through all the options. If we postponed our trip by a week I would be out of work for over a month. It was hard enough to get this time approved. If we didn’t go at all… My husband had not been home in eight years. 

 “We have to go,” I insisted. “We’ve done so much to get to this point. We can’t abandon it because of a stupid injury.”

“You can barely sit up for more than a few moments– How will you do the sixteen-hour flight?”

It was not just one sixteen-hour flight either. There would be a short flight to NYC, a layover followed by a sixteen-hour flight, another eleven-hour layover, and finally a six-hour flight, culminating in a total of forty-hours of travel. I couldn’t stand; I couldn’t even sit. Outlook was dismal. 

Seven days, hundreds of stretches, and a back brace later, I sat in the tiny local airport, already aching.

 It was one of those moments where you have absolutely no idea how you are going to make it through something. 

We all come up against moments like this. Sometimes it is something life-shattering, like a loss, or paralyzing, like a deep-seated fear. I had hit a moment like this before, on mile twenty of my first marathon. All my energy was gone. Every single thing which had motivated me to start seemed hollow. The six miles left stretched out before me, torturous and seemingly impossible. But what is amazing about humans is that when we hit a wall of ‘impossible’, somehow we find a way to keep going. Or maybe it is not human at all. 

At mile twenty, I took one step forward and then another. I had absolutely nothing left, but there was something which persisted– when everything else was gone. All I had to do was take the next step. 

As we boarded the little aircraft heading to NYC, my stomach twisted itself up like a scared snake. Somehow I’d make it there. I’d survive the flights, the layovers, and the impossibly heavy baggage. I would make it to Kathmandu.

And then the real adventure would begin.