Originally written 5th April 2025
When you’re a solo traveler, there’s often an unsaid trust amongst other females, for example, that hopefully you will look out for each other in precarious situations. In my experience, you feel this vibe from others, if it’s there. We found that there’s a whole other level of trust when you involve family – trusting almost-strangers with your child(ren).
Instances when we’ve trusted and helped others abroad:
Returned rental car back to the mainland for people we met once
Loaned our spare laptop to a single mother we’d never met, whose work computer was kaput
Transferred a few hundred quid’s worth of local currency to our neighbor in Thailand, so that she could withdraw it for us from a bank without the ATM fee
Let our child go for a playdate at someone else’s place and they drove him home (we had met them many times during the weeks here)
Took the opportunity to have a ‘date dinner’ by ourselves when our friend offered to have our son help her with a sand sculpture on the beach for an hour or so
Left our son for hours each week to do art lessons with a parent and 20+ other kids
How others showed trust in us:
A bunch of families trusted James to teach their kids swim lessons (and he did a great job!)
In Thailand, we drove several children in our rental car, sometimes without their parents present
We kept an eye on the kids in our villa’s pool when their parents weren’t nearby
Women’s Circle leader allowed me to use technology to improve registration and comms for her events
Impromptu play dates
Bliss hub leaders shared our community with the larger group
How do these instances make you feel, especially if you can look at the scenarios from a parental perspective? As you might have thought in our last post, is this insanity?! Or has the Western world conditioned us to be untrusting, skeptical, afraid? Perhaps the pandemic contributed to some of this fear as we all became a bit more insular. Each of these examples has its own story and luckily all of them ended positively.
Honestly, my inner anxiety compass was wavering some of these times but I trusted my intuition and tried to quiet my logical mind from worrying. The real trust had to start with trusting ourselves. We observed how relaxed the local island culture was and also how much the worldschool community relied on each other like a ‘village’ raising the children. All of these examples would be naturally done at ‘home’ – in a place where you’ve known the people for months or years. Although we were only here for a few weeks, the connections felt much deeper than that. Perhaps it is the way of this lifestyle that the masks are thinner and you can see people for who they are, purely and truly.
What have you done lately to ‘pay it forward’? Who has shown you trust? I’d love to hear.
– Jess
