I plan a lot of trips. I also plan a lot of trips I don’t go on. The planning part is easy. I love to research where I’m going; unique accommodations, the flow of the itinerary, when to weave in fun activities with the space to do nothing at all. Once the location is chosen, I shoot myself out of a cannon and plan until there is almost nothing left to plan. I become obsessed with putting the structure together, like the exterior pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle, making the necessary shape to fill in with ease over time.

Then there is my experience of the trip itself. Strangely, I typically know before a trip occurs if I’ll actually wind up experiencing it as planned. Even if it’s months out, I can sense whether or not the future will happen as planned. Nine times out of ten, I ignore this intuition completely. I love to travel, I want to go where I spend so much timing planning to be. Yet, my knowing remains, nagging at me persistently in the back of my mind. No matter how much I can imagine aspects of the never-going-to-happen-trip, I just can’t feel myself experiencing it in the location in the time and space I’ve set it up to be there.

This was the case with the five-year anniversary trip to Italy that Mike and I planned to go on this week. Over the summer when Mike suggested that we go to Italy as a romantic gesture to celebrate our plans to buy a home there several years from now, I jumped on the sweet idea. Italy in January; damp, cold and magical. I’d wear head-to-toe black; all the pieces that get stuffed to the back of the closet in Colorado. Yet, I knew that would never really happen. As the months dragged on, I walked the streets of Florence in my head out of memory and nostalgia, but just couldn’t place us there together this winter, no matter how much I tried. Eventually, this foggy sense turned to subtle dread as the trip grew closer. Something didn’t feel right; I’d wake up to a passing article about COVID in Europe, or our flights would change ever so slightly making travel less convenient. It was time for help. Laying in bed I silently talked with whatever was listening. “Please, give me a louder nudge if we aren’t supposed to go. Clearly I haven’t listened yet.”

I like the idea of signs and I also like believing in them. But, lately I’m having trouble with all this spiritual “the universe only wants the best for me”-excuse-my-French-crap. This notion may be true, but it can’t possibly be in the way we humans have made it so. To think that the powers at be, whether one man in the sky or a flow of energy that we’re all a part of, are individually-focused as we’re making them seems self-serving and off-base. Sure, we all have access to infinite possibility and the abundance that is universal energy, but to call upon it for our own rather pathetic, at times, requests has me pause to better understand my own relationship with the “universe.”

When I was younger I found it quite supportive to lean into mysterious power beyond the human realm. I “talked” to the universe regularly in a unconscious prayer for comfort when I felt I had little capability on my own. As I’ve learned to comfort myself and heal many of the wounds that would once trigger such discomfort, I find I converse with the universe much less often than I used to. I believe in its existence, and I can feel my minuscule part in the whole, but I’m much more keen on passively riding our interconnected waves than efforting to make sure I’m on the right one. Lately, I presume the latter is a sure fire way to entirely miss the boat of the former.

When our extra travel-designated COVID tests didn’t arrive the day before our departure, my nerves shot into high gear. A sleepless night followed, when finally at 4:30am I opened my phone hoping for an email reporting a negative PCR result substituted for a notice about our hotel preemptively closing in Rome. It became crystal clear, my premonition true, we aren’t going to Italy. Hours of planning consummated with a final hour of cancellation communications. Rather disappointed, I took to the web for many more hours of research to find our replacement destination in warm and easy-to-access Mexico. Armed with the tests that ironically arrived the afternoon of our original departure, we felt safer and ready to shift plans, headed to bed with reinvigorated excitement for a trip saved.

As the universe would have it, Mike woke up in the middle of the night with COVID and tested positive using one of our travel tests a couple of hours later. Who knows why things occur or even if there is a why, but if we had boarded our plane to Italy when scheduled, we would’ve boarded with COVID being none-the-wiser until it was too late. Typically, I trust my gut almost completely, but any human gut in these pandemic days is marred with years of exhaustion, collective unrest and continued uncertainty. It’s hard to know what is actually what. So, even though I’ve been down on the universe lately, so much as to speculate aspects of its existence altogether, it heard my call and answered just in the nick of time. I’m sure there are many realities in which we could’ve made it to Italy unscathed and returned the same, yet in this one, we were clearly never meant to go, and I’m grateful I had a universal friend to help me realize what I already knew all along.