Packed...and waiting

Buddhism--which was founded in India more than 2,000 years ago--turns on the central tenet that human beings should let go of their physical and emotional connections to the world. In this way, they can obtain enlightenment and inner peace.

If the bags that Jenna and I have packed for our trip to the Subcontinent are any indication, we are nowhere close to enlightenment.

Two large hiking backpacks filled to the point of tipping over, a roller suitcase, and two more smaller backpacks. And we still feel like we are leaving stuff behind.

Here is an abbreviated list of the things we are taking: two weeks's worth of clothes, three weeks' worth of underwear, comfortable shoes, flip-flops, Crocs (to traverse streets washed out by monsoon rains), eight sticks of deoderant, three tubes of toothpaste, four toothbrushes, three cans of shaving cream, ten Gillette razors, Ibuprofen, inhalers, Dayquil, Immodium, EmergenC and and a half-dozen other types of over-the-counter medicine the sum total of which would make up a pharmacy shelf; a laundry bag, a water purifier, two travel guides each as thick as the Mahabharata, electrical adapters, two rolls of toilet paper, insect repellent, four blank journals, a laptop, a camera with an extra long-range lens, five paperback books, two old copies of The New Yorker and a deck of cards. Not to mention the most important thing of all: our passports with visas.

Our lives for the next 10 months or so are contained in these five bags. Much of it will be disposed of along the way. Empty deoderant sticks discarded in the trash. Books that have been read given to used bookstores somewhere along the Ganges. What we come back with will be much, much more.