The blazing sun peeks just enough through the courtyard’s palm trees. The rays heat your typing fingers, sandal-bound toes and brown bosom in a green, red and yellow crochet bikini top. The typing comes from boredom, the last thing you wanted to encounter on this hard-earned, exotic Bali trip. Get out of your head, you think and say to yourself all bloody day. There’s a new world out there but you’re too “something” to escape. An island paradise awaits on the other side of the busy, high-trafficked roadway.

The locals are beautiful dipped in every shade of caramel and chocolate, their language rhythmic and lyrical. Where’s your curiosity? What happened to that sense of adventure you promised yourself? Instead of letting last night’s surreal dream keep you in the throes of subconscious paranoia, let go. Remember why you are here. Divinity. Peace. Reflection. Renewal. Not reviewing old ways, no more post-mortems of loves that were never built to last. Accept and overcome. What’s keeping you from you? Nothing. That changes here and now. Loving the sight of black people in non-traditionally black spaces is the move. Be in that. Don’t talk a good game and fail to live up to it. Now is the time and more than ever.

It doesn’t take a plethora of megahertz frequency YouTube meditation videos or enough vibration raising pressure point tap and chant combinations to escape the fact that you are you. It doesn’t matter where in this world you are at or who you are with. You are you. Embrace and own that shit in the full. Change your mindset. Failure comes in living yet not truly living and making the most of every step, every breath. Tomorrows are never promised so make the most of today.

Stay outside long enough to see that chocolate skin of yours turn to a deep mahogany. Go run your toes through the white sands you have been dreaming about. Go see the Indian Ocean from this side of the bay. Go. Seek. Do. 

Go be free.