I have been in Goa for a while now. And the site where Maloka is being built — the wellness café and healing space I have been dreaming of for so long — was right there, waiting for me. And for the first 3 days of the trip, I could not bring myself to visit it.
It was not fear, exactly. It was doubt. The vision in my head was so clear, so alive and so complete. And I did not know whether the structure standing in front of me would match it. And if it didn’t — if I walked onto that site and felt the gap between what I had imagined and what was actually being built — I didn’t know how I would make peace with that. So I kept finding reasons to stay away.
But finally, I went.
And the moment I arrived, something in me settled. There it was — so alive and beautiful. Still unfinished and so much work left to do. And yet, standing there, I did not feel the gap I had been so afraid of. I felt joy. A deep sense of joy.
I thought that was the end of the story. That I had faced my doubt and come through it.
Then I met the contractor the next day.
In one conversation, all the plans I had been carrying so carefully in my head were turned upside down. The plans changed. The budget shifted. The timelines moved. And for the first time since I signed the lease papers all those months ago, I felt my faith waver.
This was a different feeling from the doubt I had carried earlier. The doubt had been about whether the vision would match. This was about whether I could hold it all together at all. More money. More time. More uncertainty than I had allowed myself to imagine.
So when I went back to the site a second time, after that meeting, a part of me was bracing as I expected the joy to be gone, replaced by the weight of everything that had just shifted.
But that is not what happened.
The moment I stood there again, the joy returned, exactly as it had been. The work was still enormous. Nothing about the practical reality had improved since the contractor’s news. And yet the joy was untouched by any of it. And in that, I found my answer.
Because here is what I have come to understand. When something is truly yours, your circumstances can shake without your faith shaking with them. The budget can change. The timeline can stretch. The plans can fall apart and be rebuilt a dozen times. None of that touches the deeper thing — the knowing that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
Standing on that site the second time, I understood that I am not building this alone. Something larger is holding this container for me. I am aligned with a purpose deeper than any spreadsheet or schedule. And because of that, I will be able to steer through whatever comes. Not because everything will go according to plan — it clearly will not — but because the plan was never really the point. The alignment is.
The fear the contractor’s news stirred in me did not disappear because the problems were solved. They were not solved. There is still so much work ahead. It disappeared because the joy reminded me of something my mind had briefly forgotten. That everything is happening for a reason. That I am being carried even when I feel like I am the one doing all the carrying.
The plans changed. The plans will change again. But the joy did not. And that is how I know I am still on my path.
Have you experienced something like this?