I had never seen anything like it.

It was 1984. My friend A. had invited me to join her parents in southern India, where her father had been running a cotton business for twenty-five years. For me, a girl from Niort who had already tasted Spain and England, this trip was something of an entirely different nature.

We drove four hundred and seventy kilometres with their chauffeur to Kodaikanal, their holiday home in the hills. Hundreds of kilometres of landscapes, dusty roads, and scenes of life I had no words to describe.

That is where something cracked open inside me. Quietly. Permanently.

What you cannot unlearn

The human suffering I witnessed along those roads was not abstract. It was not in a documentary. It was real, immediate, impossible to keep at a distance.

I was not prepared for it. Nobody had told me how to react. Nobody could.

That journey taught me something no classroom ever could : compassion is not learned from books. It is triggered in the body, in the presence of another person's reality.

I was nineteen. I came home different.

The trips that crack you open

Spain had taught me that friendship crosses borders. England had taught me I could survive discomfort and rain. India taught me that the world was infinitely larger and more complex than anything I had imagined from Niort.

Those three trips had cracked open the certainties I had absorbed without realising it. Those cracks never closed.

And that was exactly what they were meant to do.

Because the trips that transform us are never the ones where everything goes smoothly. They are the ones that challenge what we thought we knew, about the world, and about ourselves.

What that trip left me with

An awareness. A moral discomfort I learned to inhabit rather than flee. And a certainty : seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it were, is itself a form of wisdom.

That is the lesson I write about in Volume 2 of The Strawberry Wisdom, Adolescence. The years when the world began teaching me what school never could.

This week's question

Which journey confronted you with something you were not expecting to see, and what did it change in you ?

Write it in the comments. I read everything.

Elisabeth Court, known as Babette
Author of The Strawberry Wisdom