How We Learn to Let the World In

Another episode of Wayfinder waiting for you

Our lives are not shaped by the loudest moments, nor by the most expensive ones, nor even by the ones that photograph best. They are shaped by the quieter crossings — the moments where something inside us loosens, where control slips, where we allow ourselves to be changed without fully understanding how or why.

Travel, when it works the way it’s meant to, lives in those moments.

Not the checklist version. Not the “I’ve been there” version. But the kind of travel that costs you something — certainty, comfort, ego — and gives you something harder to name in return.

This is the space where Wayfinder exists.

And it’s why this episode, with Huda Alvi, has stayed with me long after the microphones were switched off.

Huda is an entrepreneur, a traveller, and the co‑founder of The Girls Trip, a company built around the idea that travel can be a form of collective transformation — not escape, not consumption, but connection. Her story takes us to Peru, to Cusco, to the high-altitude spaces where breath comes harder and clarity comes easier. But what unfolds there is not a destination story. It’s something far more universal.

Because Peru, in this conversation, becomes a mirror.

Across cultures, across continents, there is a shared knowing that modern life keeps asking us to move faster, to optimize, to plan, to extract. Travel often becomes another version of that — another thing to “do right.” But some places resist that impulse. They ask something else of us. They ask us to arrive differently.

Cusco is one of those places.

High in the Andes, where wind hits your face with intention and the land refuses to flatten itself for convenience, the illusion of control starts to fray. Huda talks about arriving without over-planning, about letting curiosity — not certainty — lead the way. About how unfamiliar landscapes can awaken a kind of attention we didn’t realise we’d lost.

That attention matters.

Globally, we are living through a moment of disconnection disguised as connection. We know everything and feel very little. We document relentlessly and experience selectively. We are rarely surprised anymore — and even more rarely transformed.

What struck me in this conversation is how much of transformation comes not from seeking, but from allowing.

A conversation with a stranger.
A recommendation given without a Google review.
A door knocked on without knowing what waits on the other side.

Some of the most powerful moments Huda describes emerge this way — unscheduled, uncurated, deeply embodied. Healing that is not transactional. Spirituality that isn’t packaged. Encounters that remind us that wisdom does not belong exclusively to institutions, or algorithms, or Western frameworks of “expertise.”

In Peru, she encounters Pachamama — not as a concept first, but as a feeling. The belief that the earth is alive, relational, responsive. That mountains, stones, wind, bodies, and communities are not separate, but intertwined. Long before someone explains this philosophy to her, she feels it.

This is something many cultures around the world have never forgotten — even as modernity tried to erase it.

And it forces an uncomfortable but necessary reflection: what have we traded away in the name of progress?

In much of the Global North, individualism is celebrated as the highest form of freedom. But in many places, including Peru, community is the sacred unit. Healing is collective. Joy is shared. Responsibility extends outward.

Huda speaks about this not romantically, but practically — in how people show up for one another, how food is shared, how care is offered without spectacle. Travel, here, is not about “taking” experiences home. It’s about being received — and being changed by that reception.

There is also patience in this story. Patience with weather. With altitude. With uncertainty. With revelation.

One of the most resonant metaphors in the episode emerges from a moment many travelers would label a disappointment: waiting. Waiting for clouds to lift. Waiting for something hidden to reveal itself on its own terms.

And isn’t that life?

We plan relentlessly, believing clarity will reward urgency. But again and again, across cultures and spiritual traditions, the lesson is the same: some things only appear when we are willing to wait — when we are willing to be present without demanding outcomes.

Huda’s reflections on Machu Picchu touch on this beautifully, not as spectacle but as symbol. Not everything is meant to be instantly visible. Not every place reveals itself to everyone, at every moment. Readiness matters.

So does respect.

This episode also quietly asks us to rethink why we travel.

Do we go to escape?
To perform?
To accumulate stories?

Or do we go to soften, to open, to return changed — and then allow that change to ripple outward?

Huda’s work with The Girls Trip sits firmly in that latter space. What she is building is not just access to destinations, but access to permission — permission for women to step outside prescribed roles, to choose curiosity, to experience the world together in ways that foster trust, vulnerability, and transformation.

There is a moment in the conversation where she reflects on happiness — not the self-focused kind, but the quieter, deeper happiness that comes from facilitating transformation in others. From witnessing people meet themselves more honestly because they stepped into the unknown.

That, to me, is the quiet thesis of Wayfinder.

This podcast is not about where to go. It’s about how to go — and who you become along the way.

It’s about recognizing that travel, at its best, is a conversation between you and the world. And like all meaningful conversations, it requires listening more than speaking.

I don’t want to tell you what happens in this episode.
I don’t want to summarise it.
I don’t want to explain it away.

Because some things — like healing, like revelation, like the feeling of wind on your face in a place you didn’t know you needed — are only real when experienced directly.

What I will say is this:
If you have ever felt the pull of elsewhere.
If you have ever sensed that the world is bigger than the life you’re currently living.
If you have ever suspected that travel could be more than movement — that it could be a form of remembering —

Then this conversation with Huda Alvi on Wayfinder is waiting for you.

Let it meet you where you are.
Let it take its time.
Let it do what it needs to do.