An Interlude in Innsbruck

Kuzu zampo la, y’all!

What do you call a respite from a pause?

A gap in a break?

A lull in a hiatus?

A conference trip to Innsbruck, Austria, for the International Mountain Conference, planned more than a year ago, was an interlude in my pause in Bhutan.

Traveling into Bhutan is tough enough, requiring two or three flights from many places, but traveling out, especially with the goal of returning, was unlike any trip I’ve ever experienced.

First, I had to get permission to go, surrendering my passport, with its all-important visa, back to Immigration, along with an official letter about why I was leaving, for endorsement for re-entry.

Then, the compulsory cha-cha of flights: first to a major airport outside of Bhutan, Delhi in this case, necessitating an overnight, then the longer transcontinental flight.

Given the early morning flight from Paro, requiring a half hour drive from our mountaintop campus, my friend Karma offered to host me overnight at her flat in town, a short drive from the airport, before my flight.

On the way to her house, a troop of charismatic grey langurs with big black eyes and white-tufted Cheshire cat cheeks, cryptic inhabitants of the JSW Campus, scampered across the road in front of the car.

According to local belief, this was an auspicious sign for our mutual journeys, as Karma was also enroute to a training in India.

The langurs augured well.

 Our next stop was the just completed Dawa at Hilltop luxury hotel, halfway between the law school and town, where Karma wanted to inquire about hosting an event.

To demonstrate the exceptional hospitality of the new, ideally situated hotel – proximate to the Royal Academy and Dungkhar Dzong, two other institutions near JSW likely to have visiting guests – the General Manager treated us to beers and mocktails, a tour of the luxurious grounds, which feature Bhutan’s largest swimming pool, a spa, and private balconies overlooking the Paro valley from every room.

He then invited us to a multi-course dinner of curries, rice, naan, spring rolls, soup, kabobs, and more.

After a night in Delhi at the airport hotel, which required finding the hotel’s booth in the arrivals hall and being escorted through multiple security checkpoints into the bowels of the airport, I was on my way to Munich.

Spotting unironic lederhosen in the wild for the first time meant I was clearly in Tyrol.

The augury of the langurs was running out, though.

I reached Innsbruck just in time for some recent meal to take its revenge. Symptoms consistent with Listeria food poisoning, which can take one to three weeks to show up, awakened me the next morning.

Fortunately (auspiciously?), I had arrived a day early, and had two days to recover before my evening panel.

Here, I was forced to interrupt my pause.

The rush of planning, packing, traveling, settling in, and launching the semester had felt relentless.

Now I could do nothing but let my body recover.

The luxury of European cotton sheets, the soft bed, the thoughtfully arranged lighting, the well-stocked bathroom lulled me to relaxation.

The Buddhists speak of the bardo, most commonly understood as the time after death and before rebirth – the pause between lives.

Buddhists must learn to skillfully navigate this pause during life, coming to understand what sorts of beings may be encountered in the bardo space and how to properly engage and move past them without becoming terrified or lost.

Another teaching on the bardo, discussed in Ann Tashi Slater’s excellent and inspiring new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World, is the bardo as the gap between experiences, or even the gap between breaths – the moment between being and becoming.

As my yoga teacher had explained, it’s possible to rest in that tiny space, the kumbhaka between breaths, letting it expand, envelop, and enrich through attention. 

Yet, ironically, in my haste to pursue my pause, I had lost track of my yoga practice and with it the rest between breaths. 

The langurs had delivered me to a place where I had nothing to do but rest. 

I rehydrated furiously to join the evening plenary panel on The Value of Glaciers, in recognition of 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, at the International Mountain Conference.

Joining a glaciologist and an editor from Nature, both of whom spoke about the more commonly studied biophysical values of glaciers, I spoke about the cultural and spiritual values of glaciers, as did Pasang Yangjee Sherpa, a Sherpa anthropologist from Nepal’s Khumbu (Everest) region.

For mountain people, many of whom locate their gods or deities on or as mountains, the decline and extinction of glaciers can be a morally fraught consequence of climate change. Local communities often experience feelings of doubt and moral culpability.

As I wrote in the UNESCO Courier at the beginning of the year:

By my third day in Innsbruck, I was mostly recovered, though disappointedly still lacking any appetite. I’d especially been looking forward to eating pizza, pasta, fresh salads, cheese, and other staples of my US diet that are scarce or unavailable in Bhutan.

After attending panels on climate change resilience and adaption in mountain regions, I began fulfilling my resupply list: hair conditioner, herbal tea, wine, olive oil, chocolate, hiking shoes.

Being in an isolated spot fed by limited supply chains has caused me to interrogate my standard materialist, consumer-driven consumption practices: want it, need it, get it.

Living on a mountain without a car has placed a big pause between the impulse of material desire and the possibility of fulfilling that desire, allowing me to ask why I need the item and what desire it fulfills.

By the time I reached Innsbruck, I had written and revised my resupply list multiple times, cognizant of limited space in my luggage as well as this brief opportunity to procure goods not otherwise available. 

In the US, we’re so inculcated to understand ourselves as consumers defined by our material possessions and acquisitions.

When there’s nothing to buy, a huge amount of space opens up. 

As does the latent desire.

I missed shopping. I missed easy access to the goods that shape our American lives. Capitalism so easily seduces us with its infinitely diverse and desirable buffers to our deeper selves.

To be able to walk to three different well-stocked shoe stores on Maria-Theresien-Strasse was thrilling, as was locating sturdy hiking shoes to carry me through the rest of the semester.

The pause in Bhutan, and the deeper pause in Innsbruck, helped me interrogate my reflexively acquisitive desires, inserting a pause between thought and response.

Which is what the kumbhaka helps us do: open up space between stimulus and response, even between a breath and the desire for the exhale.

May you find rest and rejuvenation in the tiny pauses in life until next time,

Tashi delek!