Article based on a personal true story which shows how does having a positive mindset help overcome challenges when unpleasant experiences happen while traveling and that a positive attitude towards challenges plays a big role in overcoming difficult situations.

How might your mindset help You overcome challenges? When we are facing challenges, having a positive mind can help by giving us the motivation we need to keep looking for solutions and ways to overcome the difficult situations we find ourselves in. A positive mindset prevents us from giving up.
How do You keep a positive mindset? Being confident and trusting yourself, looking at the good things that may happen, setting a goal and focusing on what You can do to achieve it, is often the basis for a positive mindset.

For the night between the 6th and the 7th of August 2014 I was supposed to be hosted by someone but things didn’t go as planned and it happened that at circa 22:30, about two hours before midnight, I had to leave the house of my potential host. I was in Hutki, a tiny village located about 15 km south of Czestochowa, in Poland.

All of a sudden I found myself walking on the side of a countryside road in complete darkness, without having food with me nor another place to sleep for the night. I did not have my tent with me, only my sleeping bag. But I didn’t get desperate – inside of me I knew that a positive attitude towards challenges was determinant for the outcome of the end of that day and I decided to preserve my positive mindset and find out what solutions would show up. I said to myself: “Adrian, have faith, things will work out for the best also this time”.

I put my headlamp on my head and I attached the red beacon to my backpack. I decided to walk towards the closest petrol station, located about 4 km from where I was, to eventually try to sleep there. After about twenty minutes that I was walking on the side of the road, a car stopped and the driver asked me if I was in need of help. I told him where I wanted to go and he offered to take me there.

While I was in his car I became curious to know what made him stop when he saw me, so I asked him. He said that it was mostly because of my lights, the white one on my head and the red one on my backpack, and that when he saw also my mattress attached to my backpack he realized I must have been a hitchhiker, and given that he also hitchhiked sometimes he understood my situation.

(If I had no lights, he wouldn’t have noticed me in the darkness of the night, and would have been also very dangerous for me to walk on the side of the road. Including lights among the things to bring when hitchhiking and backpacking is of fundamental importance – many times they won’t be used, but sometimes they will make a huge difference.)

On our way he suggested that maybe would be better for me to take me to Czestochowa as there were supposed to be many pilgrims around the Jasna Gora monastery and I could sleep together with the pilgrims since the environment was safe and friendly. I accepted and he took me to the location of the monastery.

While he was telling me about this famous monastery, I expected to find many people of all ages sleeping in their tents or simply on the grass around it. When I got there, it was midnight. I didn’t find anybody, but I continued to believe in the importance of positive attitude in life, I kept believing that something good will happen again – the man who gave me the ride was already something good that happened.

So I said to myself “Adrian, keep looking around, don’t give up, a solution will come out” and decided to just have a walk all around the monastery to see it better from more angles.

When I arrived in front of its main gate, up on the hill, I saw a pilgrim who just got there on its bicycle. We started talking and, among other things, he told me that the pilgrims are all accommodated in a special house, built on purpose for them, and that maybe I can also be accommodated there for free. We went together to this house. At the reception I found out that some sort of payment was expected so I left.

In front of this house there were guarded parking lots, and between them, scattered, there were big tents which had big long tables inside where pilgrims could sit and eat the food they had with them. From distance, these tables looked like ideal surfaces to sleep on, since they were long and wide enough and they were protected from rain. I decided to go to one of the guards and ask for permission to sleep on one of those tables. The guard said it was okay, so I headed towards one of the tents.

Once arrived at the tent and got the backpack off my back, I noticed there were 3 apples left on the table. When I saw them I felt like they were there waiting for me. I sat and pondered over the events that happened to me during the entire evening, and observing how did having a positive mindset help me overcome challenges and find a place to sleep comfortable enough, made me feel great.

Written by Claudio Adrian Dobre; first in 2014, last updated in 2020. © 2014-2020

See also

> Benefits of Having a Positive Attitude when Traveling