Turkey: I'd Choose a Mosque Over a Castle Every Single Time

I am a germophobe. Not severely (I for some reason am completely OKAY with public gyms), but enough.

So walking barefoot into a mosque for the first time - shoes off at the door, no exceptions - was not something I was mentally prepared for.

Turkey was my first Middle Eastern country.

Nobody told me.

I showed up in Toms.

I made it work. We're moving on.

What I was not prepared for - in a completely different way - was what was waiting on the other side of that door.

I had been inside castles before. Palaces. Grand historic buildings stacked floor to ceiling with the accumulated wealth of people who had more than they could ever use.

Thrones and tapestries and gold fixtures and rooms built for no reason other than to demonstrate that more was possible. Endless, exhausting, superfluous more.

Castles are a flex.

An architectural argument that excess equals power.

A mosque argues the opposite.

Do you ever walk in a castle and just think to yourself, "why?" I often wonder why families needed THAT much space, THAT many riches, THAT many rooms, and I mean just THAT much stuff. It's too much to keep up with. But who am I to speak on such things.

I literally have multiple non blurry photos of this shot…but for now, I am too tired to scrounge the strength to retrieve / airdrop it.Step inside a mosque and the first thing that hits you is the space.

Not what's in it. The space itself.

High ceilings that make you feel appropriately small.

Clean lines (my favorite).

Light coming in at angles that feel deliberate.

The floor open and uncluttered.

No furniture demanding your attention, no objects competing for your eyes. Just architecture and air and something quieter than quiet.

I am a minimalist.

Have been for a long time.

And standing inside that mosque in Istanbul, I understood something I hadn't been able to fully articulate before.

Minimalism isn't about having less.

It's about making room for what actually matters.

Castles fill every inch with things.

Mosques clear every inch for presence.

One is about accumulation.

The other is about reverence.

And reverence requires room - room to think, to breathe, to feel the weight of where you are without distraction pulling you somewhere else.

I've stood in rooms full of priceless things and felt nothing.

Inside that mosque I felt everything.

That's not a religious statement.

It's a design one.

It's a philosophy one.

The space was built to do something to the person standing in it, and it worked exactly as intended - on a germophobe in Toms who hadn't done her research.

Turkey was the beginning.

Once I started visiting mosques, I couldn't stop.

There's one in Casablanca, Morocco that stopped me completely still. I'll get to that city eventually. When I do, you'll understand why I'm mentioning it here.

For now: if you ever have to choose between a castle and a mosque, choose the mosque.

Bring socks.

PART II: Turkey: Travel Doesn't Build Confidence. It Builds Something Better.

The bags were gone for hours.

New country. New airport. Staff that were not particularly invested in solving our problem. And nothing to do but wait, track, and stay functional.

That was my welcome to Türkiye.

I've thought about that moment a lot since.

Not with frustration anymore - with something closer to gratitude.

Because that airport didn't just test me. It taught me something that no book, no podcast, no morning routine had quite managed to install.

It taught me how to not fall apart when things go wrong in a place where falling apart costs you everything.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that you have power over your mind, not outside events. He wasn't writing from comfort. He was writing from war, from loss, from the weight of running an empire while everything around him was breaking down.

The principle is simple. The application is brutal.

Most people understand Stoicism in theory and collapse in practice - because they've never actually been tested in conditions where reaction is the most expensive thing they could offer.

Travel tests you in those conditions constantly.

Something goes wrong on almost every trip. That's not pessimism. It's the data.

Bags get lost. Flights get missed. Accommodations fall apart.

People try to take you somewhere you didn't agree to go. Protests erupt while you're eating ice cream.

Armed soldiers stand closer than you'd like. You end up barefoot in places you weren't expecting to be barefoot.

Each one of those moments is a fork.

You can react - and burn energy, make noise, accomplish nothing, and color the entire experience with the mood of one bad hour. Or you can respond. Assess what's actually in your control. Move toward the next functional step. Keep going.

The first time travel forces that choice, it's hard. The second time, slightly less. By the time you've moved through enough countries and enough problems, something shifts. The gap between stimulus and reaction gets wider. You start to recognize the fork before you've already taken the wrong path.

That's not confidence. Confidence is about outcomes. This is about process - about who you become in the space between what happens and what you do next.

Epictetus said it plainly: it's not what happens to us, but how we respond that determines our character.

James put it a different way. Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds - because the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Perseverance that finishes its work. Character that lacks nothing.

Two different traditions. Same truth.

The trials are not interruptions to the journey. They are the journey. The pyramids surrounded by poverty. The soldiers with loaded rifles. The airport that swallowed our bags. The India situation I'm not ready to write about yet - but I will.

Each one built something in me that comfort never could have.

I'm less reactive than I used to be. Not because I've had an easy life. Because I've had enough hard moments in enough unfamiliar places to know that reaction is almost never the answer.

The most Stoic version of yourself doesn't emerge from reading the right books. It emerges from being in a foreign airport with no bags, no immediate solution, and a choice about who you're going to be in the next five minutes.

Travel keeps making that offer.

The question is whether you're willing to take it seriously.

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