The shrine I feared, and the joy I found instead

There was one place on the whole trip that I was quietly dreading. In the country's holiest city stands one of the largest and most sacred shrines in the Islamic world, and I had absorbed, without ever really examining it, the idea that a place like that would be hostile to someone like me. We dressed as respectfully as we could and braced ourselves for it.

Nobody cared, in the best possible way. We walked into an enormous complex full of people, and what struck me was not severity but life. Thousands were praying, yes, but there were also families spread out on carpets, children running and playing, parents watching them, groups of friends talking, people taking photographs of each other. It was not a fortress. It was a gathering.

At one point half of our group got separated in the crowd. Before I had even finished looking worried, a stranger clocked exactly what was happening and simply pointed me toward them. That small, instant kindness, in the precise place I had feared, quietly undid the last of the picture I had carried in with me.

I had been afraid of a building full of people at their most peaceful. The fear, I realised, had never really been about them at all. It was about a story I had been told, by people who had never once stood where I was standing, and it dissolved the moment I did.

I have thought about that afternoon a great deal since. It is the clearest lesson I know that the places we are taught to be frightened of are often the very ones most worth walking into.

The place I feared most became the one I remember best.