The Real Journey

It begins when you return.

I am a person who feels most in harmony with my self when I am on the road. Not when I’m vacationing at a resort, snorkeling and body surfing in the Pacific, lounging on a beach chair under an umbrella while sipping Mai Tais (though I’m not gonna lie; I love doing things like that, too) but rather when I’m immersed in the daily long haul of confronting the unknown: a new food, a new language, a new subway system, a new unmarked trail. Or when I spend six hours in Venice trying to find Ziploc bags (sidebar: they don’t exist). When my debit card gets swallowed at 6:30 on a Sunday morning.

This is when I come alive, when I feel most grounded in the world. This is when I feel most present.

Last summer, when friends would ask if I were ready to come home, my response was usually a long pause, a series of staccato blinks, followed by a rambling statement about looking forward to easy access to Cheezits and multiple varieties of peanut butter. We would all laugh together, but it wasn’t a joke. The very thought of returning to the US felt surreal, even as the reality of my return quickly approached.

I couldn’t predict, though, how difficult that reality would be.

What happened when I returned to that place familiar, only to realize that life had gone on fine without me? And that the things I was trying to get away from, things both tangible and intangible — fears, insecurities, uncertain friendships, road construction, syllabi, paying bills, the simple monotony of day-to-day life as a grown-up human being — were just sitting there waiting for me?

There was no transitional period, no space for me to unwind, to sit back and process all that I had experienced. There were no galas thrown in my honor, no lecture series for me to share all that I’d learned. Instead, there was a jet lagged trip to Target to stock up on, well, everything; a jet lagged visit to the doctor to get a TB test and an X-ray of my foot; jet lagged searches for a place to live; jet lagged meetings and preparations for a new semester that started only a few days after that final plane had landed.

I wasn’t the same person I was when I left, but I had to step back into a life that was near identical to the one I had left behind. Unlabeled boxes waited for me in my office; furniture and clothing waited for me, scattered in friends’ garages; questions about curriculum development needed answers now; complex decisions about buying real estate in one of the most expensive markets in the world needed to be made immediately.

What I wanted was to be standing in the middle of a rice field in Vietnam. I wanted to be getting lost on undiscovered alleyways in Venice. I wanted to be hiking in the Himalayas. I wanted to be sitting in a café in Paris, listening to the rain. I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, but here in California. Where I was stuck in traffic on 880. Where I was sitting alone — correction, in loneliness — on a Friday night, in an unfurnished bungalow in Oakland, watching Netflix while my friends spent their weekends with their families.

As the jet lag lifted, I found myself facing a frustrating question: is there a space for me in this place that is simultaneously the most familiar yet the most foreign place I’ve ever been? Twenty years in the Bay Area, and I don’t feel like I belong. How is that possible?

I came to realize that nobody truly cares about the stamps in my passport, the foods I’ve eaten, the people I’ve met, the roads I’ve navigated, the mountains I’ve climbed. Is disappointment inevitable when I realize that all of my self-discovery, all of those A-maz-ing experiences, in the end, didn’t really matter?

Or perhaps that realization could become a source of liberation?

What does it mean to belong somewhere? Are there certain places where we innately fit in? Certain people with whom we just click? Why are some people content to plant roots in one place for a lifetime while others can’t seem to stay put for more than a few months? Are some people more prone to fitting in anywhere (yet simultaneously fitting in nowhere) than others? Are we nomadic types really wandering spirits? Or is it simply that we haven’t found our place of belonging?

My friends Karen and Brian, both with a history of wanderlust, traveled to Venice a few years ago, and the moment they arrived Brian turned to Karen and said, “Yup. This is home.” They both instinctively knew that Venice was where they wanted to be, and now they spend most of their time in the US studying Italian and figuring out creative ways to get back home to Venice. It isn’t that they don’t like the US; it’s just that Venice is where they belong.

Then there are my friends Helio and Vera who live in Brazil where they spend nine months out of the year planning where they’ll go the next three months. Yes, Brazil is where they are from, and it’s clear that they celebrate their time there (recent videos from Carnival prove just that), but at their core they are walkers — wanderers — and every year they spend those three months exploring a new trail on foot. Open up the atlas and choose. The road is where they belong, every day something or someone new to discover just around the bend.

For most wanderers, the very possibility of narrowing the world to that one place of belonging can feel baffling. One day you think you’ve solved it: you’ve bought a house, you’ve hung pictures on the walls. The next day, maybe not: the impulse to move on bites, and the pictures come down, the house gets put on the market. We can like a place and feel a desire to stay, for a few nights or a few weeks or even a few months, but every place feels like a temporary landing pad. Eventually there’s another place that beckons. We embrace change rather than flee from it.

When I travel I never have an urge to come back home yet the practicalities of life dictate my inevitable return. Is my subconscious trying to tell me I belong somewhere else? Or would I wind up yearning for departure anywhere I landed? Is rootlessness simply who I am? The idea of being tethered to a place feels bizarre; I just bought a house here in Oakland, yet it’s unfathomable that I’ll be here permanently, even as I choose paint colors and hire plumbers. Houses can always be sold, after all.

The danger is when the impulse to change, to always discover some place new, removes us from the moment. At a certain point, most of us have to have some sort of home base, and we’re wasting our lives if we spend all of our time there in misery, counting down the days to our next departure. It’s one thing to plan your next trip (or your next ten trips), but if you do it at the cost of living in the now, what’s the point of living?

In the end, I think even we wanderers have to accept that where ever we are right now is the place where we belong. We have to step into the moment and experience it fully, without our eyes planted on the horizon. Whether that’s on a sacred Himalayan mountain or in a drafty, unfurnished bungalow in Oakland. To do anything else is to deny the present. Which is to deny our very existence.

Perhaps for some of us, we nomadic souls, the road is roots enough, and the places and people we gather along the way become our collective home, our collective belonging. I belong in Paris, London, New York, and Venice. I belong on a wild trail in the Tuscany. I belong on that mountainside in Bhutan; in a kayak in New Zealand; in a hammock in the Amazon; in the tiny town of Tobermory, Scotland. I belong on a beat-up moped zipping through the rain in the Vietnamese countryside.

And slowly, slowly I’m even starting to accept that I belong here in Oakland, in a 92-year-old bungalow with broken down cardboard boxes taped to the windows and a pile of essays at my side. Or at least I’m working on that acceptance. Because here is now, and now is here.

So I’m working at saying to myself, “There’s no place on Earth that I’d rather be.”

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