If you travel a good amount, it’s likely that you’ve felt your body sigh in relief when stepping once more into your familiar spaces upon returning home.
But what is that feeling, when you’ve spent the last days or weeks away in what I hope was an amazing, life-altering or life-affirming, trip?
We all feel a sense of comfort in our familiar places, and travel has a great side effect of often getting us out of those comfortable places and into new experiences. Like going to a new school where you don’t know a soul, or stepping into a new town or city you’ve never visited before, traveling can make you find yourself at your most essential, without all the trappings of what you already know.traveling can make you find yourself at your most essential, without all the trappings of what you already know.
So when you step back into your comfortable places, there’s a sigh of relief. But there’s likely also something else, something you might not notice until days or even weeks after getting back from your trip: a sense that the puzzle pieces that are you and your life don’t exactly fit the same way anymore.
That perhaps it’s not your world that’s changed, but you yourself.
The experiences you have when you travel—what you see and do, who you connect with, the struggles and the challenges—can often have a profound, yet quiet, impact on who you are. In short, they can change you forever.In short, they can change you forever.
And this change often includes an appreciation of where you’ve been and, perhaps most surprisingly, where you now exist.
This is most often true for me after taking longer trips or when visiting places further away, more different from my own home. The more different the world of my travel is, the more I come to appreciate where I live upon my return. The more different the world of my travel is, the more I come to appreciate where I live upon my return.
I adore the wildflowers growing on the sides of the roads; the old, beat-up country roads bearing bumpy scars from last winter’s frost; the charm that is found in our old buildings, never as old as the ones I’ve now seen, but important to our history nonetheless; and the unique traffic: turkeys and geese and deer and raccoons and sandhill cranes.
I adore everything better, feel gratitude for the experiences I have had simply because of where I live. Large cities might hold great attraction for me, but how many people in those cities have held newly hatched turtles in their hand and helped them reach the river after they hatched in their yards? How many of those people have stopped for traffic of the four-pawed or winged variety?
So I challenge you to leave your home, leave your comfort and familiarity behind. When you return from your trip ask yourself this: what do I love about the place I have returned to?
You might just find that list bigger than when you first left it.
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