Homeward Bound

The hardest part about traveling is coming home.  We’ve changed, and our friends seemingly haven’t, so we struggle to reconcile, let alone integrate, our former and current selves.  We might feel resentment about many things that we never even considered previously (consumerism, shallow social interactions, etc.), and it’s really difficult not to fall back into old habits.  And the most difficult fact of all to swallow?  WAL-MART STILL EXISTS.

Upon returning from a gap year of travel, it felt as though the things that I learned--mindfulness, a sense of interconnectedness, tolerance, gratitude (what am I, Buddha or something?)--were slowly oozing through my hands.  

And rightly so, as I wasn’t taking concrete actions to either incorporate the truths I had realized on the road into my old life, or use them to create the foundation and scaffolding of a new life; rather, I spent a lot of time complaining that ‘home’ wasn't providing me happiness.  Aka Buddha flips out.  

There are few things more disheartening than feeling new worlds and perspectives and ways of being in you grow and become clear, only to find yourself  in the basement beating Super Mario Kart for the 2,837th time (consolation: damn Cocoa Puffs are good!).  

In reality, my needs had simply evolved.  Social interactions clearly signalled this, as I was no longer content engaging in meaningless conversations with people at parties--I wanted to talk about what it feels like to be immersed in the babble of a foreign language and how that affects your psychology, or the patience required to haggle down the price of a bottle of water at the local shop.  I wanted to talk big-picture, and wanted to connect with the humanity in others, like I had done so many times with strangers during my travels.  

I wanted to be different than the person I was before I left, but didn’t quite know how to go about doing that.  As a result, I felt very, very lonely at times; most often, my journal consoled me in these moments of perceived isolation.

For travelers, journaling can oftentimes becomes the central axis for understanding and transformation, the forge where revolutionary ideas and beliefs and “HOLY SH**’s!!” get hammered into a personally sensible, working definition of the self.  Traveling forces us to change more than we can stand--or are aware of--and the only remnants I have of former selves (because the bodies of memories grow old and frail, too) remain in those well-worn books.  

I understand this about writing.  Yet it still shocked me when I opened my first travel journal recently, and was confronted with, well, the consummate a-hole that I was at the time.  

On the first day of my trip in New Zealand, I wrote, “I'm going to find out who I am and where I belong, and I'm going to knock down the door to get there.  Well, maybe just ring the doorbell enough until some smokin' hot chick lets me in.”  

Complete.  Prick.  

I guess it all makes sense when you consider that this guy was writing...

That’s über-cool-kid me on the left at the onset of my gap year travels in New Zealand (I traveled onward to Australia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and Nepal).  The most important lesson learned during my travels?  Don’t take pictures like this.

It’s easy to talk about myself like this now, and in hindsight, I can more fully appreciate how those experiences utterly transformed the trajectory of my life, my value system, and my way of being in the world.

But those first months coming home are still seared into my memory.

If you’ve changed significantly--either in your perspective on the world, or in how you view yourself--then returning to a world staked out and habitualized by a former self can lead to internal confusion and alienation.  

This is largely because your self-worth revolves tightly around the environment in which you grew up in and the people that surrounded and shaped you growing up; not feeling a strong connection to those who have been an integral part of the construction of your identity--to put it in the terms of 18-year old me--“straight up sucks, dude!”

Chances are that who you are now, and who you want to become, don’t align with who you were before you left.  

What to do?

DEVELOP NEW HABITS

Most of who we are stems from conditioning, habits, and belief systems that we develop before we’re cognizant of them--they’re ingrained in us.  And de/re-programming the hardware in our brains is no walk in the park.  Habits and beliefs seemingly rule our lives at times, and what’s even sneakier is that they operate subconsciously (yes, the habits are cowards, not I!).

For me, one old habit that caused me a lot of internal anguish was not taking my time when eating my food (okay, so “not taking my time while eating” meaning shoveling peanut butter into my face with a backhoe-spoon motion rather viciously...).  Like clockwork, this was followed by a bout of shame and, well, to put it lightly, “gastric distress.”  I’m still working on this today, but am so much more conscious of how I eat than before.  

Notice, simply, what your old habits are, and how they attribute or detract from your quality of life.  How do you feel after re-engaging an old habit?  What’s the thought process that ensues?  What do you want to change about your old way of being, and what new things do you want to integrate?   

Thought about it for a bit?  Okay great, now you can return to your bucket of Ben and Jerry’s.  

See, the tricky thing about trying to apply lessons learned while traveling is that they are most often not really things that you can set a ‘goal’ for.  How does one set a goal for greater tolerance?  Saying “by October, I will be 80% more tolerant” sounds stupid.  Because it is.  

So focus on small actions that cultivate that sense of tolerance in everyday life.  Maybe create a small catchphrase or affirmation to say to yourself when you notice yourself judging other people--“I fully recognize that we are all human beings with the same needs, desires, and struggles.”  Or, “Live, and let live.”  Or, “Everybody has their own thing.”  When you notice yourself slipping into an old thought process, say your catch phrase and return back to yourself, rather than allowing other people to irritate/scare you, and thus hold power over your life.  

Simply put: sure, set goals--then consider what habits, and small, manageable actions you can take that will naturally lead to those goals.  

It takes roughly thirty days of repeat action in order to create a habit, whereas the difficulty in focusing solely on your goal lies in constantly staring at the prize at the top of the mountain, which hijacks your concentration away from what you can do today, right now, to get you there.  

There’s no guidebook for this--no one can tell you exactly what all of your habits are (well, other than your mother when she’s yelling at you for itching the cocoa puff scratch a little too hard), and even if they can, no one can do the work of creating new habits that align with your value system or aspirations for you.  

This may seem daunting, and somehow slightly unfair--I get it, I’m a pretentious Millennial who’s also received an unfair amount of the ‘lazy’ DNA sequence from his ancestral lineage--yet to be clear, you don’t have to change all your old habits and create new ones all at once.  And you won’t.  Because you can’t.  It’s simply not human.  Building long-standing habits calls for effort and persistence dashed with patience and self-forgiveness.  Not your standard ‘to-go’ menu options, sure, which is why most New Year’s resolutions fail so miserably--we’re simply not used to delayed gratification.  

So start with baby steps.  

And the first step towards transformation is always awareness.

While there are many things that you simply can’t see and understand about yourself (it’s helpful to have honest friends and family who give you constructive feedback on your blind spots), the willingness to take an honest internal inventory of your strengths and weaknesses naturally snowballs into growth.  You have to want it, in the first place.

So, after establishing a willingness to change oneself, how does one go about further developing this ‘awareness’ thing?  (And, suddenly, I’m Buddha again!)

A great habit to develop that will nurture a keener sense of awareness is--ta-daaaaa, you guessed it--journaling.  Not the I-hate-my-life scribble scrabble or amateur hack poetry (I say this because that’s all I’ve written for most of my life), but rather a simple exercise that flexes much of what your travel jones impelled you naturally to flex.  

It’s called T.A.L.L.  

T.A.L.L.

Thankfulness, Accomplishment, Laughter, and Learning.

So before you go to bed, get your journal out, and reflect upon each of these themes and how it played a role in your day.  By all means, do this while traveling, but most importantly, upon return.  It will tune you into your internal processes while navigating the reintegration process, and help to maintain that sense of openness, questioning, and gratitude that traveling naturally triggers within us.

Here’s how I go about this (let it be known though--this is totally up to you!  There are no rules rules).

Thankfulness

Traveling naturally breeds appreciation--you start missing showers and Mom's Mac ‘n Cheese real quick once you find yourself pooing sideways for a month straight in India.  This will most likely make it glaringly apparent what you've been taking for granted your entire--let's be real here--pompous, entitled, life, and what you’re beholden to (ugh, your parents).  But more often than material comforts, it’s the immaterial contents of our lives that we’re most grateful for--the quality of a relationship with someone, or a particularly stimulating or fulfilling conversation, or the way that the air feels on your skin that day.  Every moment offers something new to be grateful for.

Accomplishment

This doesn’t have to be simply knocking your to-do list out of the park (another Mario Kart level up?  CHECK)--rather, focus on your state of being.  Was I at peace today, with myself, and with the world?  How did I handle the anxiety that came up when I was introduced to a stranger and became fearful of how they might judge me?  Was I kind to those I interacted with today?  Now, that doesn’t mean you should ignore your logistical accomplishments--in fact, celebrating what you do achieve by our cultural standards remains an important part of one’s self-worth.  Just remember that those are most likely other people’s standards, not your own.  Reflecting upon what you consider an accomplishment begins fostering your own definition of success, which is the foundation for a meaningful life.  

Laughter

Nothing is more important than writing down the moments when you doubled over, guffawing.  Once you begin to comb through your day, chances are you'll recognize how often you do laugh, which can be quite alarmingly awesome to realize.  Humor plays a vital role in augmenting our creativity, which directly affects our sense of well-being.  Simply put--no one ever complained about laughing too much.  

Learning

I recently spoke with a man who pulled both of his children out of school when they were 7 and 9, and traveled around the world with them for a year.  He said that traveling was their education, and that schooling was, well, their schooling.  And that’s exactly why the term "Gap Year" misleads-- it implies some gaping hole in your life, when in reality, a year of experiential learning may be one of the richest chapters of your story.  Such a journey not only prepares you to succeed academically at college (because you'll be refreshed and have a greater understanding of what interests you), it piques a curiosity that engenders life-long learning.  If you begin to apply that curiosity, to pay close attention to your life, you'll see that every interaction presents a teaching (if you’re willing to see it), and moments of adversity will ‘test’ your character.  There’s no “GPA” for growing up.  Welcome to the School of Life.  

The acronym is all fine and good, but there’s one important thing to remember: don’t reduce your entries to rote and cliche fluffballs: "I'm thankful for my health, my family, and my iPhone."  NOOOOOO!!!!  Just put those in reverse order… okay, that’s better.

In all sincerity, focus on being thankful specifically for what happened that day--maybe your good health allowed you to run away from a gang of really cute, yet kinda rabid street kids who wanted all of your pencils even though you didn’t have any.  Or, if you’re thankful for your family, what member of your family are you thankful for, and why?  What in your day caused you to think about them, and cherish the role that they play in your life?  How has their presence enriched your life?  

While it’s important to tackle the big picture questions--“What makes me feel alive?” “What is my personal definition of success?” “What are my biggest strengths, and my most glaring weaknesses?”)--they oftentimes have the quality of goals.  One and done.  The mountain you’re staring up at.

A more promising endeavor would be to convert your answers to big-picture questions into intentions--loose guiding parameters for your life.  Then utilize T.A.L.L. and build the habit of reflecting upon your experiences.  Your reflections will indicate whether or not you’re heading in the direction of those intentions, and the life you want to lead.

Think that you’ll struggle to do this every day?  Then you’re like 98% of the world's population--join the club!  A handy solution: grab a friend who is also interested in such things, and create a spreadsheet where you track and share your accomplishments, holding each other accountable in the process.  Schedule weekly check-ins with one another to share your processes.  

When practiced daily, this reflective exercise cultivates an acute awareness for the details that accrue into a vividness of life, a life you can hold in your hands and feel the edges and texture of.  A life you can begin to appreciate simultaneously from a bird's eye view, and from within your heart.

Maybe you caught the flash of a smile on someone’s face in the market while they were looking down, lost in their own world.  Maybe you saw an old woman taking her sweet, sweet time hobbling along while traffic streams around her, honking.  Maybe someone took the time to really look you in the eyes and take you seriously.  

So--before you go to bed, write down what you're thankful for, what you've accomplished, what made you laugh, and what you learned that day.  And if you do that long enough, a smokin' hot chick will answer the door and tell you who you are.  Just kidding.  

But you will become more conscious of the beauty and blessings that your life bestows upon you daily; more grateful, humble (you know, just a few of the things that every great spiritual tradition ever uphold), interested, honest, and fun.  You will become more awake, and more alive.  

Paying attention is the greatest resource that we have as human beings.  And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll see that every interaction offers a gift from a stranger, or a loved one.  And those are the gifts that will continue to give.