I’ve lived in my new home for over a year and other than some day trips, I haven’t traveled very much. First, I don’t have the time off because of the nature of my recent employment. Second, the places my husband and I would like to go just aren’t stable enough right now. Third, we’re not unhappy with our lives as they are, so four: we’re investing our money in the things we have right here.

I have never been able to travel as much I would have liked. When I was younger, I felt trapped in my depressing Rust Belt town, and I longed to escape. My parents didn’t let me go to my first college choice because it was too far away, so I went somewhere close that was even worse than the town I left, waited until I was 18 and free to drop out, and then I dropped out. I have traveled some, and I have lived in different places. I have come to the realization that I actually don’t want to be a tourist: I was much more fond of living in different places. I don’t like going through the TSA. I don’t like being stuck on the glorified city buses in the sky that are the airlines I can afford. I don’t like being in tourist traps. I don’t like being surrounded by other tourists. I have had contempt for the tourists in the cities I’ve lived in who refuse to adapt – the college kids who yell on the L train because they think they’re “outside,” the tourists in Penn Station who stop en masse at the top of an escalator or in front of a revolving door to orient themselves, the Westerners ewwing and “gross!ing loudly at Korean barbecues in Seoul as if they didn’t go anywhere and South Korea somehow just came to them.

But there was a time in which I was admiring, perhaps even a little jealous of the widely-traveled around me, who somehow always seemed to have both the time and the money to go from one place to another across the globe. Surely their lives were richer than mine due to all the fascinating cultural experiences they had.

Except I have had both the money and the time to travel extensively. I have traveled a bit. I have been to a few different countries. I have traveled in a few different ways. I guess in the end, if the choice was pay thousands of dollars to travel or pay off debt, I paid off debt. If the choice was to pay thousands of dollars to travel or build a side business to generate more income, I built a side business to generate more income. If the choice was to pay thousands of dollars to travel or to make my daily life more comfortable, I made my daily life more comfortable. If the choice was to pay thousands of dollars to travel or to invest the money, I invested the money. It’s true that you only live once, so why should fifty weeks out of the year be miserable just so two of them can be used to escape the other fifty? It’s also true that you’re only young once, which means that you can either party before “getting serious about life,” or you can focus on creating a life that gives you the freedom to choose what to be serious about.

After a while, I realized that these habitual travelers had really nothing to say about the places they went. They did some touristy things. They took photos and posted them on social media. They drank alcohol. Then they went home and planned the next trip. One particular travel addict, whose goal was to visit every country and every national park, never spoke must about his travels to very exotic countries except “it was good.” Riding a yak? It was good. Having to fly into one country and take a rickety train to your final destination? It was good. He never had anything to say in particular about the places he went. He never could tell us about conversations he had with the locals, or interesting customs, or the way the bread tasted. He could never tell us about what it was like to see a Unesco site. He could never tell us what it was like to see the stars upside down. Surely he did many or all of these things, but none of them appeared to excite him enough to share these experiences. He appeared numb to his own travel experiences, compulsively engaging in travel the way a sex addict compulsively engages in sex without love, without connection, and without pleasure.

I hadn’t thought about it much until I saw this video from a Catholic convert:

But what I do notice about the compulsive travelers is a set of traits in common, particularly:

1.a lack of creativity,

2. a lack of uniqueness, and

3. a lack of enterprise.

And maybe I’m still so very often surrounded by lawyer, who tend to lack creativity, uniqueness, and enterprise, but at any icebreaker or meet-and-greet, the first thing you learn isn’t that they all travel as a hobby, but rather, that they don’t know the difference between a hobby and a past time and most of them don’t have actual hobbies so they mistakenly refer to travel as a hobby.

And I get it – being a lawyer sucks, and if you were creative before you went into law, you have to fight to keep that little light from being snuffed out by the demands of the profession, and by the time you have some time off, if you can’t hide yourself away in a little room and paint or write, or if those things are completely foreign to you, you’d rather just go to a resort somewhere, far from home but also far from the locals, and drink and watch the ocean waves lap and hope you don’t get any work texts. Lawyers are often risk averse by nature, which is reinforced by training, and enterprise is a punishable offense in law school and in the profession. Law not only doesn’t train for entrepreneurship; it doesn’t even train for starting one’s own law firm because law schools are largely meant to be a pipeline to the largest employers/biggest law firm donors.

But what about everyone else?

Once you have the enterprise, the creativity, and the uniqueness to create a daily life that one doesn’t wish to escape from, one builds the foundation for a life that can be further individualized to suit one’s needs. Granted, this is not easy. If you’re bogged down in school debt, the rent is so high that you’re a grown adult with roommates, and you have to work multiple jobs just to pay bills, sitting in your room with your roommates drinking downstairs while you build your own business or cultivate skills to create a new career during the little time you have between jobs may not be easily attainable. Hustle culture has lied to us – it does not cultivate either uniqueness or freedom, but conformity and slavery. Having multiple masters doesn’t make you free. Having the “freedom” of a remote job doesn’t make you happy either, per se, and if you’re relying on the remote aspect of the work to do the psychological work for you, you’re missing the point.

I’m also not talking about people who travel with purpose, such as for work, education, or evangelization. I’m not talking about diplomats. These are all people who all have to get to know the places they visit outside the tourism bubble. I do cast a side eye at things like Habitat for Humanity and travel volunteerism/voluntourism that takes jobs away from locals who could do a better job than the random middle class hero who has never swung a hammer before but just paid $10k to go to the Third World to build a school for the clout and the social media likes when $10k would have paid local carpenters, masons, electricians, and plumbers to do the job. But it’s not actually about whether a school gets built, is it? It’s never actually been. This is why I only give money to people who have taken a vow of poverty. Anyway.

I remember going on extensive road trips by myself, the pattern being the same each time: the uncertainty of the plan, the stress of getting out of Chicago, the thrill of the open road, the tedium of the open road, the fact that no matter what, I still had to work anyway or I was roped into something that caused me to have to set aside the vacation each day. But aside from all of that, there was the sense that something was missing. Wasn’t I supposed to have or feel something different now that I am in a new location, not at work, looking up at these marvelous wonders, visiting these new places? I would look at families with young children at Mt. Rushmore, at Zion National Park, at campsites, at white sand beaches lining an emerald gulf, and think to myself how those parents couldn’t possibly be having any fun because they’re too busy making sure their children are having fun, are safe, are sun-protected, are bladder-drained. They’d be instructing their children through buffet lines, or trying to temper their excitement – but not too much – at Disney but I don’t have this issue. I would be in an Amish village and buying old fashioned candy for myself and think how cool it is that I’m an adult and I can buy anything I want, but who cares? I could be walking along a sidewalk in a tropical city and see all the interesting things I could see, but then what? At the end of each of these trips, I’m going to go back to the same old life, my world expanded just a little, but wherever I was, I was still me, still alone, still unhappy, still wanting something this travel didn’t give me.

Once in a while there are trips that have a profound affect on you, and unfortunately, we have come to expect that all trips are supposed to do this. For example, trip to Southern Illinois made me think maybe I’d like to live there someday, and another trip there about a year and a half later was to meet the man I would marry.

But I never had a cinematic, life-changing experience.

But you’re not supposed to have your life changed by a vacation. That’s the entire point: you are vacating, or taking a holiday from, your real life, which is effectively put on pause, while you do something else, and you don’t confuse it for your actual life.

But there was a time in which people had lives that had some settling to them, some lack of choice, and one had no choice but to make the most of it. Most people bloomed where they were planted, and few permanently left. Most people stayed in the same socio-economic class in which they were born, meaning that if they were born in X town, they would work in X factory or in X family business, as their ancestors before them did. They may even inherit or work on family land. They would marry someone local, get married in a local church, and live locally, and they would have children who would do the same, and if they moved, they didn’t move very far. If they went to college, they usually went locally, and if they went somewhere special, they usually came home afterward. Even those who intended to resettle during Western expansion were ultimately seeking a homestead and a permanent home, not endless skipping around the country. Insecurity in one place was solved by finding security in another place: traveling for fun came after securing permanence of some sort, or else it wasn’t a vacation.

I have traveled very little in the last year or so. I have traveled to other states, but that’s because it’s relatively easy to do from where I’m located. I have worked though – on a home, on a new career, on a marriage, on a few new hobbies, and a few business ideas. I just haven’t felt much of a need to escape this place, and when I’m tired, of working, I just want to rest, and there are restful places here that don’t require much, if any, work from me beforehand.

I just don’t need to run away from this place. It’s a good place, and it’s a good life. I don’t want to escape it; I want to make more of it, extract more life from this fruit, to put its seeds in the ground and create a life-sustaining orchard.

Not to say that I wouldn’t like to go to many places in Europe one it’s safe again. Not to say I wouldn’t like to see a starry night in Texas. Not to say I wouldn’t want to see aurora borealis directly overhead. The thing is, Jesus is everywhere, including right here, including right where I am and where you are, and once I realized that, the need to change locations had less to do with stimulation and more with where you need to be so that you don’t lose sight of Him, and that depends on what He thinks is best. Sometimes He calls for you to be uprooted and replanted. Sometimes He calls you to go to the ends of the earth. Sometimes He calls you to go out for a while then to come back.

People told me I would miss Chicago, but I don’t. People told me I’d miss the buzz of a busy place, but I don’t. People told me I’d be back, but I’m not back. Weirdly enough, people told me I’d miss the buzz and that I’d be back when I’ve left a variety of places that I’ve left and never returned to, or only came back to for economic reasons and then left when I was economically satisfied, so I’m not sure if it’s just how I come off or what people assume about everyone. However, I have always had a sneaking suspicion that when you get the urge to flee, it’s not an urge to run to the beach and drink cocktails by the water but an urge to create a lifeboat to get off the island you’re stuck on, or else you’re just fleeing to the beach over and over again, back and forth, back and forth, until one day, your legs don’t work the way they used to. It may be then that you realize you didn’t really experience another culture: you had a curated experience in a controlled environment in a different location. You may realize that you didn’t actually expand your horizons, since you largely experienced the same relatively familiar things in a different place. You may realize that you didn’t actually live in the moment because you were too busy dreading the walk back inland and the work and life waiting for you there. You may realize that there’s nothing on the beach for you, but there’s also nothing inland for you either because you didn’t build it.

With that being said, there may be a trip coming up soon, a last hurrah before the real work starts, but we know what it’s for. And I think that’s fine. And I think the rest of us who have finally found a place to rest don’t need to wonder if we should be more restless, or if we should be more of a grasshopper and less like an ant. I think those of us who are building lives and not running from them aren’t boring or unadventurous, because sometimes the real adventure is staying still and facing what’s here.