As I slowly digest the experiential buffet of memories, lessons, and stories from a year on the road, I’ve been taking notes on some concepts I’d like to expand on (work in the 2020s, defining success in different places, vagabonding skills that translate into everyday routine) in the coming editions. Yet, as I look back, I notice there is still a stage of my travels unfolding presently.

It’s strange to come home. Social freedom shrinks. Life responsibilities increase. Expectations from others re-emerge. Expectations of others disappear. The internal scrabble that comes with dropping back into a small world after getting a taste of how big it can be is a complex one to describe. That and understanding what to do with a bundle of next life steps that aren’t quite congruent on a timeline. The paradox of choice exists.

“And It’s Over Just Like That, Huh?”

I didn’t intend to be back by now. So, that’s how I felt—flung back into the U.S. after 10 months on the road without as much of a chance to catch my breath. Like I had just pushed through a wormhole in space. A wormhole that contorted and rushed me from OKC in September in a stretchy, Marvel-movie animation of motion through space and time straight back to where I started. I was gone for almost a year, and it felt like I’d been gone for a weekend.

Time is a conversational darling of roamers, both short- and long-term. It’s common to hear someone say “I can’t believe it’s over” or “I can’t believe it’s only been three days.” For some, these are attempts at calling undue attention to their recent Cancún vacation. For others, it’s a genuine attempt to unravel why 10 days on the road can feel like 10 hours and 10 months all the same.

When vagabonding, time does not pass at a constant rate. It doesn’t move particularly fast. It doesn’t move slowly. Instead, it compresses and expands. It flashes in one moment while it never ends in another. When I look back on a specific moment within my meanderings, it typically appears ancient.

Argentina’s World Cup win (10 months ago as of this writing) seems to be a couple of lifetimes ago. The vineyard (12 months ago), a handful of millennia. Yet, simultaneously, I feel like I landed in Panama, blinked, and was suddenly heading home from the Amazon again.

How does that work? Can time pass rapidly and sluggishly in the same periods? Is Ferg going off the deep end? I have half an answer for the first two.

When moving between new places, one adopts new personas. With each persona comes an adopted routine and community. Those elements mesh together in our minds almost as if they were another life. A double life. Triple. The list goes on the longer movement persists.

In each of these lives, the traveler is particularly aware of the scarcity of time he or she has in this place. Second nature kicks in, and the traveler pulls out all stops to make the most of limited time. It’s only human to become more aware of the preciousness of something when its end is known. Let’s take my stint in Buenos Aires for example.

I was serving as a concierge for a couple of Airbnbs by this point. I had a “work” identity and routine that plugged me into the city in ways I would’ve missed otherwise. I had friends, travelers and locals alike, who granted me access to various corners of the Argentine capital. Although I had this routine, I was still hyper-aware of my temporary time; I could skip town at any moment, mostly predicated on how far Argentina made it in the World Cup.

To ensure I optimized the experience of Buenos Aires before it was over, I said yes to any and everything. Salsa classes ran into World Cup watch parties, into asados with friends, into letting someone enter their Airbnb, into shooting back across the city for a language exchange. My appetite for the unknown was ravenous, and I packed as much exploration into that timeframe as possible. As happens in each place on the road, it became a Michelin star-worthy tasting menu of novel experiences. A savvy vagabond knows to go for the whole shebang.

What results is a glut of novelty condensed down into little time. Experiences that would take us three months to have in a workaday routine happen in three hours. Our brains, programmed to measure time by average novel experiences per day, can’t help but sort this as a longer span than it was. Hence, the vagabond’s time paradox.

This isn’t groundbreaking from a psychology standpoint. Research on memory retention indicates novel experiences have longer-lasting impacts on the brain than the mundane. Evolutionary heuristics theory describes this tendency as one that is used to help us survive. As human beings, we evolved to compartmentalize common occurrences as unremarkable. But when something is out of place, it becomes easier to remember.

To our ancestors, irregularities could’ve been a threat to survival. We take note, danger or not, and file it away. If that irregularity rears its head a few more times, it becomes routine and goes into the “autopilot” folder. Autopilot does not create memories. Fresh stimulus does.

So, while a Hollywood time machine may never exist, we can certainly mimic the experience through a voyage. Maybe I did go through a wormhole after all.

Character Unlocked

On my first day back in Oklahoma City, I drove around a bit confused. Nothing appeared to have changed. The new grocery store is still under construction. I still navigated the city’s streets as if I’d driven them yesterday. I suppose there was another Braum’s Ice Cream & Dairy Store near my house. Maybe the recipe was altered too? Like I needed an excuse… Drats, same recipe. How did nothing change?

I continued to re-explore my hometown over the next few weeks. I made it a priority to ask questions about my close ones’ lives when back home, but it was hard to get anything back. All conversations tended to boil down quickly to the following:

“Nothing new.”

I didn’t suspect that was the case. But for some reason, it’s human nature to believe so.

That phrase, or a variation of it, was normally followed by “So how was South America?”

A loaded question—where do I start? Like the continent? Do they mean food, people, danger, hijinx? I felt oddly guilty when I couldn’t provide an interesting answer to that question. Was I to pull a random anecdote from the memory bank? Or do I stick with one of the three stories that everyone expects to hear from the vineyard, the World Cup, or the Amazon?

As much as anyone would like to believe, home doesn’t change when away. Not for those of us who grow up in the same place year after year. If we want to perceive home as a destination ripe with opportunities to unearth and fresh faces to meet, we must rely on change occurring within ourselves. We are the sole proprietors of our lives, and if a change is needed, it’s our sole responsibility to actualize it (opening up the world with irreplicable experiences is a good way to start).

I had to question whether I achieved that level of internal development myself though.

I felt like I had changed a lot in a year. As a digital native, there’s a side of me that wishes I could point to newfound character traits X, Y, and Z as the “new me”. I think most vagabonds come home expecting to have a tangible list of the new skills, stories, and personality shifts they acquired. Those are much easier to share in a sappy Instagram post (“omg, take me back”). More digestible. The reality is not so clear though. Most character shifts are more subtle. Some are so imperceptible it takes another person pointing them out to me to notice them.

One of my first days I shot straight into an area of town I’d never visited to hunt down an Iranian spot I heard mention of years ago but never felt the curiosity to venture. I now say yes to more spontaneous invites—scheduling things in advance seems to have lost its appeal. Someone told me I speak more assuredly of myself. Another was shocked to hear I ventured out to a random meet-up the other day to meet with other young professionals alone. Something I allegedly probably wouldn’t have done a year ago. My reliance appears less on my phone, and I leave it in random places and forget where it is for hours.

Surely, these were positive advances, but I worried they wouldn’t stick. Changes in character are volatile when breaching the threshold between away and home.

Keeping consistency in my newfound values has come with some challenges. One of my biggest fears when nearing my return date to the U.S. was existential: how was I supposed to maintain all that I learned on the road when I returned home? How strongly, or how quickly rather, would social pressures and “reverse culture shock” take hold?

Skills and values like my recent languages and lessons learned the hard way were at the forefront of my mind. Not only that but was it even rational to remain consistent in the lifestyle I led on the road once returned stateside?

In some ways, it is an act of great mental fortitude to keep values and ideals from one culture constant in the face of another. In others though, it would certainly be an act of inadaptability to stay put in certain habits.

In no way could I continue to treat timeliness as a loose suggestion rather than a fixed meeting time. Nor could I walk around city streets anymore in only shorts and Havaiana flip-flops… despite attempting. I don’t wish to receive those looks again.

Intentionality is a word I increasingly hear in podcasts, books, and conversations with others. That is the key, isn’t it? Defining what is personally important to continue practicing (i.e. mindfulness, curiosity, diving into uncertainty, saying yes spontaneously, spending more time with loved ones, and Spanish/Portuguese) and letting go of the rest.

The rest are those same “changes” that can cause more friction than benefits in a U.S. lifestyle (i.e. lax approaches to timeliness, less-rigid professional conduct, a daily rice and beans diet, preferences for social events, fashion choices, over-slowing my pace of life, and even some community customs that don’t translate from Latin collectivism to Yankee individualism).

It is easy to live according to a set of values held by a collective majority. It’s equally easy to form a foreign set of values in a culturally pressure-less vacuum like the ones we visit abroad.

But as Ralph Waldo Emerson best put it,

If the crowd is our home culture, then living away from it gives us the independence of solitude. The goal is never to engage in these two worlds separately though; it is to intertwine the two and form an individual culture and set of values of our own.

Just because I’m back doesn’t mean Ferg’s Focus has closed up shop. That said, expect the frequency to take a hit over the next few weeks as the newsletter receives a much-needed overhaul. Best share the link below with 1,000 of your closest friends in the meantime.

Because more adventures are brewing…