Ten Years a Nomad: A Traveler's Journey Home

by Matthew Kepnes

And that makes the hardest part of a journey the mental preparation. Once you are out of safe harbor, you feel the wind in your sails. Action begets action. As the shoreline drifts further away, the wind picks up and carries you like Gulliver to unknown lands. And once you’re out there, your fears fade away as excitement and adventure takes over. You are too busy having fun to worry about worrying anymore. But it can take a lot of work to get out of the harbor. Our comfort zones may make us unhappy at times, but more often than not, they keep us just happy enough to resist change. We may hate our routine, we may complain, we may daydream, but we don’t change. It’s the devil we know. It’s where we are safe.

A plan is not a list of directions, it’s a list of suggestions to take at your leisure. And that’s okay, because the point of travel is to be flexible. If I left home in large part because I wanted out of the rat race of office life and middle-class predictability, I realized that there was no point in re-creating those attitudes on the road. To me, travel was supposed to mean freedom, and freedom meant the ability to change direction on a whim.

Learning to go with the flow is the most important part of travel planning. Travel is about letting things unfold and happen naturally. It’s better to see fewer attractions and go deeper into a city or a region than to cast a wide net and go shallow. Going with the flow is how you get to know people and places better. It’s how you avoid the stress and expense of constantly being on the move from place to place and attraction to attraction. That magical, romcom serendipity that people dream of on the road—that moment when a local befriends you or you stumble upon the most charming café or hole-in-the-wall restaurant—that stuff only happens when you let the day unfold without trying to assert your will against it.

it’s the transitory nature of nomadic life that makes hostels the occasionally out-of-control places they can become. You don’t rip curtains open and wake up a room full of sleeping people if you have to deal with them the next day, and the day after that. You don’t have sex while your roommate is trying to sleep in the next bed if you’re going to be roommates for more than a night. The promise that we’re going to interact with the people in our lives day after day keeps us civil—we don’t break the rules today, even if we want to, because we know we’re going to have to deal with the consequences tomorrow. But on the road, there’s no guarantee you’ll see that person tomorrow (or ever again), so the only thing keeping you civil is whatever self-restraint you happen to internalize. I love the freedom of travel, but I also realize that, while it can bring out the best in us—our sense of adventurousness, curiosity, and creativity—it can also sometimes bring out the worst.

I’ve learned to enjoy proving people wrong. When someone tells me I can’t do something, it pushes me to show them I can. That doesn’t mean fixating on all of the “haters” in your life, making your travel plans to spite them. That’s an ugly way to live, and it also means that you’ll be going on someone else’s trip—not your own. There’s a difference between taking pleasure in spiting someone, and taking pleasure in exceeding expectations about yourself. The former is fixated on negativity, the latter is all about well-earned pride.

We shouldn’t always be connected. Always being connected is not healthy or productive. No wonder I was constantly burning out. We need to sign off and interact with people in real life.

TO ME, the road is and always will be a place of wonder and endless possibility. It’s where magic happens. But you can find wonder and magic wherever you are. You just have to look closely enough. And sometimes you don’t have to look very far at all. Sometimes, believe it or not, it’s right outside your front door. Most people think of travel as this thing you do in faraway lands. They think that travel is about getting on flights to places where people don’t speak your language, places with different customs, a different history, different food, and different climate. That’s travel. It’s the act of going to the exotic. I don’t agree with that definition of travel. To me, travel is the act of going somewhere new, doing something new, meeting someone new, and connecting to as much of it that feels right and good to you. That can be in a country half a world away. It can be in the next town over. Or it can be a staycation where you explore your own town (which I think is always a good thing). Travel is the art of discovery. It’s about visiting a place you haven’t been before, and learning both about the things that make it unique and the things that tie it to the greater human experience. A place like that can absolutely be your own backyard.

The real world can be like travel, if you approach it with the spirit of openness, curiosity, and adventure. I used to believe adventure was always outside the borders of “home.” But a place is only as boring as you are. Adventure and activity isn’t something that just happens. It is something that must be sought out.