No Matter Where You Go, There You Are
That phrase, which is most known as a call to mindfulness by author Jon Kabat-Zinn, and is then perhaps secondarily remembered as a quote by the character, Pigkiller, in the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. But I think it was Buckaroo Bonzai that most famously stated it in the movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension,“Hey, hey, hey, hey-now. Don't be mean; we don't have to be mean, cuz, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.” These are just the recent iterations of the philosophical mindset that goes back to at least the Roman philosopher Seneca who wrote around 65 CE, “Why do you wonder that traveling does not help you? You flee with yourself.”
Damn.
And because this pillar of truth has been upright for 2,000 years, another essay by me touting its validity is completely redundant and unnecessary. But I bring it up because it is entirely relevant to where I am today, here in France, and in my life. I have gone, yet here I am.
We left two years ago next month, and if you haven’t been following along or just found this blog, the quick version is that like a lot of Americans, we sold it all and hit the road. Our intent was to travel, seek adventure, and unwind those twisted knots of stress that most Americans have. It wasn’t to escape ourselves, per se, but I realize now that it was inherent. It’s easy to mask that fact when you encounter newness every day. My bad habits and self-inflicted dramas are temporarily shelved like luggage being held for you. The lightness that came from not having to carry them freed me to focus all my energy on photographing and writing about an entirely new way of living, and watching other human beings do it differently than me. But, eventually, I was going to have to go back and pick them up.
Ultimately one has the same set of challenges when you travel full time as you do back home. It’s just camping on steroids—what to eat and where to sleep. I don’t know if you’re like me, but camping is fun for a day or two and then it gets progressively more uncomfortable. The ground seems to get harder each evening, the dirt finds its way into places you’d rather it didn’t, the food is harder to prepare and tastes worse by the day. The mosquitos and horseflies are relentless. If you aren’t in the middle of the sticks and have to use a lake to bathe, and occupy a car camping spot and can walk to a creepy shower instead, the water is still freezing cold. This explains Glamping, which to me is completely understandable. Bringing life’s comfort into the wild if possible seems like a smart tradeoff to me.
When you travel full time it’s much the same, only you replace the sleeping ground with Airbnbs, also fun at first, but they are no more comfortable. (I now have a profound love of hotels that I never had two years ago.) The food is difficult to prepare in unfamiliar kitchens and as much of a struggle as cooking at your campsite. Dull knives, cheap pots, where is the can opener or the colander? What? No wine glasses? Savages. Even if you eat out regularly, your body rejects the copious amounts of salt and sugar that you encounter and begins to punish you by exacting a very ugly price on your digestive system. Never mind your wallet and credit cards. And you’re still carrying all of your stuff from place to place. It will wear on you while you’re experiencing the thrill of seeing the world together.
We’ve been lucky in many ways, though. The obvious, of course, is that we’ve had this opportunity at all and were able to experience the intensity of life while traveling full time. I have lost count of how many times we’ve have heard someone say they wish they could do the same. They also want to escape their lives—it’s only natural—and they want to see how others live theirs, too. We’re also lucky in that we genuinely get along and like being with each other. We travel easily together. I think a lot of people learn the hard way who they can and can’t spend weeks on end, let alone years, with without the built-in conversation-starter of work and friends to rely upon. We’re communicating more in real time than we ever have and I am grateful for that.
But what emerges above all else after months or years of living itinerantly is the exhaustion. You grow tired of being tired and so the siren call of resettling gets louder and more irresistible. Routine, the bane of my existence before, starts to look like that plain girl you’ve known forever but suddenly just noticed is actually very attractive. Finally, you just stop feeling guilty that you’ve reached the point where you’d willingly trade a comfortable chair in a living room over visiting another cathedral.
For us, there then came an interim period, what seemed at the time to be a happy medium. We didn’t want to go home, but we didn’t want to stay on the road either. We’d become even more devout Francophiles while traveling so the idea of finding an apartment in France was logical. One that hopefully already had nice furniture and pots and pans. If Airbnbs were the ground floor of existence, then we wanted to live much higher up. Someplace with nice weather, access to food markets, and a good airport for when we did want to get back out there. Nice, France, fit that description, so that’s where we went. It was perfect for us for 18 months, and then it wasn’t.
We found and amazing apartment, close to the famous promenade. It had beautiful furniture, a very nice set of cookware, plates, forks, and a big screen TV. It even had built-in friends, really wonderful Americans already living in the building who welcomed us with open arms and became our reliable social network and family away from home. I put my wine corks on the wall and hung my pictures. I fell back into a settled routine life, hard.
As I have written about this recently, I will summarize why it ultimately didn’t work for us. The furniture was handsome, but it wasn’t comfortable. (There is that word again.) All the Americans there were renting from the same owner, four apartments in total, and we had the same furniture and the same complaints. It looked great in the photos but apparently nobody had bothered to actually sit or sleep on it before they bought it. Nice is also extremely touristy and with that comes higher prices and less authentic stores and restaurants. Everything is aimed at the temporary visitor. Nice is “Fritaly” or maybe “Italance” either way, a combination of the two countries, given it’s location, that felt neither. For a lot of people that is huge plus, we had just hoped for a bit more French authenticity. And it is remote, far away from anything else you’d like to get to, which meant expensive train or plane tickets. And last, and most devastating to our budget, we paid a dear price tag for the privilege of enjoying that San Diego-like weather. That part did feel like home. So now we find ourselves in Dijon, where we have a reasonable priced, uber-comfortable apartment that we have unfortunately had to pay to furnish, but with the things we chose, and we live in one of the most authentically French cities in France.
We’ve spent the past ten weeks developing a new routine, getting to know our new home town, and really settling back down. I have a kitchen with the new appliances I bought (French apartments often come with no appliances as the previous tenant takes theirs with them.) that is so comfortable to work in that I cook almost every night. The food here in Burgundy is high quality, and I have multiple places where I can buy the best produce, meat, fish, and cheese at ridiculously affordable prices. We haven’t owned a car since we left the USA, and I walk everywhere. My step counter tells me I have walked 953,402 steps so far this year, roughly 400 miles. I continue to drop weight. I watch Roue de la Fortune (The French version of Wheel of Fortune) every night because it is an excellent way to learn French humor, culture, and to improve my French. I am currently at B1 level (French levels test at beginner A1, A2; intermediate B1, B2; and advanced C1, and C2.), so I have a long way to go to get to fluent. And I just finished reading a 600-page history of the Arab people. I mean, I am settled.
But that also means that the mental luggage that I stored when I left two years ago has been retrieved. And now I am confronted just as Seneca, Pigkiller, and Bonzai were with my actual self. What does that mean exactly? I am the same person, just as I was, when I left Federal Way, Washington, in September 2024 with all of the anxieties and self-doubts that most humans have, but I no longer have the American definition of myself. I don’t have a career that I can rely upon as an identity, and besides, nobody would ever ask me here in France—“What do you do?” is not a thing. I am richer for the experience of the past two years and I have zero regret for doing it. It has changed me for the better and we all know the power and benefit of travel. Even if you go someplace for a week or two, it buys you perspective. That view point is the gift of seeing yourself from outside of your own body. You become relative to yourself.
But once back into a routine, I now have a lot more time for thought. Thoughts that run off in tangents. Thoughts that ponder. Thoughts that hum in the background, in my dreams, in the shower, that have occupied my mind on those nearly one million steps. What I find myself thinking about these days whenever I go somewhere, and there I am, is the future.
When I left work on my 59th birthday, and strapped the backpack on and slung the camera over the shoulder, I felt old. Understanding that word is a relative term and to each their own, but I was worn down from 30+ years in corporate America and I truly felt like my time was limited and I had better make the most of what was left. My health wasn’t good, my stress level was deeply internalized and wreaking internal damage. The things I had always wanted to do couldn’t wait any longer.
Today in Dijon, two years later, I am much healthier and ironically, I feel too young to have this much free time. I think, perhaps, I pulled the ejector seat handle too soon. I have fully recovered my capacity, my abilities, my focus, and my desire to be productive in a meaningful way. I have come to the realization that I probably have years, if not decades left, and yet I am unsure of just how I will occupy them. Thus the inordinate amount of thought about the future. It is unsettling to be approaching my 61st birthday and wondering what I am going to do with my life. It’s also kind of exciting. And scary.
I think this blog is going to have to transition into writing about that process. It feels natural to do so. What was ostensibly a travel blog can no longer only be about the weekly journeys into foreign places and will instead need to also be about the personal journey of moving to a foreign country and what life is like living there. The change will be noticeable, but I hope that the sense of living vicariously will still hold for you, reader.
Wherever I go, there I am, but you can be there, too.