Where do we go from here?

What is life after travel like? How long does it take for someone to reacclimatize with their surroundings? Is it possible to avoid that acclimatization?

As I look towards a year of travel, I can’t help but think about what that year plus a day, or that year plus a week, a month. When the bags have all been unpacked, and foreign lands with constantly changing scenery, people, and experiences are nothing more than memories –

What becomes of the traveler that lived, breathed, and experienced only days previous? Will he still exist? Can he still exist?

I’ve been there before. I remember the happy-shiny feeling of returning, knowing that you will never be the same again. Knowing that the experiences you have gained over your past travels will help thrust you into the future as the person you’d always want to be.

I’ve been there before. I remember those moments turning into nothing but memory as well, ever fading as life regains its caustic grip.

When I returned from my cross-Canada trip, I remember feel a sense of life, and of accomplishment unlike any I had had before. I realized that my life was mine and mine alone. No one could hold me back from anything; nothing was impossible. And this feeling stayed, touching my life, and the lives of those around me for months to come. Some people, in fact, said they didn’t even know who I was anymore. Others, who had known me years before, stated they’d wondered where that person had disappeared to for so long.

And then, months after that, things had started to normalize. To return. But not fully; never fully.

Every subsequent trip would bring forth the same feelings, the same wonders, the same thoughts, the same changes. And in time too, they would all even out, making a little dent here, or a small dent there – almost unnoticeable.

Still, the two months I took to travel Canada made the largest impact. But that was only two months. Who will I be after a year has past?