I knew a chapter was ending. More than a decade of traveling alongside someone else, learning beside them, seeing the world through conversations we had together, was coming to a close. I knew eventually I would have to find my own footing, so I did what I tend to do when life feels uncertain. I started building.
I took the things travel had taught me and tried to give them another shape. I created trips and programs. I built a business around the things I had come to believe mattered: slower travel, history, culture, environmental responsibility, respect for the communities we move through, curiosity about people whose lives look different from our own. I wanted travel to mean something.
And somewhere in the urgency of making sure I could continue what we had started, I don't think I ever stopped long enough to ask whether continuing it was actually the question I needed to answer.
That thought has been creeping up on me for a while now, and sometime around June it became harder to ignore. I still love travel. That hasn't changed. I love the moment when somewhere stops being a destination and becomes a place.
There is a difference.
A destination is somewhere we consume. A place has people in it. History. Contradictions. Problems that don't disappear because we arrived with a camera. Someone buys groceries there. Someone complains about the traffic. Someone's grandmother remembers when the street looked different. Someone worries that they won't be able to afford to live there much longer because people like us think it is charming.
That is the travel I fell in love with. The kind where the more you learn, the less simple the world becomes.
I have spent twelve years crossing borders, sitting at tables, listening to people, walking through landscapes where history is still very much alive beneath your feet. Somewhere along the way I became much less interested in how many places I could see and much more interested in what being in those places asked me to consider: climate change, tourism, poverty, migration, war, privilege, belonging, who gets welcomed, who gets displaced, whose version of history becomes the official one, and what responsibility any of us have once we know things we did not know before.
That last one has stayed with me.
I suppose that question eventually had to reach beyond travel.
Over the last few years, I have also found myself spending more time volunteering, particularly in spaces involving people who have had to rebuild their lives somewhere new. I am intentionally being vague about some of those experiences. Not because they were unimportant. Quite the opposite. Some of them changed me deeply.
But I have been thinking a lot about what stories actually belong to us.
I can tell you what happened inside of me. I can tell you that I have sat in rooms where people who had every reason to distrust the world were still laughing. I can tell you that I have watched people from completely different countries communicate badly in each other's languages and somehow understand one another perfectly well anyway. I can tell you that I have been reminded, over and over again, how little humanity requires in order to recognize itself.
But some stories are not mine to borrow simply because I happened to be present for them.
Their pain is not the interesting part of my story. The interesting part, for me, is what happened when the labels fell away. Refugee. Volunteer. Immigrant. American. French. Foreign. Local. For a while none of those words seemed particularly useful. We were simply people occupying the same space, sometimes talking, sometimes making something, sometimes laughing because none of us knew what the other person was trying to say, sometimes drinking tea, sometimes doing something completely ordinary.
And I think the ordinary part affected me more than anything.
We live in a time when human beings are constantly being turned into abstractions. Populations. Borders. Threats. Statistics. Political problems. We argue about people we have never met as though millions of individual lives can be reduced to one word.
That doesn't solve anything. I know that. I am not naive enough to believe kindness between a handful of people resolves war, displacement, racism, religious fundamentalism, inequality or any of the other things human beings have been inflicting on one another for thousands of years.
But maybe that isn't the standard by which every action has to be measured.
This is where my understanding of meaning has changed as I have gotten older. I have always been drawn to existentialism, but perhaps not for the reasons people usually associate with it. There is something strangely comforting to me in the idea that we are not handed a perfectly ordered world with a predetermined purpose and instructions for how to live inside it.
We arrive in the middle of things. History already happened before us. Systems already exist. Other people's decisions shape our lives long before we are old enough to understand them. We inherit contradictions and injustices and identities we didn't choose, and then somehow we have to decide what we are going to do with the little piece of existence that is actually ours.
I don't find that bleak. I find it freeing.
If meaning is not something waiting somewhere for us to discover, then perhaps meaning is something we participate in creating through choices, relationships, what we decide deserves our attention, and how we treat another person when nobody is watching.
Humanism has always lived somewhere beside that for me. The stubborn belief that another person's dignity does not depend upon whether I understand them, agree with them, share their culture, speak their language or approve of the decisions of the country they came from. They are human first. That should be enough.
It is such an incredibly simple idea. Human beings have managed to make it extraordinarily complicated.
Maybe this is why certain volunteer experiences affected me as much as they did. I went into those spaces thinking about what small thing I might contribute. Instead, I kept leaving with this peculiar sense of wholeness.
Not accomplishment. Wholeness.
It wasn't the feeling of having fixed anything. Nothing was fixed. The world outside was still exactly as complicated when I walked out the door. But for a few hours, people had chosen to create something different inside that small space. A little kindness. A little patience. Curiosity. Laughter. The willingness to sit beside someone whose path through this world had been completely different from your own.
Maybe that sounds hopelessly idealistic. I have decided I am okay with being idealistic.
Cynicism has never struck me as particularly courageous. It is easy to look at the world and find evidence that people are terrible. There is plenty. What seems harder is knowing all of that and deciding you are still going to participate in creating something kinder. Not because you believe kindness magically wins, but because it is the way you have chosen to live.
And suddenly I began wondering whether that was the thing I had been trying to find through travel all along.
Not travel itself, but connection. Understanding. The moment when somebody becomes more complicated than the stereotype you had been carrying around about them. The moment when history stops being dates and becomes something that happened to actual people. The moment when "them" becomes someone's name.
That realization has complicated my relationship with the travel work I have been building.
I have traveled with many wonderful people over the years. I have also reached a point where there are certain kinds of travel I simply don't want to facilitate anymore. I can do it. I know how. I can rearrange the itinerary, smooth over frustrations, find another restaurant, fix the logistics, answer questions, accommodate preferences and make sure everyone gets safely through the week.
But being capable of something does not automatically make it meaningful. And I think I am finally allowing myself to say that.
There are people I don't want to spend seven or ten days traveling with. There are experiences I don't want to create merely because somebody is willing to pay for them. I don't want to build trips around curiosity and then spend the week negotiating away every opportunity to actually be curious. I don't want to talk endlessly about respecting local communities while designing an experience entirely around the comfort of the visitor. And I don't particularly care about growing something simply because growth is what businesses are supposed to want.
That doesn't mean I no longer want to travel. It means I am becoming much more interested in who I travel with and why.
Students still make sense to me. They arrive knowing they are there to learn. There is humility built into education, at least when it works well. You begin with the assumption that there are things you do not yet understand. I love that. I want more spaces in my life where people arrive willing to admit that they might leave thinking differently than when they came.
That thought eventually turned into another one.
What if travel, volunteering, culture, language, art, food, history and community could somehow meet?
I don't know what that means yet. I have imagined a space in France where people from different backgrounds could come together. Workshops. Language exchange. Writing. Art. Cultural events. Food. Volunteers. People teaching each other things rather than one group arriving to "help" another.
The idea is still messy. Maybe it always will be.
And there is one part of it I am particularly cautious about. I have no interest in turning marginalized people into someone else's meaningful travel experience. I don't want someone's displacement to become another person's inspirational story. I don't want suffering packaged neatly into something that makes a traveler feel transformed before they fly home.
If anything, the experiences that affected me most taught me the opposite. Nobody owes us their trauma in exchange for our empathy. Nobody should have to tell us the worst thing that ever happened to them before we decide they deserve dignity.
Maybe the most radical thing we can sometimes offer another person is the freedom to simply be ordinary in our presence.
So I don't know what this idea becomes. Maybe it becomes something real. Maybe it evolves into something completely different. Maybe it is only pointing toward the next question.
I can live with that.
What I struggle with much more is what happens when I share an unfinished idea and people immediately begin explaining why it will be difficult.
Of course it will be difficult. What isn't?
Life is difficult. Starting over is difficult. Living between countries is difficult. Building your own work is difficult. Trying to act according to your values when the world rewards completely different ones is difficult. Loving people is difficult. Knowing when to let people go is difficult. Remaining hopeful without becoming naive is difficult. Trying to recognize when someone's reaction is really about their own fears while resisting the temptation to throw your fears back at them is difficult. Trying to live deliberately is difficult.
Difficulty has never seemed like a particularly compelling reason not to do something.
Sometimes the harder thing is knowing something matters deeply to you and choosing not to pursue it because somebody else found the idea impractical.
My brain has never been particularly practical anyway. It wanders. It makes connections. It imagines things before it knows what they are supposed to become. It gets excited. It becomes hopeful. Occasionally it creates absolute chaos.
I have made some peace with that.
There are people in my life who love that part of me. There are people who tolerate it. And there are people who hear an idea and immediately begin rebuilding it into something they find more reasonable.
Well intentioned or not, I have learned that doesn't work very well for me.
I don't need people to agree with me. I need people who can let an idea breathe long enough for me to understand what I am thinking.
There is a difference between saying, "Have you considered this?" and saying, "That will never work." There is a difference between helping someone examine a dream and trying to manage it for them.
Lately I have felt like I am standing at a crossroads. Every time I start looking down one of the roads, somebody walks into the intersection with directions. Go this way. Don't go there. That one is too difficult. This road makes more sense.
Maybe the problem isn't that I don't know which direction to take. Maybe I need to stop allowing everyone into the intersection.
Twelve years ago I probably would have said travel was one of the great loves of my life. It still is. But I think I understand that love differently now.
Maybe I never loved movement for its own sake. Maybe I loved what movement exposed me to: people, history, contradiction, the unfamiliar, the constant dismantling of certainty.
Travel taught me that the world becomes more complicated the closer you look at it. And somehow, instead of making me more cynical, that has made me more hopeful, because underneath all that complexity, I have also seen how quickly people can recognize one another when given the opportunity.
Maybe travel was never the purpose. Maybe it was simply one road toward it.
I don't know what comes next. I don't know exactly what happens to my work. I don't know whether some shared cultural space exists in my future or whether it is simply one more idea helping me understand what I value.
For once, I don't want to force the answer.
I spent the last few years trying desperately to make sure I could continue the life I had when one chapter ended. Maybe that was necessary. Maybe I needed to prove to myself that I could stand on my own before I could question where I actually wanted to stand.
Now I find myself at another crossroads.
But I don't think I am lost.
I think I am finally asking a different question.
Not how do I keep going down the road I already know, but what do I want the life at the end of the road to mean?
