A week into my fourth trip to Africa, I was sitting in Chefchaouen trying to work out why being back felt so good.
I had arrived in Casablanca, continued by train to Fes and then made my way north into the Rif Mountains. The trip was still new enough that every day felt slightly unsteady. I was learning where to go, how things worked and which parts of my plan were already becoming irrelevant. This is usually when travel begins to do something useful to me. My routines loosen, my attention comes back and the world stops feeling like background scenery.
Fes helped. In a short stretch of time, I met Moroccans, hostel workers, backpackers and volunteers from several countries. Some conversations lasted ten minutes and others took over an afternoon. That is one of the things I still love about traveling alone. You become easier to approach, partly because there is nobody beside you making you look busy.
By the time I reached Chefchaouen, I had started thinking about four ideas that kept appearing in different parts of my life: awareness, adaptability, appreciation and enjoyment.
Written like that, they sound suspiciously like the headings on a corporate retreat poster. In practice, they came from being sick in Bolivia, checking my shoes for scorpions in Thailand, sitting quietly in India and getting sworn at on doorsteps in Australia.
Awareness
I was eighteen when I took my first long backpacking trip through South America. For three months I traveled through Bolivia and Peru, stayed with families and tried to learn enough of the language to participate in the life happening around me. I also contracted typhoid fever and giardia and spent five weeks dealing with a root canal without anesthesia. It was an ambitious introduction to international travel.
What stayed with me was not a neat lesson about how other people live. It was the realization that my own way of living was only one version. Being welcomed and cared for while I was far from home made the world feel larger, but also more personal. Awareness began there, less as an abstract idea and more as the habit of noticing how limited my assumptions could be.
Adaptability
Years later, I moved from Chicago to Wangnamyen, a small town in Thailand near the Cambodian border. I taught English, science, math and art at a local school. I did not know the language, the routines or what I was doing much of the time.
At first, every difference felt like a problem I needed to solve. Eventually I understood that the town did not need to reorganize itself around me. I needed to pay attention and adjust. That meant figuring out unfamiliar bathing arrangements, learning to check my shoes for scorpions and becoming more comfortable with not having an immediate answer. I had moved there to teach, but adaptability was one of the more useful things I brought home.
Appreciation
Some of the moments I remember most clearly from travel would look ordinary to anyone else. One was a rickshaw ride through the valley around Pushkar, India, sharing a cigarette with someone from the hostel and watching the landscape pass. Nothing dramatic happened. I was simply aware that I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Not long afterward, I spent twenty-one days trekking in Nepal. Long stretches of walking left plenty of room to notice the mountains, the blue sky and the fact that my body could carry me through them. Appreciation was not a grand revelation. It was the quiet feeling that arrived when I stopped hurrying toward the next thing.
Enjoyment
At twenty-five, I moved to Melbourne on a one-year working visa and spent my first six months living in a hostel. I found work selling gas and electricity door to door around Victoria. The job introduced me to rejection, resilience and a comprehensive collection of Australian curse words.
I did not make as much money as many friends back home. I did make close friends, travel around Australia, visit Bali and Egypt and discover a career I probably would never have chosen from a desk in Chicago. Because the visa had an end date, I was unusually conscious of saying yes while I could. Enjoyment stopped feeling frivolous. It became part of how I judged whether I was actually living the life I kept saying I wanted.
Back in Morocco, those four words felt less like principles and more like reminders. Notice what is in front of you. Adjust when reality ignores your plan. Be grateful for the ordinary moments. Let yourself enjoy them.
Travel does not automatically make anyone wiser. It can make you tired, impatient and deeply interested in finding a clean bathroom. But it does interrupt the autopilot. Sitting in Chefchaouen after a week back on the continent, that interruption was what I had been missing.