Practicing change, on purpose

Immersive travel, the boundaries of identity, and the practice of staying pliable.

There's a particular kind of attention you can only find in a situation you've never been in.

You step off the plane, or the boat, or the trail, and something in your nervous system activates that you'd forgotten was even part of you. Light hits differently. Air carries different smells: mineral, vegetal, smoke, something you don't have a word for yet. The cadence of voices around you doesn't sound like home. Your body, without you asking, starts pulling in new data. 

And you haven't done a thing. You're just there, in a place that doesn't know you yet.

Without effort, you start to feel something soften. Or sharpen. Or both.

We are creatures shaped by the contexts we inhabit, and most of the time we don't notice it. Our routines, our local environments, our daily habits, the people we already know. These things settle in to create a container we live inside. The shape feels like us, but a lot of it actually comes from the context and how we relate to it. 

The way you sit in your kitchen is partly the kitchen. The way you speak in the office is partly the office. The version of you that shows up at your in-laws' table is shaped by years of being that version of you in that house. None of this is bad. It's just true. We calibrate against our context, automatically, all the time, without thinking about it.

Which means: when you change the context, something in you changes, too. Not because you've done anything yet. Just because your container has shifted.

There's a thread running through our work that we sometimes call the nomadic ethos. The basic premise is that change is constant. Life is a river, not a pond. The patterns we settle into, the routines that organize our days, the version of self we keep returning to…none of these are permanent. They are arrangements that hold for a while, until conditions shift.  

Left alone, any system trends toward rigidity. The brain conserves energy by automating what's repeated. The nervous system stabilizes around whatever patterns are in place and starts defending that stability. This is not a flaw; it's elegant. But it has a consequence. Over time, without intervention, the self grows brittle. The patterns that once fit the conditions become walls we can no longer see past. And when life eventually disrupts those patterns, and it will, the system can't bend. It breaks.

A person is a verb, an action unfolding, a process in motion. The work is to continue shifting, not in a frantic way but in a rhythmic, responsive way. To remain pliable. To practice the small adjustments now, in chosen circumstances, so that when unchosen change arrives, you have the capacity for it. 

Most of the conversation about "personal growth" focuses on the interior: your thoughts, your emotions, your habits, your beliefs. That work is real. But it can become a private engineering project, oddly disconnected from the actual situations, realities and relationships that shape your nervous system every day. 

Slow, immersive travel, the kind where you actually arrive somewhere and stay long enough to feel it, is one of the most direct ways to practice this type of adaptation. You take the same person and put them somewhere they've never been, and they can't operate on their usual assumptions anymore. The whole system has to wake up and pay attention. The conditions do most of the work. Travel is, among other things, a deliberate practice of pliability.

What happens when your conditions change:

The senses come to the surface. You can't run on autopilot, so something in you starts paying attention. You notice things you'd stopped noticing: the texture of bread, the temperature of the wind, the way light falls in late afternoon. Awareness expands not because you tried, but because the situation demands it. You're a slightly more alert version of yourself, by accident.

Old patterns get loose. Without the cues that usually activate them (the route to work, the morning email, the meeting at three), your habitual patterns of personality stop reaching for you the way they do at home. There's room for something else to take up space. You catch yourself acting in ways that don't match your usual story about who you are.

Identity breathes. You don't have to keep being your known and comfortable self. The self isn't the rigid object we sometimes treat it as. It's a living thing, with boundaries that can move. Put it in unfamiliar territory and those edges flex.  And for a while, possibilities open up. You get to explore who you might otherwise be. Sometimes the stretch is small, and you simply notice you're a person who can do this now. Sometimes it's larger, and you come home different.

None of this requires struggle or strain. It just requires being somewhere different long enough for the nervous system to remember that change is not a threat, that movement is survivable, that the self can hold across these shifts.

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In late February of 2027, Thomasina and I are heading to northern Patagonia for ten days with a small group. (...and you are invited to join us.) The lake district of Argentina, with mountains, alpine lakes, old forests, geodesic domes beneath a volcano, slow afternoons in small Andean towns. It's a chance to put yourself in unfamiliar territory with a group of people willing to do the same.

 Details are here, if it's calling.

But honestly, it doesn’t even need to be the type of trip we're planning. Just some version of changing your conditions, on a regular basis, on purpose, is enough to practice pliability.  Rearranging your furniture, just because you can.  Taking a different route to work, not because it is “better” but because it is unfamiliar.  Practice being unpredictable, even to yourself.  You might be pleasantly surprised at the wonder that emerges. 

The principle is the same wherever you go.

Do something unfamiliar, often enough that the system stays accustomed to motion.

The identity breathes when the situations change.

The work is to continue shifting, gently and on purpose, so you continue to feel alive.