The Best Part

You go out into the world to acquire all manner of habits and learn all sorts of languages, but the one tongue you neglect most is the one you’ve spoken at home, just as the customs you feel most comfortable with are those you never knew were customs until you saw others practice completely different ones and realized you didn’t quite mind your own-

Andre Aciman

I can’t wait to come back and I haven’t even left. While the planning is exciting and the doing is exhausting, it’s the returning that reveals what the leaving was really all about. It’s after you come back from a journey that you can see what matters, what you remember the most vividly.

It’s always the stupid things. One random walk home after the bars when nothing in particular was discussed. One cup of coffee that you burned your tongue on so badly it prevented you from enjoying dinner. One innocent observation made by a total stranger who knew you only in one context but that summed you up so well you wondered why no one else ever noticed or bothered to ever say it.

You remember how they are different from you. The people you meet or, more accurately, smell. They smell more differently than they really are and it’s this smell that makes them so frighteningly unfamiliar. It’s not that they are any more dirty than you, they are just dirty in a different way. Different toxins secreted at different altitudes is all. But at the end of the day, a pesticide is a pesticide and you smell scary to them too.

When it’s all over, you come home and it feels better than it ever did before you left. Now you’re all cultured and worldly and you cling to your corner of the earth with more ferocity because you see it’s worth defending. The things you scoffed at now seem quaint. The mundane things you do everyday are now sacred tradition. You are no longer a poor, culturally-schizophrenic American. All along, you’ve had what you thought you didn’t and all you had to do was miss it to see it.

You set out to see the world, to learn of its ways and make your impression. As it turns out, its your world that impresses you.