Why Travel Needs Stillness
What travel teaches us about returning, staying, and choosing where to live
Travel gives us amazing sights, but it’s only by sitting still that we can turn those into insights. That’s what travel writer Pico Iyer shares in his TedTalk about the art of stillness in travel. Travel is not only about where we go, but about the stillness afterward that allows those places to change us, helping us reflect on questions that matter: where we truly want to live and what kind of life we want to build.
When we travel, all our senses are on high alert, taking in sights, smells, conversations, and new ways of being. But it’s only when we pause and sit with these observations that our internal chemistry begins to shift. In stillness, the raw experiences of travel transform into insight, allowing us to understand how the journey has moved us.
The Long Way Home Journeys
Over the past four years, I’ve been embarking on three-month-long summer adventures to far off corners of the world from Europe to Asia to Latin America. I’ve been calling these trips, “The long way home.”
Many travelers recognize the same feeling: returning home after months of new sights, sounds, and experiences can leave us unsettled. Normal life suddenly feels smaller, quieter, and harder to step back into.
“Travel isn't about seeing the sights, it’s about a new way of seeing. And once you have a new way of seeing, even the old places look different,” Pico Iyer says.
Post-Travel and The Stages of Grief
Returning from long journeys often comes with an emotional cycle that feels surprisingly familiar, almost like the stages of grief. Many travelers move through similar feelings. For me it has been this:
Year 1 (2022): Denial — resisting the end of the trip and the return to standing still.
Year 2 (2023): Frustration — irritation at being back in a city that feels different, restless to get moving again.
Year 3 (2024): Bargaining — running “what if” scenarios in your head, wishing you could have stayed abroad longer or that home felt different.
Year 4 (2025): A soft depression — a lingering sadness for the life you just left behind.
Year 5 (2026): What will it be?
This framework isn’t just personal, it’s a shared experience among travelers who’ve spent extended time away. The challenge is learning to sit with these feelings, to observe them, and to let them inform how we see both our homes and ourselves.
Year Four: A Different Kind of Acceptance
This fourth year, returning home after months abroad brought a more reflective contemplation. I’m happy to be back with family, to sleep in my own bed, and to settle out of a backpack, yet there is still a subtle grief for the life I just left. The walkable streets, the new friends, and the rhythms of other cities.
What feels different this year is awareness. Sitting with these emotions is helping me understand that sadness isn’t a sign that home has lost its magic, but that I have changed. Travel adds new layers to who we are, shaping how we see both the world and ourselves. We can use that to help decide our next steps.
Insights, Not Just Movement
I remember a teacher at a Shaolin Kung Fu temple in Germany saying, “Insights mean inside sight.” The idea stuck with me: the lessons we gather on the road only become meaningful when we bring them inward. Sitting with our experiences allows us to turn movement into understanding, and understanding into choices about how we live, where we want to be, and what we value.
The Fifth Year?
Looking ahead, the fifth year brings a natural question: what will it feel like to return next time? Perhaps it will be acceptance, or perhaps a new shade of reflection entirely. For travelers, there’s always a quiet tension between continuing the cycle of journeys and wondering whether it’s time to put down more permanent roots somewhere new.
The point isn’t in predicting the stage, but in using the pause after travel to process what we’ve experienced. Stillness is what allows us to transform movement into understanding. By sitting with the insights we’ve gathered, we can see how travel has shaped us and make thoughtful choices about our next steps, whether that means embracing life at home, planning the next journey, or exploring a longer-term change. The future remains uncertain, but reflection gives it direction.
Questions for All Travelers
For those of us who travel often (ie: digital nomads), returning home can be a time to think deeply about:
What has this year’s travel taught me? How have I changed this time?
Which aspects of the countries and cities I’ve traveled to have brought me the most joy?
Do I want to continue this loop between home and travel, or is it time to choose — to stay, or to explore a new place as home?
Movement vs Being Moved
So, travel perhaps is as much about movement as it is about stillness. It’s only with the stillness that we are able to process how the movement we experienced for travel, converts to how it moved us as a person. There’s a difference between movement and being moved.
As Diana Uribe says in her podcast about migration, movement is deeply human. For millennia, people have always found reasons to shift from one place to another. Sometimes for work, sometimes for safety, sometimes simply to try something new. And with that comes a question many of us still hold: is this movement temporary, or permanent? Do we return, or do we root elsewhere?
In the end, travel isn’t just about where we go, it’s about what we allow ourselves to process afterward. Stillness is what turns movement into meaning.
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-Maria
It’s like you took the thoughts right out of my head and put them directly onto paper. I love the intentionality you are moving into this next season of “waiting” and am definitely going to use this reframe as I wind down from my travels at the end of the year!
Love this newsletter! I can relate so much after doing 2 long trips almost back to back and each time I came back feeling a bit depressed but also I enjoyed the stillness of coming back to a routine and a chance to reflect on my trips and take it all in. In the moment, it’s too chaotic but after it’s over you get to process everything and cherish the memories that your brain has been collecting 😆 Also I’m glad that we got to meet for the first time and our trip was the beginning of our long adventures 🥹