There was no Sunday post last Sunday. For once, instead of sitting down to write about life, I was somewhere else living it.
Being somewhere else made me notice something I tend to forget: how much our surroundings shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
At home, life develops grooves. We wake up in the same room, look through the same windows, drive the same streets, follow the same routines. And without realizing it, we often revisit the same thoughts too. The mind knows its usual routes.
Then we go somewhere else. Different streets. Different light. Different sounds. Different people passing us. And suddenly, something changes.
Psychologist Stephen Kaplan spent years studying the restorative effects of environments. In his work on Attention Restoration Theory, one of the qualities he identified was what he called “being away.” Not running away. Just stepping outside our daily environment.
That’s what happens when we travel. The usual cues disappear. The room where we worry is gone. The desk where we work is gone. The pile that reminds us what we haven’t finished is gone. The familiar streets that carry us almost automatically from one obligation to another are gone.
And for a little while, the machinery of everyday life feels different.
In her essay Street Haunting, Virginia Woolf writes about leaving home and walking through London, observing strangers, shop windows, the streets, and the life unfolding around her. For her, leaving home also seems to loosen her everyday identity. She becomes more anonymous and more curious, free to imagine other lives and other ways of being.
Away from the familiar rooms of home, identity itself seems to become more fluid. When we change the scenery, we’re not only seeing a different place. We’re stepping outside the version of ourselves that belongs to our usual surroundings.
At home, we work. We worry. We pay bills.
But somewhere unfamiliar, the script feels less rigid. We stop moving on autopilot. We look around more. We notice things. We walk streets simply because we’ve never walked them before. We talk to people we may never see again. We become curious.
Curiosity changes us. Or maybe it just reveals a part of us that our routines have pushed into a corner. It makes me wonder: If we feel lighter somewhere else, where does that lightness come from? Am I more adventurous, more present, more open because of the place? Or were those sides of me already there, just waiting for a different setting to bring them out?
Travel can feel like a temporary experiment in another version of ourselves. The experiment ends, of course. We come home. The familiar rooms are still there. So are the bills, the responsibilities, and the unfinished projects.
But maybe we don’t come back exactly as we left. Maybe the point of changing the scenery isn’t simply to escape the familiar.
Maybe it’s to notice what else in us shows up away from the familiar.