How Paradise becomes Tuesday

One of the strange things about travel is how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary.

You can spend months planning a trip. You can spend thousands of dollars getting there. You can fly across an ocean, board a beautiful ship, and wake up in a place you’ve only seen in photographs.

And for a little while, you notice everything. I mean everything! The light on the water. The shape of the coastline. The buildings stacked into hillsides. The fact that breakfast is happening with the Mediterranean outside the window.

And then, somehow, a week and a half later, you’re walking past all of it wondering what they’re serving for dinner.

Nothing happened to the Mediterranean. You happened to the Mediterranean.

That may be one of the most interesting things about being human. We adapt. We normalize. And we stop seeing.

I’ve been to Alaska four times, and every time I’ve been there I’ve had the same experience: almost everywhere I looked seemed like a postcard. It’s almost impossible not to be struck by it.

At first.

But I also know that if I lived there long enough, eventually I’d walk outside, see the mountain, and think about whether I’d remembered to answer an email. The mountain wouldn’t have become less magnificent. It would have become familiar. And familiar things have a way of disappearing.

This isn’t really about vacation. Vacation just makes the mechanism easier to see. At home, the same thing is happening all the time.

We stop seeing the people we love because they’re always there. We stop noticing the house we once worked so hard to own. We stop appreciating the body that carries us around because it’s been carrying us around every day. We stop noticing that somebody answers when we call. We stop noticing that there’s food in the refrigerator, hot water in the shower, a dog happy to see us, a person sleeping next to us.

Not because those things stopped mattering. Because they became Tuesday.

And I don’t think the answer is gratitude; at least not in the simple, “count your blessings” sense. You can make a list every morning of ten things you’re grateful for and still not actually see any of them.

I think a deeper question is:

What has become invisible to me simply because it has become familiar?

That question is a little more disturbing. Because it asks me to consider that perhaps some of the things I believe are missing from my life aren’t missing at all. Perhaps I’ve just stopped experiencing them.

We’re remarkably good at believing that the next thing will do it. The next trip. The next house. The next relationship. The next achievement. The next amount of money. The next version of our body. The next adventure.

And sometimes the next thing really is wonderful. But eventually, the next thing becomes this thing. The new becomes familiar.

Paradise becomes Tuesday. And then we start looking for Wednesday.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting more. I love travel. I love adventure. I love seeing things I’ve never seen before.

But maybe one of the real gifts of leaving home isn’t simply that we get to see something extraordinary. Maybe it’s that, for a little while, we remember what it feels like to see. And if we’re paying attention, perhaps we can bring that home with us.

Not the photographs.

The seeing.