6 Lessons On Staying Still From a Recovering Digital Nomad
I'm sitting at the breakfast table with my head down.
I've just had another discussion with my partner that didn’t end well.
We’re also about to renew the lease for the second year on our apartment — a record for me since living in my childhood home.
Then, all of a sudden, the thought flashes through my mind:
Why not…?
In difficult moments, there's always a way out for a digital nomad.
It's the curse and blessing of the digital age.
As long as you have a laptop and an internet connection, you can walk out the door and live just fine without having to deal with any physical humans.
The temptation is sometimes overwhelming.
But unlike in the past, the thought passed by without a flicker of doubt and I got up and continued washing the dishes.
After 6 years of living out of a backpack, not having any close friends or pets, and dealing with crappy AirBnbs and crazy landlords that walk in whenever they please, being a digital nomad had lost its appeal.
But there was much more to my decision to stay than that.
The nomad phase was an important — no, integral — phase in my life.
But that's all it ever was, a phase, leading to somewhere much more profound.
1. Being A Digital Nomad is to Try to Recreate a?Lost Rite of?Passage
Long-term travel and being a digital nomad is the closest thing we have to a rite of passage in the information age.
Rites of passages mark the end of one stage of life or state and the beginning of another.
They typically occur in three stages:
Today's society lacks rituals and ceremonies that offer the “rite of passage” from a dependent child to a fully responsible adult.
The modern-day nomad and traveler on some level realizes this and embarks on a journey of discovery without fully knowing why.
However, instead of passing through to their new identity, they often get stuck in the Liminal or Transition Stage, trying to make a home in a place defined by uncertainty, groundlessness, and openness of identity.
You can’t make a home in this phase without burning out.
The only way forward is to face the trials you need to so you can return to the world you once knew with a completely new outlook and way of being.
2. Travel is Not About Leaving Your Home, But Leaving Your?Habits.
You are what you do.
And when what you do becomes crystallized into habitual routines and rigid structures, so do you.
But when you step out that door, you untie yourself from old routines and habits and open up the realm of infinite possibility.
You become unstuck from your old self, and at the same time, become nobody and anybody.
At least, that’s the idea.
Traveling in the age of constant connectivity is to drag your old self and habits around with you in the form of your phone and laptop, making it all but impossible to disconnect from how you once were and did things.
You can’t find a new way to be and become something new without first being able to recognize and detach from your old ways of being.
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.” — Piko?Iyer
Without consciously disconnecting from your old ways, you may think you need to travel further and wider to escape yourself and break the tight chains of routine and habit.
But it’s not more physical distance from home that you need, it’s more psychological space from your habits.
3. Heaven is The Place Where You Think of Being Nowhere?Else.
The modern idea of heaven is a constantly moving target.
It’s the latest work trend, the hottest destination, the most hyped-up new product…
The?what?isn’t important. It’s the fact it’s novel and different from whatever you currently have.
This stream of novelty and shiny objects never stops coming.
So much that you can be eternally possessed by the idea that the next thing, the next place, or the next person will?finally be the one.
For the digital nomad, it’s chasing the idyllic beach town that has perfect wifi, cheap food, is just Westernised enough, and isn’t too crowded.
When you believe that heaven is always just a few steps around the corner, you have a recipe for remaining in hell.
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When you try to make the best of your circumstances and look to find peace within yourself, heaven is nowhere else but where you are.
4. The Backpacker Has No Home, The Traveller is Never Away From?Home.
On the road, you don’t owe anybody anything and can move from one place to another like a leaf on the wind.
It’s liberating to be without any fixed place as a home.
But it’s self-defeating to get rid of the notion of home altogether.
Home is where you feel like you belong.
It’s not a place, a state, a person, or a lifestyle.
Home is the ability to feel safe, connected, and at ease within yourself — which is often confused with a place, a state, a person, or a lifestyle.
It’s difficult if not impossible to feel at home when you’re constantly moving.
You forfeit community. You evade responsbility. You feel like a visitor wandering the world instead of a part of the world exploring itself.
“We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.” — Maya?Angelou
The Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh believed that we’re all refugees.
He didn’t mean we’re all without a home, but that the idea we belong to one specific place and not another is wrong.
We’re all lost wanderers on a random planet at the edge of a strange galaxy.
The lostness is what ties us all together. The homelessness is what makes it possible to feel like we belong wherever we find ourselves.
5. Freedom From Decision?&?Commitment is a Prison of Infinite Possibilities
After being forced to go to school, living in an oppressive society, and working the daily grind, freedom is having zero responsibilities and obligations.
But to live this way permanently is to place yourself in a different kind of prison.
This is the prison of?living-for-nothing-else-but-yourself-and-the-moment.
It’s difficult to build a meaningful life without making sacrifices, being able to delay gratification, and becoming a part of something bigger than yourself.
The free spirit sees such actions as signs of living in a tyrannical dictatorship and losing the ability to be free and fully enjoy life.
But this view doesn’t make them free at all, it dooms them to moving through life with little purpose, direction, or meaning outside of the?mezcalita?cocktail in their hand.
“Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. Freedom is the strength of character to do what is good, true, noble, and right.” ―Matthew?Kelly
It feels good and is relieving to not have to make hard decisions and commit.
But you’ll never be free if your main concern is feeling good and you can’t face tough things like doing what you think is right and working on projects and relationships that take hard work and patience.
6. The Greatest Adventure is Going?Nowhere.
In the 21st century, there’s more to do, more to see, and more to know with each second that passes.
If you manage to step off this accelerating treadmill for a moment, it can feel like the mind is still going a billion miles an hour.
Instantly it points out everything that’s wrong, churns up all the bad decisions you’ve ever made, and finds all the reasons why you shouldn't stop but need to keep moving.
To the accelerated mind, staying still can feel like you’re shutting out the whole world and basking like a jerk in all that you don’t have.
In this state, any hint of difficulty or disagreement or inconvenience is another reason to search Airbnb and place another pair of undies in the suitcase.
But if you can stick through it, the mind eventually settles with the body.
Travel writer Pico Iyer describes this as shifting from pointing your life towards getting?somewhere?to pointing it toward going?nowhere.
Going nowhere is the most intrepid journey you can take in the 21st century.
If you can get off the constant treadmill toward somewhere else and instead work on finding stillness where you are, then you can travel further, deeper, and wider than you ever could with a backpack and laptop.
“The nowhere I was interested in had more corners and dimensions than I could possibly express… and somehow seemed larger and more unfathomable than the endlessly diverting life I’d known in the city; it opened onto a landscape as vast as those of Morocco and Indonesia and Brazil I had come to know, combined.” ―Pico?Iyer
This inner journey is available whenever and wherever you are, no matter if you’re in a beach town or have a cocktail in your hand.
The catch is that there’s no map, no one to tell you which way to go, no safety rails, and no clear reward or destination.
You have to take the lonely and treacherous leap of faith and make the transition through the Liminal Stage to emerge on the other side into a new world and new way of being.
This?is where the real journey begins.
Start your journey toward inner stillness.