In Praise of Coming Home
Every good adventure ends the same way: you start fantasizing about your own pillow.
I’ve noticed it after backpacking trips, camping trips, road trips, and international trips, solo, with friends, and with family. You don’t feel cheated. You didn’t “see everything,” and the world carried on without your review. You’re simply ready for your own bed and your own routine.
This trip was no different. My wife tapped out a couple of days before we landed. I held out until the day before. Our daughter, Aiki, delivered her verdict somewhere over the Atlantic: she was ready to be home. Three votes, no dissent, and not a single recount.
We walked in late on a Wednesday night, wrecked. Then, after two or three days of jet-lag purgatory, something odd happened. We both felt better. More energy. More patience. A newfound ability to meet whatever the workday threw at us without flinching.
At work, I stepped back into projects I’d left mid-flight and flagged a few things within two days that I’d have missed had I never left. That did two things: it reminded me what I’m worth, and it settled the argument I keep having with myself about whether travel is a luxury or a tool. It’s a tool. A tool with better snacks.
Here’s why. Novelty is a workout. New places, new languages, new faces: your mind, body, and spirit get stretched in directions your routine never reaches. Then you come home to the familiar and find you’re not quite the person who left. Same desk, fresh eyes.
I take a few short trips a year and one long one. This year it was fifteen days: a touch long for Aiki, just right for my wife and me. Two weeks is no accident. Around day seven, you stop vacationing and start living somewhere else. Real decompression doesn’t happen in the four-day sprints Americans call vacation. Someday, a month. For now, ten to twelve days will do.
Jet lag, it turns out, can be put to work. We flew east to Ireland, then Estonia, and came home seven hours off. For a few days I was awake at 1, then 2, then 3 a.m. I tried reading myself back to sleep. The book won. So I got up and started the day, and my body eventually settled at 4 or 5 a.m., which is where I wanted it anyway. Aiki’s alarm clock has no snooze button, so those quiet hours are my head start. I took the time zone’s gift and kept it.
On vacation, I let off the gas. Sweets, carbs, and a beer with lunch and dinner most days. At home, that’s a cry for help. In Ireland, it’s called lunch. Before we left, my training had plateaued and our home cooking had gone stale, the same rotation so long the chicken and I had stopped making eye contact. Two weeks of eating whatever I wanted did what willpower couldn’t: it made me miss discipline. Back home, meal prep and the gym came easier than ever, and I’m riding that reboot toward a healthier routine.
The trip stocked the kitchen too. Inspired by where we’d been, we’ve been cooking for fall: a Guinness beef stew, a chili that leans closer to borscht, and a harvest chicken bowl. Our kitchen has a pulse again.
The least glamorous lesson is also the most practical. Friends and family who live frugally because they have to reminded me that the best things in life cost very little. So we’re eating in, exploring our own backyard, and spending less so we can save and invest more. That discipline is what buys the next trip.
The suitcase made the same point louder. After more than a week living out of one, you come home, open your closet, and realize how little of it you missed. My wife took that as a mandate and deep-cleaned and decluttered the house with the focus of a general. We’re heading into fall lighter than we left.
And gratitude hit hard. It sent me back to the people I’m notoriously bad at calling. I’m the guy who thinks about phoning you constantly and does it never. I’m going to be better. But it was bigger than people. We could take this trip. We have savings, a good daycare, good jobs, good health, a home fifteen minutes from the beach, and a church and Estonian community that feel like family. Once the jet lag lifted, that feeling stayed, and it’s still here a week later.
Our first weekend home settled the question. Saturday, we were at the beach with close friends visiting from out of state, the kind of glorious day that makes you wonder why anyone lives anywhere else. Sunday, we dragged a mattress onto the living room floor, in a house with perfectly good couches, and watched the Bills win again in extraordinary fashion while Aiki rolled back and forth between our laps and her blocks. No itinerary. No landmarks. No line for anything.
This is what life is about.
And we’re not done. This coming weekend we have a full fall agenda: a local football game, apple picking, the farmers’ market, and all the golden October light New Jersey can muster.
I loved the adventure, and I’ll take a hundred more. But the surprise was how good it felt to come home.