There are many things in this life I’m perfectly fine not understanding. Quantum physics. People who enjoy black licorice or banana-flavored candy. The appeal of golf. But this one has always snagged on me: the people who don’t want to travel. Not people who can’t. That’s different, and sacred (perhaps for lack of a better word) in its own way. But the ones who could and simply don’t care to see the world.

I’ve tried to let it go. I’ve tried to tell myself this is just another wiring difference, another room in the house of human variety I don’t need to enter. But it’s hard for me. Especially having walked from end to end of Boulevard Saint-Germain, trees overhead like a patient audience, watching Paris move at a human pace. Especially having biked through Corfu in search of a weave belt I probably didn’t need at the time but somehow couldn’t live without in the years that followed. Especially having sat in living rooms with strangers who handed me an instrument and asked if I’d help them make something beautiful, as if this were the most reasonable request in the world.

My favorite meal will always be my grandma’s hamburgers and gravy with Virginia-style fried potatoes. That plate is home, full stop. But every favorite meal after that comes from elsewhere. A little ramen shop we happened upon while I was looking for underwear larger than a Japanese large. Lamb I had in Crete and a quail egg in Oaxaca, eaten inside buildings that seemed designed by someone who believed walls were a suggestion. Springbok in Johannesburg. Unmentionable meat in Ghana. Lobster in Strasbourg, eaten slowly, reverently, as if the river itself were watching to see if I deserved it.

So when the first friend told me he’d never leave the States, I assumed—and I’m still certain I’m right—that it had something to do with scale. He’s afraid of being a smaller fish in a bigger pond. His hometown is the perfect size to be seen as someone. Known. Recognized. I’ve always wanted the opposite. I want to feel smaller. Zoom all the way out. Let me blend into whatever I’m standing near. Let me be unremarkable in a crowd that doesn’t owe me anything.

For some, it’s language. The fear they’ll look stupid trying to pronounce “toilet,” or “food,” or “where can I find deodorant?” in whatever language they land in. That fear of sounding foolish, of being exposed is quietly keeping them from experiences that would stretch them into kinder, more elastic versions of themselves. It’s a remarkable thing, how much of a life can be avoided simply by refusing to mispronounce a word.

But if you examine it deeper, you start to find layers that are less about laziness or incuriosity and more about protection. Travel dismantles the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works and where we sit inside it. For some people, those stories are load-bearing. Remove them too quickly and the whole structure collapses. Staying put can be an act of self-preservation.

There’s also a quiet dignity in rootedness we don’t talk about enough. Some people are meant to know one soil intimately. To learn the moods of a single place the way others learn the conjugations of verbs. They become libraries of local knowledge, living archives. William Least Heat-Moon wrote about roads and towns and margins, but he also understood that staying can be as intentional as leaving. That depth and breadth are different crafts.

And still—still—I struggle. Because I’ve seen what happens when someone realizes the world is larger and kinder and more complicated than they were told. I’ve watched shoulders drop. Breath deepen. I’ve felt my own certainty loosen its grip as I stood somewhere unfamiliar, trying to read a menu or the sky.

Maybe some people don’t travel because they don’t want to be changed. Travel is a consent to alteration. You agree, quietly, to come back different. To have your preferences rearranged. To let your favorite things be challenged without being replaced. Not everyone wants that. Not everyone needs it.

I suppose this is where I’m meant to land: with respect, even if I don’t arrive at understanding. The world will keep spinning whether we witness it or not. Some of us feel called to walk its long sentences, to taste its many dialects, to be made smaller by it. Others find meaning in mastering a single paragraph.

I just know this: every time I go somewhere new, I come back more grateful for what never changes. Grandma’s hamburgers. Familiar roads. The place where my name is pronounced without effort. Seeing the world hasn’t made me love home less. It’s made me understand what home is made of.

*this is written from the departure lounge in Tokyo*