I’ve traveled to many places and often. Traveling eventually messes with your memory; places blend into each other and new moments feel vaguely familiar. This is jarring and distracting, which is probably one reason most people don’t move around as much as I do.

For certain brains, weird lifestyles can produce precious results.

Driving is the most consistent way to induce travel-tripping for me. Every road is simultaneously different and the same. I turned into a strange roundabout/intersection hybrid yesterday and it happened—everything was suddenly different.

All the complicated and ever-changing driving rules that I and the cars passing by were trying to follow felt…fake. I knew the red light and the yield sign made sense and everyone understood them, but they felt like monopoly pieces placed into society by people who were giving their best guesses about what we should all do.

I and everyone around me were players in a game where the rules were made up as we went along. Nothing was certain and nothing was permanent, it was all just what it was, as it was, right now.

True freedom is only felt in moments because being fully untethered to everything makes writing grocery lists and obeying traffic laws turn grey. The high-dose form of freedom that makes the fallibility of everything obvious is best received in short bursts across time. When our laws and cultural customs feel contrived, you question them.

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