Equanimity
Peace in Motion
We sometimes plan journeys elsewhere because where we are, some things feel slightly out of reach. A sense of lightness, perhaps. A shift in our perspective. A feeling of being more ourselves and at peace. Whether we name it or not, many of us travel with an intention and a quiet hope that something inside us might settle along the way.
We book time away, mark it in calendars, and carry it ahead of us — as if a different setting might relax what has felt fixed. Travel feels like the right container for this hope because it introduces distance and scope — not only from place, but from the selves we have built, maintain, or abandon. It promises a life temporarily rearranged. The extra to our ordinary.
When time is deliberately set aside like this, it takes on a different weight. Meaning accumulates early — fantasy, hope, expectation — often before anything has actually happened. Peace and reflection feel even more possible and permitted than usual. While the thinking is seductive, a change of location alone can end up carrying more expectation than it reasonably can hold. When we arrive craving peace, yet stay actively moving through places, plans and experiences, we still try to do our way into being.
Calm is eventually uncovered, just not in the way initially expected, because travel is rarely composed only of serenity. It can be noisy, fast, visually intense, filled with constant stimuli and endless choices. I’ve noticed that across extraordinary and ordinary experiences abroad: trying an adrenaline sport or catching an early metro among commuters on their way to work, moving between temporary accommodations or visiting a street food market, navigating a busy supermarket or training in a gym.
You soon see that the location is almost irrelevant, because the feelings that emerge are not imposed by a place, but carried into it. Moving through hectic streets without urgency does become an opportunity to practise awareness, noticing our own pace and presence.
For me, this can look like walking with a destination in mind but without constant map checking, trusting myself to localise intuitively rather than micromanage a route. Queuing while people-watching, not letting my phone create noise during pause. Navigating uncooperative traffic without catastrophizing. Finding the ocean or green spaces if I feel overwhelmed. Simply noticing when stimulation builds and how I can regulate. None of these habits are remarkable in isolation. What matters is that they’re practised across environments, whether a place is familiar or entirely new. This pattern of noticing also shows how quickly calm is handed over to circumstances. How easily we assume it is conditional.
Travel then becomes less about being a tourist in the traditional sense and more about using the travelling itself as a backdrop for an inner quest. Another way of observing how the mind settles and how the body responds when certainty is removed, plans change, and the comfort of familiarity falls away. Perhaps behaviours change when conditions are imperfect, when routes are made up on the go, and when the status quo is interrupted. Some environments will stimulate, overwhelm, or provoke, and in doing so they test how well we accompany ourselves, while in motion. The escape plan we had, becomes a self-schooling in adjustment. The environment and us, together. In that sense, movement is the teacher. It shows where calm is easy and where it is conditional, where it stands up and where it sits down. Travel simply holds up a mirror to our image — by shaking up our routine, playing with identity, and interrupting the pace that kept us from noticing what is already there.
Inner peace, as it turns out, is not something waiting at destinations, nor something earned through effort or activity. It does not arrive on schedule, nor does it depend on scenery or distance travelled.
Whether we cross continents or simply step outside our door, the journey reveals the same truth: we do not go elsewhere to acquire peace. We move through the world building our relationship with it — carrying it, tending to it, losing sight of it, rediscovering it — whether or not travel happens, and where our journeys begin or end.
