THE MEDICINE OF MOVEMENT
What I learned from living on the road
I’ve chosen to go on the road for many reasons throughout my life, but it wasn’t until I went fully nomadic—wandering through America by hatchback and sleeping in a tent, with no job or home to go back to—that I received its greatest teachings.
Road life provides a medicine that is harsh at first and bitter—the loss of comfort and routine, with no distractions and nowhere to hide.
But as it worked its ways on me, the magic of its medicine unfolded, and it showered me with gifts and insights. I took so many of these lessons with me.
NON-ATTACHMENT
Living in motion offers the experiential version of non-attachment that no amount of meditation or philosophical reading could teach me. When home is everywhere and nowhere, you begin to connect with transience itself. The discomfort of constant hellos and goodbyes eventually transforms into a new rhythm and the recognition that all of life is exactly this: continuous arrivals and departures.
PERSPECTIVE
As Henry Miller once put it: “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” This new vision doesn’t arrive all at once—it accumulates in fragments—but I will never see the world or my own life as I did before living on the road.
TRANSIENCE
The fleeting moments of wonder—morning fog lifting from a valley, spring peepers in Appalachia, sharing tea with a stranger who becomes a daylong companion before disappearing forever—became my sustenance. I began to collect them not as possessions but as invisible mementos. They became precious precisely because they couldn’t be grasped or replicated or photographed.
PRESENCE
Without the scaffolding of familiar routines, even simple tasks require presence. Making coffee becomes a ceremony when you’re balancing a kettle on a campstove at dawn. Finding a place to sleep becomes an exercise in reading geographical and cultural cues. Even the most seemingly routine acts—washing dishes, showering, eating a meal, working—change each day with each location.
This constant state of awareness becomes a living meditation.
Memory catalogs differently, too, organizing around place rather than dates on a calendar. When recalling conversations or books or other small moments, I remember the campground where I was, the weather, what the air felt like or the light of day or where I’d eaten dinner, rather than whether it was March or April, 2019 or 2023.
THE HEART IS A COMPASS
In the silence of long drives and the anonymity of unfamiliar towns, I started to hear my own thoughts again. Not the reactive thoughts that bounce like pinballs but the deeper currents. And as my thoughts quieted, my intuition grew louder.
I began to trust those strange intuitive nudges— urn here, stop there, talk to this person, avoid that place—even when they made no rational sense.
I learned to let my body wisdom—my heart, my intuition—lead me. The heart is much wiser and its path much more expansive than the plans constructed by the mind.
All of those subtle nudges connect to a larger pattern, a life path that can only be seen in retrospect, when the seemingly random dots connect into a constellation that was always there.
SURRENDER
The road taught me to surrender—to weather, to mechanical failures, to closed roads and changed plans. I learned to let the wind carry me, to resist the urge to control outcomes and to expect the unexpected.
A DISCONNECT FROM MATERIAL THINGS
Material possessions fell away, sometimes literally, like offerings to the journey. I learned in a fundamental way that every material thing is replaceable, regardless of its perceived value or sentimentality. We never truly own anything; we’re just borrowing this stuff for a time.
When life is distilled to what fits in a car, priorities become clear. The question shifts from “what do I want?” to “what do I need?” And the answers were always simpler and fewer than I’d expected.
TRANSFORMATION
The person who leaves home is never the same person who returns.
THE ROAD IS A MIRROR
The road serves as a mirror, reflecting who you are, who you aren’t, who you always were, who you never were, and who you could be. It shows possibility and missed opportunity, past lives and future lives, places and people that resonate and those that don’t.
THOUGHT VS. EXPERIENCE
The road liberated me from my own head—that hamster wheel of analysis, projection and rumination. It was replaced with direct experience: the sensation of wind against skin, the changing light of day, the taste of cold water from a natural spring.
The thinking mind recedes on the road, and something more primal, more immediately alive, takes its place.
HOW TO BE ROOTED
I discovered that my roots are internal and invisible, not tied to geographical location but to my own sense of being anchored in something within myself—feeling stable and secure within myself, with no need for an external symbol for this state of being.
You can be profoundly connected while perpetually in motion, just as you can be desperately alone while surrounded by familiar faces in familiar places.
THERE IS SUCH A THING AS TOO MUCH FREEDOM
Paradoxically, I learned that freedom thrives within certain constraints. Unbounded freedom becomes formless and overwhelming, like trying to contain an ocean in cupped hands. Some structure or limitation provides the vessel for freedom to take shape.
THE ROAD KNOWS WHAT YOU NEED
The road gives you precisely the medicine you need in the moment, whether you recognize it as medicine or not at the time. The medicine works slowly, invisibly, until one day you wake up and realize the chronic ache of whatever you were carrying has faded.
FAITH
I began the journey with a “leap and the net will appear” mindset—and those nets did appear, over and over again. As I worked my faith muscle, it grew stronger.
After enough roadside emergencies, close calls and unexpected rescues, I just started trusting that everything was going to work out, because it always did.
Sometimes the “disaster” turns out to be a gift, the “wrong” turn the right path, the “breakdown” the breakthrough.
Faith becomes a living thing on the road, a bridge between the known and unknown that leads me along my path.
WE ARE ALL NOMADS
Whether we cross continents or simply move from room to room in the same house for decades, life is in constant transition. We are moving geographically or emotionally, intellectually, spiritually.
Seeing everything through a traveler’s perspective — as temporary, as a gift, as a visitation—is the most valuable medicine the road gave me. Everything we encounter is fleeting and worth celebrating. The joy is in the witnessing, in the passing through, in the momentary communion and exchanges.
SOME PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR LIVING ON THE ROAD FULL-TIME
You don’t need to pack as many clothes as you think you do, but you might need more variety than you think you do.
Don’t pack your car or van full because you’re gonna end up picking up stuff along the way.
Don’t plan anything. Don’t even waste your time. Good chance it’s gonna change.
Campgrounds are cleaner than most motels.
Amazon lockers are convenient for essentials.
Mobile hotspots often work better/faster than motel/campground Wi-Fi.
Find a way to dry your tent before you leave a campground.
I slept the best at campsites with no cell reception (but then, there’s no cell reception).
Tire pressure is gonna change a lot.
Sometimes you’ll want local culture, and sometimes you’ll crave the familiar, like Trader Joe’s or Walmart.
Tell someone where you are every night.
***This story appeared in the April 17 edition of 72 Hours (my day job). This week’s edition was a SPECIAL TRAVEL ISSUE that I had so much fun compiling.
Here are some other stories in it for you to check out, from a talented group of local writers:
• Celebrating 100 years of adventure on the Appalachian Trail with ‘Grandpa Walking’
• Unwind and relax in the Frederick region
• Roadtrip playlists for every mood
• The art of preserving travel memories
• Best roadtrip movies of all time
• Loneliness of the long-distance letter writer » find him on Substack!
• The loveliness of the Lake District
Physical copies of 72 Hours are distributed throughout Frederick and surrounding counties. Enjoy and happy trails!
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Thank you. I'm undergoing a new (for me) breed of loneliness with the recent loss of my husband. And yet, without even trying, I seem keenly more aware of the outdoor -birds, wind, leaves, trees, truly all of nature..
as indoor silences are magnified and almost deafening.
Lovely, deeply thoughtful column, L.