The Lure of Special (Reflections on Meaning after a Month-Long Trip)
*last update on September 14, 2025
At the end of August, I came back home after a month-long trip through Europe—London, Paris, Strasbourg, Baden-Baden, and so many other amazing places in between. At first, being home again was hard. I told myself it was just jet lag—and part of it was—but there was something else, something deeper. I felt restless, frustrated, oddly hollow. I kept missing… something. Not just the places or the people, but the feeling itself—the intensity, the movement, the richness of experience. Every day of that trip had offered something new for my mind to process, to be excited or challenged by. Coming back to the quiet rhythm of daily life felt jarring. I started to worry: Had I stopped liking it here? Was something wrong? For days, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But eventually, I realized—it was like a kind of withdrawal. My brain had gotten used to regular spikes of stimulation, emotional highs and lows, and impressions layered one on top of another. Without them, everything felt muted.
That frustration felt especially disorienting because I’ve spent some time working on the practice of being present. I’ve deepened my commitment to noticing, to being here with care. I’ve always had a sensitivity to detail, a natural pull toward quiet observation, but in recent years I’ve practiced it more intentionally. I’ve drawn on Buddhist ideas—noticing without judging, seeing without assigning meaning, letting a moment be just what it is: a leaf, a sound, a patch of sun on the floor. That kind of attention has brought me real joy. And yet, when I came back from Europe, I felt like I had lost it. I was no longer satisfied by stillness. I found myself craving something heightened. I started thinking: When is the next trip? Where can I go? What will give me that feeling again? It was as if the quiet beauty of daily life wasn’t enough anymore. And that scared me. Had I lost the thing I’d spent years cultivating? Had I traded presence for the chase?
That’s when I began to realize just how powerful the lure of special can be. Not just because the places were beautiful, but because I expected them to be. Because I had already assigned meaning to the names—London, Paris, Strasbourg, and so on—and because every new scene gave me a new excuse to feel something heightened. Specialness, in this sense, wasn’t just about beauty or interest. It was about emotional stimulation. And once I’d tasted that intensity, coming back to stillness felt like a kind of loss.
Compared to Europe, the United States suddenly felt ordinary. Yet I remembered how, when I first moved to Philadelphia in 2011, everything felt special: voices, colors, even smells. For weeks, I walked around in a kind of wonder. And then, of course, it faded. The specialness gave way to familiarity. And in its place, I had to learn something harder: how to stay. How to build a life not out of novelty, but out of presence. Out of what’s actually here.
I’ve moved around, I’ve seen different states. Then I settled down in Chicago in 2017. And over time, the specialness of this new place faded as well. But I’ve also trained myself to focus on the quiet beauty of the present. And then, this trip reminded me how much I still crave specialness. How easy it is to get pulled back into that chase. Noticing this doesn’t mean rejecting those feelings. It means watching them arise, with compassion, and understanding what they are: a habit, a hunger, a feature of how we are wired to seek and get used to what we find.
It’s natural to feel drawn toward things we’ve come to see as special—it’s human. But I want to remember that joy doesn’t always come from novelty. After all, specialness is just an idea in our heads. And like all meanings, it shifts, fades, eventually slips away. Something that was once special always becomes familiar. If we keep chasing specialness, we end up empty-handed.
Unlike what we call “special,” the real is always available, no matter where you are. The present moment is always here—quiet, steady, trustworthy. And it can give you something that specialness never could: a joy that doesn’t vanish when the excitement of novelty wears off.
About this project: Start page
That frustration felt especially disorienting because I’ve spent some time working on the practice of being present. I’ve deepened my commitment to noticing, to being here with care. I’ve always had a sensitivity to detail, a natural pull toward quiet observation, but in recent years I’ve practiced it more intentionally. I’ve drawn on Buddhist ideas—noticing without judging, seeing without assigning meaning, letting a moment be just what it is: a leaf, a sound, a patch of sun on the floor. That kind of attention has brought me real joy. And yet, when I came back from Europe, I felt like I had lost it. I was no longer satisfied by stillness. I found myself craving something heightened. I started thinking: When is the next trip? Where can I go? What will give me that feeling again? It was as if the quiet beauty of daily life wasn’t enough anymore. And that scared me. Had I lost the thing I’d spent years cultivating? Had I traded presence for the chase?
That’s when I began to realize just how powerful the lure of special can be. Not just because the places were beautiful, but because I expected them to be. Because I had already assigned meaning to the names—London, Paris, Strasbourg, and so on—and because every new scene gave me a new excuse to feel something heightened. Specialness, in this sense, wasn’t just about beauty or interest. It was about emotional stimulation. And once I’d tasted that intensity, coming back to stillness felt like a kind of loss.
Compared to Europe, the United States suddenly felt ordinary. Yet I remembered how, when I first moved to Philadelphia in 2011, everything felt special: voices, colors, even smells. For weeks, I walked around in a kind of wonder. And then, of course, it faded. The specialness gave way to familiarity. And in its place, I had to learn something harder: how to stay. How to build a life not out of novelty, but out of presence. Out of what’s actually here.
I’ve moved around, I’ve seen different states. Then I settled down in Chicago in 2017. And over time, the specialness of this new place faded as well. But I’ve also trained myself to focus on the quiet beauty of the present. And then, this trip reminded me how much I still crave specialness. How easy it is to get pulled back into that chase. Noticing this doesn’t mean rejecting those feelings. It means watching them arise, with compassion, and understanding what they are: a habit, a hunger, a feature of how we are wired to seek and get used to what we find.
It’s natural to feel drawn toward things we’ve come to see as special—it’s human. But I want to remember that joy doesn’t always come from novelty. After all, specialness is just an idea in our heads. And like all meanings, it shifts, fades, eventually slips away. Something that was once special always becomes familiar. If we keep chasing specialness, we end up empty-handed.
Unlike what we call “special,” the real is always available, no matter where you are. The present moment is always here—quiet, steady, trustworthy. And it can give you something that specialness never could: a joy that doesn’t vanish when the excitement of novelty wears off.
About this project: Start page
