Sometimes you get stuck in a pattern, right? Sometimes you never leave your house for like five years. And maybe you go on a trip for a week or a month or two, and you think, hm, maybe I’m a person who goes on trips. But then you get back to your house and you may be a person who goes on trips sometimes, but you’re still not a person who leaves your house. You’re not a person who goes out and does things. You get to your house, and you become the person you always are in your house. Some people don’t like visiting their parents because they feel they regress. Their relationships with their parents and their house were formed when they were a child, a person they like less than the adult they are now, and staying at their parents house brings back those child patterns, and they’re not the person they want to be. Or sometimes you run into your ex who you haven’t seen in years, and then you accidentally hang out for nine hours, and then he walks you home at night because it’s a big city and you don’t know the way, and when you get to your building you kiss each other, because that’s what has always happened when you said good night before.

So you have your patterns, and your cues. Your environment and its constraints and its incentives. You are the person you’ve always been in the place you are, with the people you’re with.

Today I took the train into the city, which I never bother to do. And I saw people and went places. I could go those places literally any day, I just don’t, and I never have, in nine years of living here.

It’s easy to feel like you’ve changed when you step away from your life for a bit. It’s easy to feel like that change will last, even when evidence tells you it won’t. You go on a trip, or a retreat. They say “wherever you go, there you are”, but if that’s supposed to mean that you’re the same everywhere you go, I haven’t found that at all. When I travel to a new country I’m often unsure who I’m supposed to be. When all my normal cues are gone, I could be anyone. But maybe it means that wherever you go, that is where you are, and so you are the person you are when you’re there.

Sometimes you step away from your normal life without really leaving. The person you live with goes out of town and your patterns change, or you spend a month doing something unusual with a new group of people. Then the glow cloud moves on, and you move on.

Experiences can change you, do change you. But patterns are powerful. Today I went into the city, because the incentives and activation energy in my life are all different from normal right now. But a week from today, I expect I will wake up, sit down at my window and write, and not leave my house or speak to anyone all day. Because that is my pattern.