Prologue

[Editor’s Note: this post was originally published as the first edition of a newsletter that I ran on Substack, which was meant to chronicle a year of traveling around the world with my partner. It… um… didn’t work out that way. But we’re leaving it as-is, since the writing is still faithful to the way I felt and what I intended to do at the time.] 

I’m currently on a plane, hovering over the corner of the world where Alaska and Siberia stretch their fingers out across the sea. Almost touching but not quite; a continental reenactment of The Creation of Adam.

I always wondered about that land bridge in school, when we were told that the first humans made their way over while hunting woolly mammoths. Did it look like a bridge to them, at the time? Did they realize they were crossing to an entirely different continent, a different place for their descendants to live and grow old and die in, with a whole ocean between themselves and the place they used to call home?

Or were they simply following the woolly mammoths, crossing without much thought at all?

* * *

I remember the first time I realized how big the Pacific Ocean was. As a child of the Bay Area, I thought I was familiar with the Pacific: vast, too cold to swim in, home to jellyfish and the sea otters that hung out around the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I understood it in an abstract sense. I knew that, hypothetically, Japan lay somewhere across that ocean.

But it wasn’t until I attended language school in Tokyo during the summer after high school graduation that I took a real look at the Pacific from the opposite side.

That whole summer stands out as if it occurred in technicolor. It was my first time living away from home, first time making friends outside my insular high school, first time learning to navigate public transit (the Tokyo subway during rush hour made for one hell of an introduction, but that’s a story for another time)… everything was new.

Tokyo is the place where I first started learning the choreography of adulthood.

When I first landed in the city, I was assigned to student housing in Minami Kasai — a quiet, residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Tokyo. My commute took an hour and a half each way and involved three subway lines. It was admittedly a trek, but I delighted in my home station: Kasai Rinkai Koen, a train station next to a large park that overlooked Tokyo Bay.

One day after Japanese class, I got off at the station and, instead of turning right towards home, turned left into the park, picking paths at random (since I couldn’t read the map) and eventually stumbling onto a beach.

Staring out at the ocean, my Pacific ocean, it suddenly struck me how far I’d traveled from home. The distance was so significant that it bordered on absurd. Who was I, at eighteen years old, to fling myself halfway around the world?

Back when the only way to cross oceans was by ship (or land bridge), people must’ve had a better sense of how far they’d traveled when they left one shore and alighted on another. The simple act of allowing time to pass during the journey, whether days or weeks, must have brought home the reality of the physical space they were putting between themselves and their former, familiar lives.

For all the wonders of flight, airplanes don’t afford the same opportunity to grapple with the distances we’re crossing. So it took visiting the beach and realizing that I was on the literal opposite side of the ocean for me to fully understand what I’d done: how I’d moved thousands of miles away from my previous life and was now a resident (however temporarily) of the largest city in the world.

It seemed too big, too remarkable a shift to have occurred simply because I wished it so. But it was also intoxicating. Did I really have the power to change my everyday life so completely, simply based on the fact that I’d aimed myself at something I wanted and leapt?

* * *

Up until that point, I hadn’t viscerally experienced agency over my own life before. This may sound melodramatic, but I suspect I’m not alone in the way that my life followed a set path up through high school graduation. I had a few decisions to make that were my own: my friends, my extracurriculars, some of my classes. Yet the general shape of my life was molded by my parents and the culture of the Bay Area that surrounded us. I would go to high school, I would get good grades, I would aim for a top university, I would graduate. These were not questions; they were not optional.

Tokyo was the first choice I made that illustrated how the contours of my life were now pliable, and that I was free to push and pull them into any shape I could imagine.

Sitting by the ocean that day, I didn’t necessarily realize all of this at once. But I did have a feeling that would plant the seed. It was jubilant, and sweeping, and powerful, and can be summed up with a simple thought:

I’m here because I choose to be here.

* * *

It can be so easy in modern life to forget our own sense of agency. The constrictions of adulthood have a way of sneaking up and drawing far smaller boundaries than we would otherwise choose to play in — the needs of our partners, careers, families, and finances lend a certain shape to our lives that can feel predefined. And this makes it hard to imagine the other ways we could be living our lives, the other shapes that could still encompass the things we hold dear.

The other paths we could still discover, if we made braver choices for ourselves.

* * *

You might’ve caught on by now that I’m in a period of transition. That I’m on the lookout for those different shapes, different paths. And in my search, I keep returning to the feeling I first experienced on the edge of Tokyo Bay, a decade ago now. That memory has become a touchstone, because I suspect it’s one of the pieces to the puzzle of creating a fulfilling life.

I don’t know what the other pieces look like or where they might be, but I’m excited to spend some time searching for them this year. I want to spend time looking, learning, and experiencing new ways of seeing. Discovering all the many different shapes that people around the world have molded their lives into.

So it seems fitting that my year-long odyssey will begin in Tokyo, the city that started it all. I’ll be landing in a few hours, where I’m sure I’ll be engulfed in a whirlwind of jet lag and prosaic travel concerns (where’s the ATM? How do we get to our hotel? Is this train going the right way?).

But for right now, everything is quiet on this flight, as I fly over the Bering Strait. So I’d like to take a moment to stretch out my hand and offer an invitation to you: come share the journey with me.

I can’t promise that I’ll discover any answers to my questions this year, but I can promise that I’ll share my experiences as best I can in this newsletter. Because every journey is better with friends.

Sincerely,

Mara