A few years ago, my friend Amanda and I got completely lost in Dubrovnik. We were exhausted, a little sunburned, and somehow ended up in a candy store where you paid by the kilogram. They had gummies in every shape imaginable — frogs, hearts, sour tennis balls, giant bears. We filled the bag like children, grabbing whatever looked good in the moment: a few green frogs, some chocolate-covered almonds, a couple of the weird sour ones. When we got to the counter, the scale read 1.5 kg. We had spent over $50 on candy.

There was nothing left to do but sit on the sidewalk with our backs against the shop wall, in the shade, eating a ridiculous amount of candy while tourists streamed past.

Nothing about it was significant in the way travel is supposed to be. No landmark. No big moment. No story you’re supposed to tell. But it’s one of the moments I remember most clearly from that trip — maybe from any trip. I wasn’t optimizing anything. I wasn’t moving toward a goal. I was just in it.

Tim Ingold describes two types of movement. The first is point-to-point: you know where you started, you know where you’re going, and the path between them is something to get through. The second is transversal — wandering, responsive, shaped by the terrain and what you encounter along the way. Many indigenous peoples and ancient cultures, he argues, moved through the world this way: not executing a route, but following one.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that the point-to-point version is the serious one. Get the steps in the right order, put in the effort, arrive at success. The wandering version gets filed under distraction, inefficiency, or not having a plan.

But I wonder if there’s enormous wisdom in the wandering — and whether travel is one of the few places modern life still lets us practice it.

Travel at its best pulls you out of the checklist. Out of the “Top 10 Things to Do” and into something less legible. You walk further than you meant to. You stop somewhere you didn’t plan. You follow something small — a smell, a sound, a turn in the road — and suddenly the day looks entirely different than it did at breakfast.

That’s what happened in Dubrovnik. We weren’t trying to find the candy store. We were lost, hot, and a little delirious — and then we were sitting on a curb with a kilogram and a half of gummies, laughing.

What made it memorable wasn’t the candy. It was that I had let go of the productive, efficient version of myself. I wasn’t moving toward the next obligation. I wasn’t performing a role. I was just a person on a sidewalk, eating a green frog, noticing things.

That version of myself — the one who wanders — is hard to find at home.

I keep chasing this feeling, but I rarely seem to catch it in ordinary life. And I don’t think it’s just about being somewhere new. It’s that travel gives me permission to shed the roles I play everywhere else. Teacher. Professional. Responsible adult with a to-do list. When I’m abroad, those fall away and I get to just be someone experiencing something, rather than someone moving toward something.

Why is that permission so hard to grant myself at home?

I’ve spent a lot of time searching for the “right path” — expecting it to be clear, direct, and efficient. But the moments that have actually mattered, the ones that stuck, rarely arrived that way. They arrived when I was lost, or bored, or following something that didn’t quite make sense yet.

I don’t have a tidy answer for how to wander more deliberately in a life full of structure and obligation. But I’m starting to think the question itself is worth sitting with — the way you sit on a sidewalk in Dubrovnik, with too much candy and nowhere specific to be.