The following is a blog written for the Reflection Project for The Bonderman Fellowship. To read more about the other fellows, please visit: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/bonderman/

Prompt: This summer we asked our fellowship alumni to reflect on their experiences abroad. Fellows from all six years of the fellowship told us how the fellowship has impacted them in the years or months since they returned from their travels.

********

Leaving for the Bonderman Fellowship, I was an odd mix: part biomedical engineer and entrepreneur, part meditation practitioner, and mindfulness teacher. On the orthodox end, I was fresh off a master’s degree with a nationally acclaimed medical device to show for my work. On the heterodox end, I was teaching mindfulness to gym and corporations, taking myriad courses under the suspect label of “nature-based mindfulness” and “deep spiritual ecology” and spending countless hours alone in the arboretum. The culturally valued side of me wanted to run with entrepreneurship – and just about everything around me reinforced that pole. Using the grit of entrepreneurship to advance modern medicine, how could I go wrong? Yet, there was something about studying my mind and sharing self-inquiry practices that clicked in a way that I had never experienced while giving a product presentation. It was like I had two different shoes. The former I had to force on, and even though it felt a little clunky to walk in, everyone told me how great it looked. While the other sneaker I could slip on without untying the laces, but it often prompted wide-eyed looks of bewilderment. Split evenly between two diametrically opposed poles, enter the Bonderman fellowship – I hoped it would provide some answers, or at least minimize some of my questions.

When I left home, a predictable thing happened. The normal reinforcing circumstances of culture that had been a ubiquitous pressure across my life vanished. There were no longer teachers telling me what to study, assignments with the questions already built-in, friends passing along trendy memes, or parents in my ears with the typical “shoulds” and “shouldnt’s.” The story that I became accustomed to telling people – an elevator pitch of what I was working on and why I should be valued – completely dropped away. That’s the funny thing about travel: the past and the future suddenly become weightless. You only have so many moments with the people and places you encounter. Who you were in the past or who you want to be in the future, takes the back seat to who you are in this moment. And, more and more, the person I was showing up as was not someone who gave much thought to medical devices or thermal dynamics.

Less predictable was not what was being subtracted from my life, but what was being added in. As I adapted to traveling to unknown external worlds, my inner world was also shifting to an unknown domain. I became fascinated with subtle psychological differences between cultures, which led me to ask questions: Why do some cultures hold others’ eye contact, while others routinely struggled to look at their friends across the dinner table? Why did city-goers appear to be in a rush, while families in the Cambodian countryside would sit on their porch for the better part of a day, without any preoccupation with time? Why did cultures with less, appear to have more? I didn’t realize at the time, but these questions were all bound to a central theme: How do our external worlds shape our internal worlds?

In academia and entrepreneurship, I was accustomed to questions being tethered to results. Assignments came with grades, prototyping was accompanied by measurable data, pitch decks resulted in funding, and years of academia gave way to a flashy degree. But the questions I was now asking weren’t tied to some end result. I simply loved the process of asking the questions themselves, for no other reason besides that they lingered in my psyche, slowly helping me better understand myself, the world around me, and how those two continually intertwined.

Hindsight makes a picture seem clear as day. It would seem evident that after months of this inquiry, I would inevitably want to share my observations. But this transition was anything but natural or inevitable. I left home as a deplorable writer (I had to enlist an army to assist me in drafting and redrafting my fellowship essay, sorry advisors.) But as the days passed on the fellowship, I started to fall in love with writing. Poetry, blog posts, long-form essays, you name it; I wasn’t any good, but it didn’t matter. I would write in whatever form felt natural and send my musings to anyone willing to read. And those who knew me best were shocked to learn that there was someone inside of me who could string together coherent sentences. To compound matters, I was gifted with a camera for my birthday. Before I knew it, I was a full-fledged, novice storyteller, spending my days wandering cities and countrysides, with music in my ear, camera around my neck, journal in my pocket, and nothing but time and space to explore.

People say that travel changes you. I say travel makes you more you. Imagine you had a whole day to yourself. You can do anything you want, with anyone you want, anywhere you want. Now repeat this process every day for the better part of the year. At the end of the year, what would you be interested in? How would your perspective change? Who would you become?

**Some children decided to join along the nightly yoga routine. Pokhara, Nepal.**

The process of becoming – at least through my experience of travel – is two-fold. First, it’s getting used to what’s not there: family, schools, friends, etc. – all the familiar constructs that have become intertwined with our identity across a lifetime. After the initial dissolution of the familiar, the next question is: what remains? What thoughts linger? Where do your observations and gaze regularly visit? How do you elect to spend your time without being told how to pass it? I contend the pieces that remain are the more authentic version of you: it’s the you that is unencumbered by cultural impositions, whose been there all along, lying dormant, just waiting to be rediscovered.

So what advice would I give to prospective Bonderman fellows? The first piece of advice is openness. Travel most serves those willing to internally travel. Are you open to explore unknown parts of your being? Are you okay with letting go of prefigured ideas, perspectives, and aspirations? Are you willing to go through the messy work of finding how you like to pass your time without anyone else there to instruct you on how to pass it? While I believe travel has riches to offer all, those who hold the least tight grip on preconceived ideas stand to bear the richest fruit. This fellowship can form those who are willing to be unformed.

The second piece of advice is courage. Traveling isn’t just about just “finding yourself,” but accepting the person that you are becoming. You may encounter new (or old) parts of yourself, and those parts may not be valued or supported by your pre-existing social structures. You may find the work you want to do, is not work that is economically incentivized. With the temptations and habits of home, you may struggle to remain connected to the person you felt you were abroad. Everyone prepares you for leaving, but few will prepare you to come home. The most challenging country I ever went to was returning to my own.

To be truthful coming home is something that I am still getting my bearings with – something that I am not sure I can put into words here. How can I explain what it feels like to go from having absolute freedom and agency, to living in a room in your mother’s suburban home? I remember giving a presentation to prospective Bonderman fellows, and one of them asked me, “what’s it like to come home?” For many awkward moments, the only answer I could muster was silence.

Reintegration is a challenge that has no easy answers and no quick fixes. For me, acceptance comes in waves. There are days where I feel entirely at peace with the journey, and others where I am overcome with waves of nostalgia for my itinerant past. Judging from conversations with other returned fellows, it’s something we all experience, and maybe something you never really come to full terms with. Rather, it’s an ongoing process of integration and detachment, remembering and forgetting. But it’s all part of the program, as Jack Kornfield says, Laundry after the Ecstasy.

I’d like to discuss this matter of coming home in more depth, but I have a ways to go in terms of organizing my thoughts on the topic. Regardless of the difficulties with coming back, no matter the offer, I wouldn’t trade in the experience. Since the fellowship, my life has taken on a character that would be unrecognizable to the person who left 4 years ago – a person that I am proud to tout. There’s the interesting stuff: playing semi-professional basketball and working as a freelance photographer in Bolivia, covering events as an investigative journalist, and interviewing people like Ray Dalio, Eckhart Tolle, and Gary Vaynerchuck. There’s purely financial stuff: working as an essay specialist for Chinese students applying to American universities, spending summers landscaping, and working the front counter at a local market. And then there’s the work that lights me up: teaching people meditation and holding nature-based mindfulness retreats, and, whenever the mystical intersection of free time and inspiration appears, writing a book.

Remember those questions I was asking about psychological differences across cultures? Well, they never went away. My work has become resolving those questions in a way that makes sense to others. In other words, writing a book. On the most meta-level, the book addresses how modernity conditions away our innate sense of well-being and how it can – or given our existential crisis- how it has to condition people to create a more whole population. I hope if there’s anything you take away from my process, it’s that the stuff which sticks is the stuff that matters.

When I take a step back and read all this aloud, I have to admit, I get a little timid. Storytelling? Writing a book? Since when did I become that person? I must be out of my mind. But then again, anyone who does this fellowship is, necessarily, a little out of their mind.

Bonderman Fellowship Reflection Project: The Process of Becoming