Wanderlust begins, for me, with a sense of dissatisfaction, a metaphysical itch. Staring out the window of my home-the domestic sphere that holds me in a tight, bear-like embrace-I escape into a sky of bright, foreign stars. They are out there: cities where I might go and be a different person. They are out there: streets, markets, and temples as yet unseen.

The itch toward constant movement reached a fever pitch when I was 23. At the time, I could count the places I had been to on one hand: Hawaii, California, Baja, Arizona, and Colorado. My good friend returned from a few months of vagabonding in Mexico. She regaled me with stories of Taxco, Cuernavaca, and Mexico City, like Marco Polo telling tales of his travels to exotic eastern cities.

“When I left California, my world was this big,” she said, holding her hands a tiny distance apart. The width of a sparrow’s wing.

“And how big is it now?” I asked.

“Like this,” She stretched her arms wide, as wide as they would go. Just by stepping onto an airplane and skimming mountaintops, she had discovered new possibilities about how human beings inhabit space and time. My mind filled with images of a sun-drenched place where I’d never actually been. It became my imperative to travel. I grew convinced that life would only become real when I flew across dark oceans towards unknown destinations. The seed was planted.

One year later, I went to Mexico on my own. Once south, I felt like I had been freed from the self I’d known at home. Travel offered the potential for discovering a more independent and courageous self. Walking the streets of Morelia, under the Roman-style aqueducts built by European missionaries, I knew that I would meet the heroic version of me. Or later, when I trekked to Europe, I thought I would shed my shadow self in humid Barcelona, under Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia; or at Trevi Fountain in Rome, where Marcello Mastroianni wooed Anita Ekburg in La Dolce Vita. Or maybe the heroic me would appear on a dirty street corner in Naples, after an Italian man on a fast scooter whistled at me.

When I returned home, I was surprised that nothing had changed. I judged those who didn’t travel, thinking them provincial and stuck in their ways. Friends who didn’t jump in a car or plane at any opportunity struck me as unadventurous, and worse, somehow less capable of living. They had feet-why weren’t they using them?

The summer after I saw Europe for the first time, I toured the United States, playing guitar and keyboards in a friend’s band. We played 23 cities in 26 days: Phoenix, Chicago, New York City, Knoxville, Denton. I loved the constant movement. When we piled into the van and started driving toward the next city, I felt ecstatic and aware of everything. The farther we moved away from home, the more I felt able to touch this epic freedom. I could be anyone because everything existed in the present, without a past or a future. Back at home, I moved from apartment to house to apartment. I never settled into one place long enough to make it comfortable. Unsettled and itchy, I wanted to be anywhere than where I was.

Recently, I received an email from a good friend who is staying in Madrid, at the tail end of a bicycle trip that took her through Italy, France, and Spain. After reading the email, I could practically taste the Spanish air and the cheap wine; I could picture the white stones of the museum walls. But the truth is, I haven’t traveled much lately. I am a false vagabond. A domesticized animal. A cow chewing my cud in a closed, narrow field. Like Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, I am sick with wanderlust. The opening lines of the novel capture that subterranean dread of being trapped in the everyday motions of life:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people’s hats off-then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Yet, I wonder: is the travel that occurs in one’s mind any less a form of adventure than physical travel? What about the adventures I take while simply sitting at a desk, allowing myself to be disciplined enough to stay in one place, to put fingers to keyboard or pen to paper, to follow an idea through to its conclusion? Wanderlust-this urge to escape somewhere, anywhere else than this place I call home-might just be an excuse for an unwillingness to develop courage in my creative life. Franz Kafka said, “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

The stories arrive like a slow death march as I work at my wooden desk before the living room window. I look out to the same view everyday: apartments; a row of orderly, unpresumptuous trees; the blonde tip of the hills that ring the valley of Santa Rosa; my neighbors passing in cars and on foot. I am benefiting from this time of staying still. If I were moving from location to location, my mind would wander from the tasks at hand; the traveling itself would be my accomplishment. I wouldn’t be writing to live in the moment-I’d simply be in the moment. But at this juncture in life, the bravest thing I can do is stay in one place. For a while, I will be a “vagabond of the mind,” moving to and fro between my imagination and discipline, until I am satisfied with the output. Then, if I find myself pausing before “coffin warehouses,” like the ill-fated Ishmael, I will reconsider this staying still. But for now, I am exactly where I need to be.