It's exciting to visit a new place. Travel brings the unfamiliar—the sites, the smells. Sometimes the street signs are in a different language. You land in a new place and it's tough to get your bearings. It's new and different from home. The streets aren't on the grid system, so taking three right turns puts you across town rather than back where you started. It takes a while to get from A to B. You may have to stop and consult your phone's map, or ask a stranger where the fuck you are. But there's a certain appeal to being the fish out of water—it's why we travel: to experience new things, to broaden your mind, to learn.

Perhaps you visit that same place again a few years later. You've only been there once, but this time it's not as unfamiliar as it was before. You're no longer wandering the streets, backtracking, asking for help like a blind person. You're a little bit wiser. And here's the thing: the place looks different. It feels different. More familiar. You are a different person, remembering more than you thought you did. But the fresh appeal of being in a new place isn't dulled—in fact, it's enhanced. Your previous experience means you're learning more, experiencing at a deeper level. You're a little bit closer to looking and acting like a local—like an expert.

Traveling to a new place is like learning new concepts. For many of us here, we swallow the pill and land at this place, like tourists off a long-haul flight, disheveled and tired, and attack the sidebar, reading deep into the night, absorbing as much as we can. But we are in a brand new place. We don't know the language. New and unfamiliar pathways are opened in our mind, introducing us to fresh ways of thinking and behaving.

We like to pretend we are not tourists.

But to those around us—most importantly, our wives—it's clear we are not locals, and far from experts. To be that we must continue to return to the place we began. We must do this to experience, again and again, that place with layers of fresh perspective and wisdom. We will find that each time we look at that place again, we see it a bit differently, a bit wiser.

We become closer and closer to locals not by forever visiting new places, but by returning back to the places we deeply need to be our new home.