I left the United States on June 13th, just over five months ago. As I walked down the gate, leaving New York’s JFK airport (and with it, the United States of America) and entering the airplane which would carry me a few thousand miles south to Lima, I passed an advertisement. It said,

“Tomorrow will be nothing like today.”

I honestly don’t even remember what it was for – An internet provider? A bank? The airline? Who knows. Who cares? The message struck me as remarkably appropriate and would stick with me for the indefinite future.

Because, how right it was. The day that I first read those words marked the transition between my life in the US and the new life I was beginning to cultivate in South America.  Not only would tomorrow be nothing like today, but the tomorrows that followed would be nothing like the todays of the past. As I boarded the plane, I abandoned the routine and normalcy of what I had come to accept as my everyday life.

And with every passing day, that life seemed farther away. A distant memory. Another lifetime. As the days turned to weeks turned to months, my new life – my new surroundings and friends and language and food and work – all seemed to change. I stopped thinking of it as something new and different, but instead accepted everything new as commonplace. I’d been living in South America for a thousand years. Routines and memories of earlier years were rendered just that – memories.

I find it remarkable how quickly these changes of state become accepted as the norm. Some humans – myself in particular – can be wary of change. The unknown is frightening. But once we get over that initial hump, once we get through that period of transition, we learn to accept our new situation, to grow comfortable and find the little things that we love about it and shun or ignore whatever bothers us. Within a startlingly brief period, our transition anxiety is replaced by a newfound acceptance and comfort and we find ourselves desperately looking back through telescopes and time-machines to a past life which is now fading like a dream at dawn.

Now, cruising at 35,000 ft above the Andes, I look at the lives and routines I’ve established over the years and over the Earth and try to figure out which one is really normal. Which do I want to be normal? Living in the clean and developed United States? Herding 16-year-olds around the mountains of Perú? Settling down in the sprawling metropolis of Quito?

Any of these could be my life. I’m lucky in that I have options – the option to choose where I want my life to go. But every time I sit down, trying to decide which of the ten million paths I want to follow, I’m faced with that same transition anxiety, the fear of the unknown, the fear of letting go of what I already have. Am I really afraid of the transition? Or is it the fear of letting go of what I have, letting it sit in the attic of my memory collecting dust?

The truth is – there are infinite paths my life could take. Some of these veer in nearly opposite directions and there’s something disconcerting about that, perhaps the implication that one must be right and one wrong. Still, if I’ve learned one thing in my twenty-three and a half years on this Earth, it’s that if you truly live your life well, the vast majority of those paths will lead to happiness and fulfillment. They may be strikingly different, but – and this is important – while there exist infinite paths, there are a correspondingly infinite number of routes to stable happiness.

Tomorrow will be nothing like today. It’s true. Mostly. Tomorrow, I’ll drink tap water and see my parents and drive a car and speak a lot of English and eat American pizza and go running in my home-town and take a hot shower. But just because tomorrow’s environment  is nothing like today’s doesn’t mean that I have to change with it. Tomorrow, I, myself, will be the one common denominator. I will strive to improve the lives of others and, in doing so, improve myself; I will love my family and friends; I will go for a run.

Yes, there will be tomorrows that are almost nothing like today. And it may be intimidating to face that giant unknown. But the one thing I do have control over is myself. If I live my life such that it brings me joy and fulfillment, there’s no need to change with my environment. Though tomorrow, the day, may be nothing like today, I (for the most part) will be. And I know I’ll do just fine with whatever tomorrow brings.