Though the date, like the itineraries of its recipients, is not a fixed one, it's mid-March, and something of a personal holiday for a small group of obscure vagabonders otherwise known as Watson Fellows. Around this time every year, the the foundation names a batch of 40-50 souls which have the fortune of spending the next year traveling abroad, pursuing a passion.I peruse the list of what lies ahead for these future fellows. The list, as always, contains spectacular ambitions. Rachel Gross will examine 'Mountain Hut Systems and the Meaning of Wilderness' in Switzerland, Scotland, Finland, Chile, India, and Tanzania. William Hunt will explore 'Notes from the Underground: Unearthing the Stories of the Subterranean' in Netherlands, France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Australia. And then there is Juan Navarrete, pondering 'The Cartoonist's Pen is Mightier than The Sword: Exploring the Impact of Political Cartoons' in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. How the world will reward the aspirations of these three, and the other Fellows, is of epic permutations. There will be good days, bad days, and very few if any boring ones.Built into this is a Watson mandate. The travel funds expect a singular demand: to go now to a lake isle or a mountain blue, but bear no burden of what came before or comes after the Watson. And this may be the only moment in my life where I took such a perspective. I wasn't paying debts. I wasn't saving or planning for the future. I wasn't taking classes toward a diploma that would get me a reliable job. It was a year like walking through an aged canyon valley, where my thoughts could not escape what was in front of me, and along its edges, the dreams of both past and future looked longingly inward watching me.That year must come to an end, but the trip never really does. The mid-March anniversary regularly brings memories of the journey: what was accomplished, what shocked, and what was foiled. And as the years pass, the profundity of what transpired stands against what followed – in my particular case, in greater and greater contrast. For what a year of uninhibited travel gives you, it has little in common with what the years afterward give you, focused as they must be upon the building of a career and the slow muzzling of college debt even as it muzzles us. Certainly the first year afterward was a spiritual hangover.On this, my five-year anniversary, I see between then and now, a greater and greater contrast. Of course it could be no other way. A return to normalcy cannot be appreciated with the same juices as those of an embarkation toward mystery and curiosity. Surely these last few years have been kind to me. I have moved within the United States several times, liked each place that I lived. I changed jobs mostly for the better each time. I now have some confidence in my abilities in the game of feeding oneself in this strange 21st century.Isn't all of that a truer test of mettle than the Watson? It has required responsibility, training, restraint. One could cynically reduce the world-rambling spirit to broken-speak in a foreign language, bus-schedules, and a patient mind. The virtues of a jack-of-all-trades. But I do not feel that way. Indeed, I cannot; the intensity of that year breathes with life, while those that followed continue to fold out of memory. Its vivid echo is unchallengeable as any faith. Even when that echo stands at odds with the effort to avoid becoming master-of-nothing.Indeed I cannot abandon that faith any more than I can abandon what seems its nemesis – for the broader journey up to now has required some success in both. These four years that have followed, they have created the possibility of a reemergence. Only with them under the belt could I find myself looking out from the balconies of San Telmo again. And yet how the mind moves of a habit. I recognize now the beauty of that time in a new light. Not only was the fortune in the doing, but in my ability then to rise to it. I know now that it is not easy to rise in the morning and seize the day. Living well, like traveling, proceeds easiest with a curious combination of open-mindedness and purpose, anti-apathy. It is a verve that requires skill, with nebulous ingredients, and one that wanes if I allow it.You have to leave to come back again, so it's said. And in the coming back, I am amazed to see that I am not the traveler I was, and more amazed that that is ok. During a conversation with an Englishman who was also returning to Buenos Aires for the second time, we remarked that it's nice to come to a place that is radically different from what we're used to, and also doesn't change quickly. I proposed that in such a situation, we have the truest mirror we could ever hold in front of us; the only explanation for why it feels different is that you have changed. You have grown stronger in ways, and weaker in others. And the illusion of a life predestined, linear – well that concept is washed suddenly away like smog from the city after days of heavy rain. And all about you is the smell of a fresh start.