If you are reading this post on email, click the image above to link to the full vlog on YouTube.

I am fascinated by unassuming moments that resurface in my memory. I rarely know at the moment that it will be a memory I’ll hold forever, but it stubbornly sticks around like the gum you will never fully remove from the cracks on the bottom of your shoe. For example, I can think of a random day that I asked my classmates for quarters to ride the bus home from high school. Or a particular summertime afternoon 15-year-old me was riding his bike home from the beach. Or a specific day that I was locking up the office after a long day of work.

Maybe there’s a reason our brains choose to remember these moments. Perhaps they tie into larger themes of our lives. Oftentimes these moments return with a significance that was impossible to realize at the time. I recently wrote about how that one random day at the office symbolized my evolution between an office job and a life of traveling the world for several years.

It’s not just me that has these memories, right? I think it’s an innate part of being human.

Anyway, I recently experienced one of these moments in Yosemite National Park. Except on this occasion, I identified the moment’s significance in real time. Does that mean I am getting older and wiser?

Since transitioning to the world of freelance writing, an interesting paradox has emerged. From the outside, my life appears to be a full-time vacation. Yet at the same time, I hadn’t actually taken a true vacation in years. On one hand, yes, I have been living in different countries, doing cool excursions, and surfing my brains out. But in the world of freelancing (at least for most of us), you have to constantly be looking for work. I was always connected, checking email, sending pitches to editors, and teaching English classes on the side. I never completely disconnected, put my feet up, and forgot about work. If you aren’t available, your job offer might get sent to someone else. It’s a cutthroat world while you are getting established as a writer and it’s hard to take time off when vacation is non-paid.

Given I started the month of August in Tahiti covering the Olympics, I got ahead of my article quota and I decided to take a real vacation at the end of the month. I went far from any cell signal to the highest reaches of Yosemite National Park — a self-imposed banishment from the internet’s temptations.

The difference between backpacking in Yosemite versus the rest of the Sierra is you are required to go through an in-person orientation. So on a chilly, summer morning at the Tuolumne Meadows permit issuing office, I stood, bundled up in a down jacket, around a park ranger with a group of five other hikers. He gave us the spiel about where you can camp, how to correctly poop, how to store your food, what to do if you see a bear, etc.

As I was listening to the park ranger, I had a realization. I was experiencing one of these unassuming moments! The scene looked simple. I was just listening to a stranger explain the rules. But my brain was thinking beyond the words coming out of the man’s mouth. I was thinking about who he is, and what he does.

He was a park ranger, roughly the same age as me. He had a thick brown mustache and gauged ear lobes that were bare of any ornamentation. He was smiling and joking with his mullet-toting colleague. His face lit up when I told him where I planned on backpacking. I was going off the main routes in search of more remote lakes that most don’t visit. He gave me some tips on good spots to camp at those lakes. Behind him, the door was open to a staff room where I could see they had cooked their breakfast on a camping stove. Living in Tuolumne Meadows, the amenities are pretty basic. They didn’t have a proper kitchen.

These park rangers seemed so content with their career and the simple mountain life. They live up there in the forest, issuing permits and literally going backpacking to enforce the rules. My five-day vacation was their life. It looked fulfilling.

It highlighted a realization that I’ve gotten before during my travels: Changing your environment changes your perspective. When I am back home in California and surround myself with my fairly wealthy, salaried peers, I can feel my outlook starting to mold to my environment, like I need to be like them. But here I was in Yosemite and suddenly I felt good about my choice to be a nomadic writer who has to submit to the dystopian American world of purchasing his own health insurance, a traveler who, since quitting his job, contributed more money to Swell Cafe in Sri Lanka than to his Roth IRA. He didn’t know it, but me and this park ranger, we were the same. We both chose (at least temporarily) a path that was anything but traditional.

As I was hiking, this phrase came to me and I wrote it down: You can’t think outside the box if you never leave the box. Did I make that up? Or did I just regurgitate a spin-off of the well-known cliché? I can’t find it on Google, so maybe my brain actually invented that one. I can’t remember who, but a famous writer once said that to write interesting things, you need to live an interesting life. It has a similar meaning.

In conclusion, the change of scenery was refreshing, much-needed, and sublime. I’ve done a good amount of hiking around the world and I stand by my opinion that the Sierra Nevada as a whole is unparalleled. I’ll try to repeat one of these excursions every summer for as long as I can.