I started the day in Idaho, in the mountains, in my hometown, population 1,081. After spending two weeks there, I acclimated to (yet still felt slightly out of place in) the climate, the altitude, the value system, the quiet, the slowness, the cold and all the other attributes of the small town that had been the only world I knew for 17 years.

After driving ten hours across half of Idaho and most of Oregon, I rolled into Portland. Or, I guess I stopped-and-goed into Portland, since I accidentally timed my arrival right at rush hour on I-84.

When I crested the hill that gave me a view of Portland, I was shocked by the thousands of tiny lights blinking at me. I looked around at the city, trying to soak it in, trying to get used to it, trying not to panic. To my right and down a slope, I saw a long river of red light, with a perfectly parallel river of yellow light directly next to it. I wondered what it could possibly be, until I realized with horror that it was the interstate.

Each red light and each yellow light represented a different car, with a different person in it, all with different, complex lives. Who was coming home to their family after work? Who was dreading coming home to their family after work? Who was going home to an empty house to make and eat dinner alone? Who was battling two screaming kids in the backseat? Who was driving aimlessly for no reason? Those rivers of light reminded me of how many people there are in the world and how many different kinds of lives there are and how vastly complex being a human is. And that was overwhelming.

I realized next, as I drove, that I was on that interstate. I was a part of that never-ending river of metal and gas and electricity. I had a life, I was a piece of the complexity I was being forced to ponder.

But when I considered my life set haphazardly in the mess of everyone else’s, it was disheartening. I want to say I looked at it optimistically – that in all those lives and people and possibilities… I still matter enough to exist. But I didn't think that. I guess I didn’t look at it pessimistically either; I didn't think about how there were so many lives more important than mine or why I should even exist.

Rather, it just made me tired. Too many people. Too many possible outcomes for lives. Everyone’s life was confusing; mine sure was. I didn’t know where I was supposed to fit in with everyone else – with anyone else. I didn’t want to be on the interstate anymore. I wanted to be driving on a two-lane highway, my headlights creating a solitary tunnel, where the only thing I would have to watch out for would be a deer jumping out from the woods.

But instead, I continued the stop-and-go game with the hundreds of strangers surrounding me in their cars. I merged onto a different interstate, climbing and climbing the interchange, the hundreds of feet of concrete, in my 4runner. I crossed the Columbia, unsure how high above the water I was for fear of taking my eyes off the car in front of me, but it certainly felt like hundreds of feet. With hundreds of tons of concrete and metal above and below me and hundreds of tiring human lives surrounding me.

I got to my house and opened the car door to noise. I tried picking out the different sounds, but it was all a mass of cars and semis and urban life. That morning when I’d first gotten in my car, the only sound I could hear was my running engine bouncing off the neighbor’s house and echoing through the valley.

Again, I felt tired. Earlier that week, I’d briefly wondered how anyone could remain happy in such a small town with so much poverty and so little movement. But now I briefly wondered how anyone could remain happy with the never-ending movement and light and sound and concrete of a city.

The next morning, however, I woke up and more easily greeted my college-town. The previous night, one of the most appalling parts of driving through Portland was that I had once considered the place home – it was astounding to me that I had once thought that I belonged there and that the concrete and noise was normal. But in the morning, my old feelings of Oregon as home returned. The shock of changing spaces gradually left, and I faced with only a slight grimace the clatter of semi-trucks and the overwhelming amount of human lives near me.

I suppose that despite the complexity of each and every human, there are key things we share; things we all struggle with, we all wonder and we all enjoy. One of those things, I hope, is what and where home is for us. And I guess this recent bout of culture shock just adds another layer to home for me to ponder.