When I was a little girl, my parents used to pack my brothers and I in the back of a van - usually a Craig’s List lemon - and undertake a road trip from small city Connecticut to the wilderness-remote Adirondacks in upstate New York for the summer.

It never mattered that we were camping and therefore freezing, living off dollar-store Wonder Bread sandwiches, or only connected to the world with a hand radio with a news dial. We were too busy hiking the unknown, floating in fish-filled lakes, storytelling fireside, and curling into a mass of neon sleeping bags when the evening got cold. I discovered something when I wandered off to watch the moonlight on the lake, hoping to see the silhouettes of dear in the woods, and staring at crystal clear star-strewn skies.

It was a feeling I’ve gotten only a few times in my life: the first time I acted on stage, the first time I held a loved one’s first newborn child, the first time I flew across the country and wondered what the “squares and circles” over the Midwest were, and the first time I saw the New York City skyline – at age 21 despite living only an hour away from the City That Never Sleeps. The first magic show before I was old enough to comprehend the illusion in a a slight of hand. The first time I swam with dolphins, snorkeled a vibrant fish-filled coral reef, or saw wild animals from faraway places up close. Touching trees in a new climate, so different than the ones climbed and carved as a child. A first crush, or the first time I harmonized with a chorus of 20000 people - my first concert. The first time I saw the late night sun rising above clouds over the pacific from Hawaiian airlines. In fact, I realized I had seen the beginning and end of two days from the sky – and hadn’t slept for 48 hours, but had never felt more awake.

This existential awe – in the positive or the beautifully incredible, and in the negative and the terrifyingly incredible.

It’s not always the uplifting moments that are moving. There’s also the first time I had gotten alone after 12 hours of grounded planes in a North Carolina airport, haggling for a bus ticket out of Boston when a Craig’s list lemon let me down, or getting lost in San Francisco’s China Town --- or breaking down in public two months after moving out for the first time, unable to get a grasp for my usual stoicism, sitting in the snow while onlookers passed indifferent to a complete, utter emotional nakedness I’d never experienced before in my life. The first time I thought I was going to die. The moment I realized I didn't want to.

On occasion, a particularly moving film or theatre -can offer a shadow of this experience, but it’s a rare and beautiful moment when first-hand experience with an emotional, epiphanic moment catches you off guard. The heart of “catharsis” is a safe separation from the events that cause emotional experiences. When that distance evaporates, in the real world, without a way to prepare oneself, in a hyper-real and blistering honesty, you must change. You must transform. If you do it enough, you get addicted to it. You need it. You realize anything less is stagnation. You realize anything less is to stop living, to abandon the lifelong process of awakening.

The existential awe I’m referring to is found everywhere, but especially big moments. Sometimes it takes a death or a birth to access the sudden realization of one’s own mortality, how small just one person is in a great big world, or how small our great big world is in the rest of the universe. Sometimes it’s smaller. Sometimes it’s a first time. Sometimes it’s seeing something as if for the first time. Sometimes it’s as simple as a little girl wandering through a forest in the dark to watch the stars above the mountains with a nighttime clarity she’d never had. There are lots of things that become inaccessible to you when you grew up on a fiftieth of an acre in a city plagued by sky glow, and a lot of other blinding domes and cycles that leave you both stranded and listless.

These two channels – cravings to experience the lovely and the beautiful as ascension, or needing to experience the challenging and impossible as strengthening – awaken wanderlust. If you do it enough, you get a taste of getting gone. You realize what you’ve always had and what you’ve always known is woefully incomplete. You realize who you are and what you’ve always been sheltered compared to what’s out there. You realize there will always be hunger for more, but it is a hunger that is devastatingly satisfying to pursue. Making an inch more of the impossible possible each leap towards something beyond the horizon, and constantly searching, is all-consuming. It is also beautiful. It is life itself – and living fully, on the cusp of something more, until your last breath.

In the modern world, a wanderer – someone who breaks free from the known and goes off on her own – has her own rite of passage. True vulnerability, true aloneness, and total, forced self-reliance become a walkabout. The trick is realizing that no one entering adulthood ever finishes this walkabout, or gets to the other side of the unknown. Coming of age has no finish line. We evolve, and evolve, and evolve – and travelers know better than anyone that discomfort is one of many inevitable discomforts as catalysts for transformation.

The independence and ferocious learning curve of being isolated and caught unaware is unbelievably transformative. Often, one realizes that the high stakes of panic are one-sided – something limited to your perspective – and that there’s a total, immaculate liberation when the calm of feeling equipped to handle whatever happens sets in.

If J.R.R. Tolkein’s “Not all those who wander are lost,” is overquoted – it’s for a reason. It resonates.

There is more than one way to be a wanderer. Those that are searching are often travelers, but they are also often readers, dancers, singers, creators, and performers. They are fueled by experiences, by people, by mystery, by the unknown. It is a search to taste and touch and see, to connect and learn and explore possibilities to the fullest possible sense. It is the desire to map all the nooks and crannies and dark alleys and caves and foreignness of each place, of each person, of each idea, of the universe.

The same wanderlust - the same awe, the same hunger – for distant galaxies and faraway suns and burning stars is found astrophysicists as it is in poets. It doesn’t matter whether that desire to conquer the unknowable and the beyond is in a scientist working on the Human Genome Project, or an anthropologist doing field work in a remote village, or a seismologist mapping the ocean, or a philosopher ravenous for meaning, or a journalist interviewing mysterious public figures, or a detective or historian trying to retrace a past event through scarps of evidence, or a polyglot or a digital nomad booking flights, or photographer or a filmmaker armed with a camera, or two people trying to build a family, or someone just hoping to fall in love, or a future president a few decades away packing her bags for college, or a dreamer who turns 50c notebooks into wild adventure comics, or an aspiring musician seeking a teacher, or a child who believes in magic and sees fairies in the trees.

We must respect the dreams of the people of this world. We must admit that we can see ourselves in anyone. We must honor the wanderer in those around us. We must believe in the search of their quests -- even if we cannot understand their anticipated destinations. It doesn’t matter if their search is through vast libraries, or on a spaceship, or in a lab, or behind a camera, or in the laughter of their friends, or in the questions of their children, or in the touch of their lover, or at the end of a pilgrimage, or horseback at the foot of a mountain, or walking ancient roads in the middle east, or protecting the vulnerable in a war-zone, or fighting for women in legislation on a policy floor, or reaching 1000 people from a theatre stage, or in the quiet stillness of the day on a forest floor. The longing in others is not unknowable – it is intimately, fiercely, and wholly human.

The human condition is neither rational nor irrational, practical nor impractical. It is simply this: oneness with the spectrum of any and everything. The more you see, the more you ground yourself in simple truths. We are so, so shockingly similar. And we are so different. But we are one.

My advice, put simply is this: Go everywhere with love and an open heart and in peace – but go everywhere.