When my parents were finally able to travel and start seeing the world, their travel looked like checking off boxes of countries, places, cities, and museums. Arrive somewhere. Walk through a place without stopping much. Take some photos. Check off a mental box. On to the next place. And when I traveled with them, I too embraced that way of seeing the world.

I got good at it, actually. I could “do” a European capital in two and a half days and tell you, with some confidence, that I had been there. I had the photos to prove it. What I didn’t have – though it took me years to notice the absence – was any memory of my own body while I was standing in front of the thing I had traveled so far to see. I was present for the checklist. I was not present for the cathedral, the museum, or the funky little cafe nearby.

There is a drastically different way of traveling, through being present, allowing oneself to be guided by what is in front of you in the moment. Then, travel can – and will – change you. Not “change you” in the Instagram-caption sense, where you come home and declare yourself transformed because you ate something unusual at a local market. I mean the slower, less photogenic kind of change, the kind that happens in the body before the mind has caught up enough to narrate it.

I remember a moment, long ago, when I spent nine weeks cycling and backpacking through Chile and Argentina. After a week of intensive Spanish lessons in Santiago, I went north, to the desert of San Pedro de Atacama, and started cycling from there.

That moment happened in the Valle de la Luna – the Valley of the Moon – probably the closest I will ever get to the actual moon. A long road crosses that valley, surreal and completely desolate. No bus stops, no gas stations, nothing. The very occasional car passed, someone glancing at the loco on a bicycle.

At some point, the desert headwind kicked in. Hard. Sideways. I could barely pedal, and after a while I gave up and stopped, for a snack, some apple juice, a chance to catch my breath. My heart was racing (Vancouver mountains do not prepare a person for 3,500 meters of elevation), and my mind was not happy, mildly put. I sat on the ground, questioning the whole idea of the trip, the meaning of life, and what to do next.

Then I lifted my eyes and looked at the landscape around me. A breath escaped me, and I really looked. Something deep opened. There was stillness. My thoughts got very quiet. My breath went gentle. I think the wind went gentle too, for a moment, though I can’t be sure of that now.

I don’t how long I sat there. Perhaps this moment was brief, or perhaps, it lasted for quite a while. Eventually, I was ready to continue. The wind was still there. The road and the landscape too. Yet, somehow, the rest of the bike ride was easier, more flowing, and I got to see a lot more of the landscape along the way.

Here is what I have come to understand, both as a student and a practitioner of “many things Somatic Knowing” and as someone who has done a great deal of checklist traveling in his life: presence is not a mood. It is not something that descends on you, like good weather, if you are lucky. It is practice. An active, ongoing negotiation between what you planned and what is actually in front of you. Also what is within you (as in, that thing your body keeps either whispering or shouting). You have to keep choosing it, moment by moment, the way a dancer keeps choosing balance rather than achieving it once and trying to hold it forever (hint: it never works this way).

Most of us travel with an itinerary in one hand and, if we are honest, a low-grade anxiety in the other. That little fear that if we don’t see everything on the list, we will have somehow wasted the trip. That anxiety is the opposite of presence. It keeps you one step ahead of yourself, already mentally at the next site while your feet are still at this one.

I know this anxiety intimately. I have power-walked past things I traveled four thousand miles to see, because the bus/train/plane/my mind was leaving in nine minutes.

Presence, by contrast, asks something almost rude of you: stop. Stay a beat longer than feels efficient. Notice that your shoulders have crept up around your ears in a city that isn’t actually dangerous. Merely unfamiliar. Your body always knows it is somewhere new well before your mind has finished being clever about it; it simply rarely gets asked.

And this is where intuition comes in, though I want to be careful with that word, because it gets used loosely. I don’t mean a mystical hunch that arrives out of nowhere. I mean something much more ordinary and much harder to access: the quiet nudge that shows up only when you are not already three steps ahead of yourself. Turn left instead of right. Sit down in this café instead of the one in the guidebook. Talk to this stranger. Stay another hour. Leave early. That nudge is always available, though often inaudible under the noise of an itinerary running on schedule. Presence isn’t the reward for slowing down. It is the precondition for hearing anything at all.

None of this means throw away the guidebook, skip the museum, become insufferable about “authentic” travel. My parents’ way of traveling likely gave them at least some joy, and I won’t pretend otherwise, for a checked box is still a life lived wider than it would have been otherwise.

But there are two ways of arriving somewhere. One collects the place. The other lets the place, briefly, rearrange something in you. Most of us are capable of both, often in the same afternoon, if we remember to notice which one we are doing.