The Someday List: The trips that stay with you are trying to tell you something

The labyrinth was at the edge of the property, past the casitas, where the desert started to take over again. Just stones laid into the dirt, a single winding path that doubled back on itself as it worked toward the center. You could walk it in five minutes if you were hurrying. I wasn’t hurrying.

I followed it slowly. In, around, back out toward the edge, in again, all the way to the center. Stood there a while. Then started back out the way I’d come. The light was that particular kind of gold the desert does in the last hour before sunset. I could hear my own breathing. There was nothing required of me.

About two-thirds of the way back, I noticed a room key leaning against one of the larger stones at the edge of the path. Not lost. Placed. Tucked there on purpose by whoever had walked it before me. I had passed it on the way in and not seen it. I bent down and read the line printed on the little envelope. Every arrival is a chance to begin again.

I reached into my own pocket. The same line was on mine. I had been carrying it around for two days without ever looking at it.

I have been carrying that ten minutes around with me for a week and a half now.

That’s what my someday list has been trying to tell me.

The list is not a wish list. It’s a diagnosis.

When I picture Iceland — and I have pictured Iceland for years — I’m not hiking, not driving the Ring Road, not chasing the lights. I’m floating. Warm water, cold air on my face, steam coming up around me, and absolutely nothing required of me for the next two hours.

It’s the labyrinth, basically. Just colder, and farther away, and with better photographs.

For a long time I thought my someday list was a list of trips. It is not. It’s a list of clues. The places on it are pointing at something my regular life isn’t giving me, and once I figured that out, the list got a lot more useful.

I added the Galapagos to mine on a Tuesday in February in the middle of a meeting that could have been an email. I haven’t thought about it since.

But look at the list as a whole. Not at the destinations — at what they have in common. What feeling are they all pointing at? What does the list have that your regular life doesn’t?

Iceland, for me, is stillness. The South Pacific is warmth and slowness and being completely off the grid. New Zealand is wildness — big sky, open road, the feeling of being small inside something enormous.

All three are the opposite of my regular life in some specific way.

That’s not random. That’s data.

Read it in two directions.

The list doesn’t just tell you what you want. It tells you what you’re not currently getting.

So read it twice.

First, what you’re longing for. Look at the list as a whole. Are these places remote? Warm? Ancient? Wild? Slow? Are they places where no one knows you, places where the food would be the point, places where you’d have to be present because everything would be unfamiliar?

Whatever the answer is — that’s what you’re after. A feeling, not a flight.

Now flip it. If your list is pointing toward stillness, where in your regular life are you systematically starved of stillness? If it’s pointing toward wildness, where have you gotten too domesticated, too contained, too careful? If it’s pointing toward slowness, where has your life gotten too fast for you to actually be in it?

The list isn’t only telling you where to go. It’s telling you what’s missing from where you already are.

That’s the real map.

The ones that have stayed the longest.

Here’s the question I want to leave you with.

Is there something on your list that’s been there a long time? Not something you added last month after seeing a photo. Something older. Something that has survived every season of life you’ve moved through — the busy ones, the broke ones, the ones where you couldn’t imagine carving out time for anything that was just yours.

That one is worth paying attention to.

The things that stay despite everything — despite practicality, timing, the voice that says not yet, not now, maybe someday — those are the ones that mean something. Don’t let that one keep waiting forever.

One more thing.

I’m still going to Iceland. I don’t have a date. But I’ve stopped pretending the trip is the thing.

The labyrinth wasn’t Iceland. It was ten minutes in the dirt in Arizona. But it was pointed in the same direction, and I felt it the same way, and that’s the part I had wrong for a long time. I thought I had to wait for the big trip to feel the big thing. I didn’t. I just had to stop walking past the small versions of it.

A hot bath with the lights off on a Sunday night. An hour in a quiet room with nothing coming at me. A weekend where I say no to every invitation on purpose. A labyrinth or winding trail at a botanical garden twenty minutes from your house — there’s almost certainly one that’s an easy drive from where you live. Look it up.

None of those are Iceland. All of them are pointed at Iceland.

That’s what the map is for. Not to tell you to drop everything and book a flight. To tell you which direction to face while you’re still here.

Yours is trying to tell you the same thing.

Your prompts:

Look at your someday list — the real one. What do the places on it have in common? What feeling are they all pointing at?

Now flip it: where are you systematically starved of that feeling in your regular life?

Which one has been on the list the longest? What do you think it’s been trying to tell you?