Tomorrow evening, I will fly East out of Tokyo. After a quick two day's worth of horrible layovers and arbitrary connections (you pay for flights either with money or with inconvenience), I will arrive in Las Vegas, Nevada, completing my total circumnavigation of the globe. The trip has taken just under two months.

Like most experiences promising at the outset to be life-altering and profound, this one has been kind of modest in retrospect. I saw a lot of amazing things. I deepened some pre-existing friendships and created a couple new ones. I walked a lot of miles on blisters, spent many unhappy nights in inhospitable places, survived a couple earthquakes and a really nasty cold. All things considered, it was a ton of fun.

However, I was once again denied the mystical, life-affirming experience given so freely to most instagram travelers—the transcendent moment of finding myself, emerging a new man with new purpose. Despite all these new experiences I've had, I remain very much the same person, give or take a few sunburns and blisters.

I am fine with this—and as I write those words I actually wonder whether that isn't the sneaky life-altering truth to be gathered from this trip after all. No experience is inherently worth much more than any other. Learning to be ok with what you are—the sum of all your experiences—is perhaps more important and valuable than any one transformational experience could ever be.

Travel, I think, is not so much about finding yourself as it is contextualizing yourself. Zooming out on the area where you already know you are to reveal for a minute some of the other billions of people who are also busy trying to find themselves.

Humanity is so vast as to be incomprehensible. You set out on a trip to see more of the world you live in and instead discover millions of fascinating worlds that you will never live in. Every Danish waitress, Thai bus driver and Japanese school child you see is living a totally self-sustaining life completely independent of you. An experience you can never fully share. More shoes than you could ever walk a mile in.

For me that's the craziest part. How many people there are in the world.

Travel teaches you, I think, that most opinions, beliefs and observations are valid, but not universal, and almost certainly pitifully uninformed. Mine are, most of the time, anyway.

I don't pretend to have "found myself" or even to understand what that fully means, but in traveling I have discovered some of the places, people and ideas of the world and my relationship to them. By finding these pieces of the world, and trying to contextualize myself in them, I am better able to understand the shape of my own life, much as a puzzle piece is best-defined when it fits into a bigger whole.

I'm glad to have taken this trip, especially considering that I probably won't be traveling much again for the next three years. Instead I'll be more or less chained to a law library, and then hopefully a desk, somewhere in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area.

I am fine with this.