One of the more reliable ways to ensure you have a good time when traveling is to commit to flexibility and improvisation, rather than becoming rigid about your peripatetic plans.

This doesn’t mean giving up on your plans or folding in the face of the challenges you encounter.

It means being willing to reshape things a bit when warranted, especially when doing so will allow you to work with the winds and riptides of circumstance, rather than requiring you struggle against them for the duration.

Some of my most treasured memories are the consequence of on-location rethinking: my plans became less possible or desirable because of variables beyond my control so I adjusted my thinking, aimed at different outcomes, and enjoyed amazing (at times, life-changing) experiences as a result.

I would argue some goals should be pursued even when that chase leads through trying times and unpleasant terrain, but ideally we’re flexible and open to change when new understandings or information warrant it.

So while it’s generally beneficial to be capable of working toward big, long-term goals, it can be less constructive to walk the same path our entire lives, undeviating, just because some earlier version of ourselves (with different priorities and understandings) decided it was a good path to follow.

Thus, plasticity potential can serve us not just while on the road as we meander around unfamiliar terrain and languages and foods and perspectives, but in life more generally.

I like to think of having a capacity for malleability as being claylike, because in most cases we’re not alchemizing ourselves into another substance: we’re reworking what’s already there.

We sit at our potter’s wheel smoothing, bending, experimenting, and in some cases smashing what a younger, less-experienced version of ourselves crafted, sculpting something novel from its substance.

This new object is made of the same stuff as its previous iteration; it’s still us, we’re just trying out revised versions of who we are and the life we’re living.

Through this lens, a lost job or a breakup is an opportunity to transform (if often a painful and/or uncomfortably liberating one).

A sense of disconnection or malcontentment is a chance to sit at the wheel, perceive and acknowledge what’s not working, and gently smooth those elements away, embracing our work into something more appropriate for where we’d like to go and the version of ourselves we’d like to become.

A global pandemic, an economic crash, the drumbeat toward international conflict are all important and impactful collective happenings. They’re also (for each of us, individually) akin to changes in temperature or humidity in our ceramics studio: we must take these things into account as we shape and reshape—environmental fluctuations will almost always expand or contract our spectrum of serviceable options, but we still retain creative control over this work.

We are, whatever the circumstances and whatever limitations or amplifications of our capabilities we might be operating under at any given moment, the shapers of our clay.

We are enormously transmogrifiable and infinitely capable of adaptation and metamorphosis.

Each version of our ever-mutable selves is valuable for what it is and for what it has the potential to become.

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