If you want to know how you’ve changed as a person, I suggest you consider moving.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had to establish a new set of habits predicated on novel circumstances and environments, and had to introduce (and explain) myself and my life to a cast of new characters: some truly novel to me, and some of whom were familiar to past versions of myself, but not the me of today.

Which is a flowery way of saying I’m in a new place, I’m meeting new people, I’m reconnecting with some old friends who have changed just as I have changed, I’m figuring out how to structure my life in this new place. And as I do all these things, I’m learning about myself—partially through the lens of my own restructuring and partially by how I interface with and choose to share myself with others.

This process isn’t particularly new to me: I go through it every time I change my physical location. And there’s a version of the same procedure that I wade through every time I produce some new artifact, like a book, or reach a milestone marker for a longer-term project, like a podcast.

Now that I’m in this new place or making this new thing, who am I?

Are my previous conceptions of self relevant to this new location or professional and intellectual dynamic?

And if those aspects of myself are now less meaningful, for whatever reason, which other aspects should rise to the forefront? Who am I now, in this space and within this context? And how does that compare to my previous iteration?

This can be a useful internal dialogue to have because as you set up a new space—and I mean that in the literal, physical sense, but also in the psychological, habitual, and ritualistic sense—you’re ideally not setting it up for the earlier you, you’re building a space for the next you; the you that you hope to evolve into.

Interactions between you and the world, between you and other people, can be illustrative of how this process is going because it reflects how the otherwise difficult to perceive internal shift is progressing.

This evolution can be catalyzed or empowered or augmented or limited by the changes you make to your geographic, intellectual, and habitual variables. You can stick to the old script, or you can make tweaks that innervate a new season of life.

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