The Forty-Third Hour

On anticipation, arrival, and the moment a journey begins to feel like your own.

There is a point in a journey when you stop arriving.

The bags have been unpacked. You no longer need to think about where breakfast is or which way to turn when you leave the hotel. You have stopped checking the time quite so often.

You are simply there.

It turns out there may be something behind that feeling.

Forty-three hours

A few years ago, neuroscientist Dr. Tali Sharot worked with a tourism company to understand when people felt happiest while they were away.

Among the travelers they surveyed at resorts, enjoyment reached its highest point at around 43 hours after arrival.

Not immediately.

About two days in.

It makes a certain kind of sense. The first part of almost any journey is still occupied by the mechanics of getting there. Airports. Transfers. Unpacking. Learning a new room. Working out where things are.

Even when everything has gone beautifully, some part of us is still arriving.

Then, somewhere along the way, that begins to change.

You know the route back without looking at a map. You recognize the person pouring your coffee. You have found the table you like, the street you want to walk again, perhaps the place you would rather return to than continue on to something new.

The arrangements begin to disappear.

And you begin to notice the place.

Before you leave

There is another part of the research that I find even more interesting.

The pleasure of a journey does not necessarily begin when the journey does.

Research into vacations has repeatedly found that anticipation can increase happiness before we ever leave home. Sharot has spoken about one study in which people reported their greatest happiness the day before their vacation began.

They were still at work. Their suitcases may not even have been completely packed.

But in their minds, they had already begun to go.

I think most of us know that feeling.

A reservation sitting quietly on the calendar can change an otherwise ordinary week. You begin imagining the first morning. You look at the weather. You think about what you might order, what the air will feel like, whether the church bells really can be heard from the room.

The journey starts taking up a little space in your life before you have gone anywhere at all.

Anticipation is not simply waiting.

It is part of the experience.

And then we get used to it

The forty-three-hour finding was part of Sharot's work on something much larger: habituation.

Human beings become accustomed to things remarkably quickly.

This is useful when the thing in question is unpleasant—the traffic outside the window or the hum of an air conditioner.

But we adapt to wonderful things too.

The extraordinary view becomes the view from the room. The path beside the sea becomes the way to breakfast. By the fourth morning, the bells that made you stop on the first are simply telling you the time.

Nothing has become less beautiful.

We have simply become familiar with it.

Perhaps this is why travelers in Sharot's research spoke so often about their firsts: the first sight of the water, the first swim, the first evening.

For a moment, we are paying complete attention.

And then, as humans do, we adjust.

What this changes

I don't think the lesson is that a trip should end after forty-three hours.

Some journeys need time.

You can't understand a city in a weekend simply because a happiness curve says you were delighted on Tuesday afternoon. Nor should every trip be engineered into a sequence of new experiences in an attempt to keep us entertained.

There is another kind of pleasure that comes after novelty.

Familiarity.

Returning to the same café the next morning. Recognizing someone. Knowing your way home. Having enough time in one place that you are no longer looking at it entirely from the outside.

That matters to me.

Because the most interesting point in a journey may not be when everything feels new.

It may be the point just after that—when a place has become familiar enough that you stop concentrating on being a traveler.

You begin to participate.

Giving a journey room

This is one reason I think pacing matters so much.

We can fill a journey with remarkable things and leave almost no room to experience any of them.

A beautiful hotel followed by a guide followed by lunch followed by a museum followed by dinner can produce a very full day. It does not necessarily produce a day you will remember.

Sometimes what a journey needs most is not another reservation.

It needs time for you to arrive.

Time to return somewhere.

Time to change your mind.

Time to discover that the afternoon you had carefully left empty has become the part of the trip you would most like to keep.

Perhaps that is what I like about the forty-third hour.

Not the precision of the number.

The reminder inside it.

There is a difference between getting somewhere and being there.

And when we give ourselves enough room, travel has a way of making that difference very clear.

When you think about the journeys that have stayed with you, when did you stop arriving and begin to feel that you were really there?

ANLY · THE ART OF WHAT STAYS