The most awesome, time-bending feature of sabbatical life is that every single day is Saturday. Every day I am mostly free to decide what to learn, where to go, what to do, and whom to talk to. This freedom was previously only available on a handful of precious hours on a good, free Saturday.

Today happens to be an actual Saturday, and I am sitting in my favorite neighborhood coffee shop in Seoul for the last time before going on a big hike to Baegundae, the highest peak in the city. It’s my last time at the coffee shop because tomorrow I go on an all-day tour of the DMZ and on Monday we leave for another city, and this has me thinking about movement and impermanence.

I generally have a hard time being still. Physically I struggle to sit still for more than a few minutes, but more generally the thought of staying in the same place indefinitely, of never seeing other places, might be my deepest fear. It’s not that I don’t love having a home and routines, but I also have this visceral need to frequently feel like I’m making progress toward seeing as much of the world as possible. I’ve always had this, and I fear it might be incurable.

This is a big reason why I needed to go on this sabbatical and move around many different places for a while before contemplating more permanent grounding. Part of me hopes that the constant moving around will tire me out, that it will make me crave permanence in a single place as I never have before.

Now that we’re at the halfway point of our sabbatical, I can reflect on what a lifestyle of constant movement has been like. We have stayed in 24 places over roughly four months. In most cases we set out to minimize moving around so we could have time to actually experience a city, but in the end the desire to see more of a country (particularly in Japan) meant that we stayed just 4-5 days in most places. In Japan we stayed just 2 nights in a few places and generally moved throughout the country every couple of days. In cities like Bangkok, Tokyo, and Kyoto we gave ourselves 7-9 days, and in two places (Da Nang and Seoul) we stayed put for three weeks.

Three weeks is so much longer than three days, but the days flew by in a blur not too different from our single night stopover in Nagoya due to a train snafu (which left us craving to come back to fully experience that city someday). Still, three weeks is enough to stop and have some slow days, to find favorite spots and develop the little routines that make a normal life.

In Da Nang I had a coffee shop called Paco, like my dad who passed away, that I started going to on most days because I’m a sucker for “signs” like that. I had a gym membership and a favorite running route, and a bakery where I bought sourdough and cinnamon rolls every other day. I could be happy there, I thought, possibly indefinitely.

In Seoul, there is the beautiful public gym on top of the hill next to our Airbnb, where the lovely regulars (all over 50, mostly men but some women as well) insisted we try the most delicious watermelon I’ve had in a while, and eventually had to ask in broken English where we were from and just what the hell we were doing in their gym in a random Seoul neighborhood. There is the quiet and airy coffee shop where I wait for laundry to be done, browsing through LinkedIn with more than a little anxiety about the real world that looms over the horizon when this magical moment in suspension inevitably comes to an end.

I can vividly recall the feeling of living in those places, of repeatedly inhabiting the same spaces and living my little routines in them. The moment I started to grasp that sense of living there, that palpable feeling associated with a specific place and time, we moved away. This is not a complaint — impermanence is, after all, exactly what I wanted and asked for.

I can remember the “feeling” of the abbreviated places too, the ones where we didn’t have time to repeat a coffee shop, though I think that feeling is more closely associated with the state of perpetual movement than the actual places.

Looking back, the fastness and fragility of it all — the quickness with which I fell into favorites and routines and the suddenness with which they vanished to be replaced by new ones — seem like an accelerated summary of a good long life, condensed into a sabbatical. The “blink of an eye” cliché is, at the end of the day, just an accurate description of what life feels like.

So I’m grateful for both feelings: for the places I stayed in long enough to attach to, and the ones I moved through so quickly that I attached to the state of movement while catching mere glimpses of their beauty. Jury is still out on whether the constant movement will allow me to sit still for longer after this is all over, but I’m reminded that whether you’re moving or standing still, in the end impermanence is the only thing we can count on, and no matter how slow or fast you move life will still go by in an instant.