We are the sum total of our choices, say any number of books, movies, poems, and umpteen other forms of art and media.

I was reminded of that this weekend when two old friends, a couple around my age, came to town. I’ve known Alon and Devin for fifteen years, from my early coming out era when I was still an anxious, conservative, boy-shy twentysomething. The pair have been together since those early days and have remained in the same city — Toronto — that whole time.

I, on the other hand, have been a model of transience, restlessness, a form of latter-day frontiersy-ness that characterizes so many American young professionals: Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Lansing MI (didn’t see that one coming), Chicago, Boston, San Francisco once more. Oh yeah, and that little trip around the world as well.

And yet, catching up with these old friends (I’d lost touch with them a few years back but all that changed with the advent of MySpace and Facebook), I was struck with our similar outlooks on life, love, politics, even boys (Alon was the first guy I’d met who shared my taste in guys, and still does). I wonder: does one’s personality remain constant — or develop in much the same way — regardless of circumstance? We transients emphatically assert no; our entire raison d’etre is to grow and change via exposure to a kaleidoscope of different venues. And yet, I see friends all the time who’ve grown and blossomed just fine with few job or career changes, few or no spousal changes, and few or no big relocations. Does one have to move to grow?

Maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe some people need the ever-changing blur of cities, jobs, people in their lives in order to mature and develop as people. And even within that realm I’ve found my perspective changing: once I eschewed travel’s power to incite personal growth, citing all those college kids professing to have “life-changing experiences” on summer party trips to Corfu. But then, maybe that was that same younger me judging too harshly. At the same time, I found myself stuck in a perpetual “relocation rut” — always the newcomer, always befriending or romantically seeking the same pattern of people — until I did take that long-overdue break from everything and saw my own world (as well as the world beyond) in a whole new light.

Perhaps that’s the real “teachable moment,” one which Wander the Rainbow hopefully imparts: whether or not you’ve bounced around or stayed put, oftentimes the biggest personal transformations come when you’re out of your element. Relocation can serve that purpose, to be sure, but more often than not it’s travel — real travel, big travel, not simply the five-day sequestration at a Hilton that’s the de rigueur vaca for too many of us — that opens our hearts and minds.

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