I was, in short, what I’d call an externalist — a person who’ll exercise great care over what he puts into his body and never think about what he puts into his mind. Who will dwell at length on everything he can see, in order to distract himself from the fact that it’s everything he can’t see on which his well-being depends. Who will fill his head with so much junk that he can’t remember that wolfing down Buffalo wings is not the problem, but a symptom.

An externalist makes a point — even a habit — of cherishing means over ends, effects over causes and everything that fills him up over everything that truly sustains him. He interprets health in terms of his body weight, wealth in terms of his bank account and success in terms of his business card. He’ll go to the health club, and never think of the mental health club, like someone who imagines the only arteries to be unclogged are the ones that course with blood.

This past Christmas, I was all set to take myself on an exotic vacation, and then decided just to stay in my mother’s house in California — no long lines, no visas, no three-hour online reservation attempts foiled when you forget your second password. I’d come to believe that most destinations are less important than the spirit you bring to them. And that spirit is better developed by sitting still than by running all around.

As friends hurried off to the airport for Rio or Hawaii, I sat in my little room and watched the sun burn on the water down below. Light flooded into the space every afternoon and then, in the magic hour, the whole place began to glow. I nibbled at breakfast bars and listened to public radio and did nothing at all, the way it isn’t always easy to do if you’ve paid half your annual income to go to Mauritius. Moments carried a depth, a weight, of both emotion and association, they’d seldom have in Vegas. It’s not so much that we lack food, I remembered Simone Weil suggesting, as that we won’t acknowledge that we’re hungry.

The external world is always going to be my home, of course, and a place where I find each day’s savor and delight. And with Google Glass and Dreamliners and every hour’s new wearable, it becomes ever more like a supermarket, restocked each day with ever more astonishing options. Revisiting North Korea, four months ago, I was reminded of just how lucky I am, when it comes to choice and opportunity.

The only problem with such visible bounty, though, is that it becomes ever easier to feel, within yourself, like a gridlocked freeway at rush hour with no overpasses or offramps in sight. You start railing against fascism, as W. H. Auden suggested, and become a dictator at the family dinner table. You hold forth against the destruction of the environment and never notice — or try to clear — the hazy skies and deforested spaces within you.

I still surrender — gratefully — to the latest congressional sex scandal or celebrity memoir whenever I’m killing time waiting for a plane, even though I know that any book by D. H. Lawrence or Marcel Proust will leave me feeling more alive, more myself, more in love with the world. And even as I keep my distance from McDonald’s now, I have no hesitation in racing off toward organic, locally sourced, “food with integrity” Chipotle outlets instead. A life of daily visits to the gym demands some guilty pleasures.

But I know that one day my doctor is going to come into the room with a very dark look on his face and news that no treadmill or repudiation of onion rings is going to make better. And then the only thing I’ll have to turn to will be all I’ve done when going nowhere — and everything I might have stored in some less visible account.