Papua New Guinea has been on the edge of my imagination for several years.

Twice I tried to get there. Twice, for one reason or another, it didn’t happen. And then, rather unexpectedly, it circled back into my life for a third time.

A travel friend, Kristen, mentioned she was heading there for the Goroka Festival, and just like that, PNG resurfaced. I wouldn’t join her for the festival—her timing meant missing my son’s 26th birthday and, four days later, my husband’s 60^th. I wanted to be at both places far more than anywhere else in the world.

And so began attempt number three, after their birthdays. For weeks, I researched and planned. I studied itineraries and lodges, flights and transfers, villages and rivers. I asked questions about everything from mosquitoes and malaria to road conditions and accommodations. I spoke with people on the ground, looked at photographs, and read travelers’ accounts.

Mostly, I argued with myself. Because somewhere along the way, Papua New Guinea stopped being merely a place I was considering visiting and became a referendum on who I thought I still was.

I think of a version of me as feral Shannon.

She is curious and restless. She craves the unfamiliar. She has spent much of her life chasing the next country, the next story, the next question. She likes knowing there are still places that can disorient her. She wants to hear languages she doesn’t understand, sit with people whose lives bear little resemblance to hers, feel awkward, ask questions, and be reminded of how little she knows. I like her and never want to lose her.

But there is another version of me now, too… domesticated Shannon.

She likes beautiful hotels and long lunches. She appreciates a good glass of Sancerre and a warm Toto toilet. She has developed a strong fondness for creature comforts and increasingly questions whether zigzagging for hours over difficult roads, sleeping under mosquito nets, and enduring heat, bugs, and accommodations she would have enthusiastically accepted twenty years ago constitute personal growth—or simply discomfort.

I like her, too, and that is the problem.

For years, I have written about the danger of letting comfort become the boundary of one’s life. I still believe that. Travel has been one of my greatest teachers precisely because it strips away the familiar and forces me to pay attention. My senses sharpen..I ask more questions and make fewer assumptions, and what I take for granted becomes visible again.

The world gets bigger, and somehow, so do I. Every time I considered canceling Papua New Guinea, feral Shannon had something to say:

You’re becoming too comfortable.

You’re losing your nerve.

This is exactly why you should go.

She made a compelling case. Until my husband said something during one of our late-night patio prattles that stopped the argument.

“You know, just because you can get into the boxing ring and fight doesn’t mean you have to.”

Well, there it was. Damn him for his annoyingly perfectly timed metaphor.

I could go to Papua New Guinea; that was never really the question.

I could tolerate the flights, the roads, the lodges, the mosquito nets, the heat, and whatever else the journey threw my way. I could climb into the proverbial ring and prove—to whom, exactly?—that I could still do hard things.

But somewhere in my determination not to let comfort shrink my world, I had neglected another lesson I’ve spent considerable time writing about…discernment.

Discernment asks a different question than courage does.

Courage asks, Can I do this?

Discernment asks, Do I actually want to?

Those are not the same question, and perhaps one privilege of getting older is finally understanding the difference.

There was a time when discomfort was almost inherently interesting to me. I wanted to test myself against the world. I wanted to feel incredibly alive, to know how far I could go, what I could tolerate, and what might happen if I kept saying yes.

I’m grateful to that wild and wacky woman. She took me places I never would have gone otherwise. She put people in my path I never would have met, leading me into conversations and experiences that quietly rearranged something inside me.

But honoring her doesn’t require reenacting her life. I don’t have to choose discomfort simply because I once believed it was evidence that I was fully alive.

Nor do I have to keep collecting difficult places as proof that curiosity still belongs to me. That realization surprised me. Initially, saying no to Papua New Guinea felt suspiciously like retreat. Then it began to feel like something else.

Choice.

I wasn’t afraid to go; I simply wasn’t sufficiently compelled to endure what getting there—and being there—would require of me.

Once I allowed myself to say that without judgment, the answer became remarkably clear. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I felt relieved. That told me something.

So, on my third attempt, Papua New Guinea and I are parting ways again.

Maybe permanently. Maybe not. I’ve learned enough about myself to be careful with the word never. But I’m no longer interpreting the decision as evidence that my world is getting smaller. Perhaps it is simply becoming more intentional.

There are still places I want to visit that will bewilder me, such as Cape Town in South Africa to explore the winelands, Victoria Falls in Zambia, the Bolivian Salt Flats, flower fields in Colombia, and the Panama Canal. There are still languages I want to hear that I cannot understand, people I want to meet, questions I haven’t thought to ask, and parts of myself I haven’t encountered yet.

Feral Shannon isn’t going anywhere, but she no longer gets the deciding vote just because she is the loudest in the room. Domesticated Shannon doesn’t either. They will learn to coexist.

And somewhere between the woman who wants the mosquito net and the woman who wants the 600-thread-count sheets is perhaps the woman I am becoming: still curious, still willing to be uncomfortable, still able to step into the ring, but increasingly discerning about which fights, journeys, and invitations merit a yes.

I’ve spent much of my life learning not to let fear make my decisions. At 52, perhaps the next lesson is to learn not to let pride make them either.

Just because I can get into the ring doesn’t mean I have to. Sometimes knowing when not to climb through the ropes is its own kind of courage.