It usually starts in my head with a vague longing to abandon everything -- family, friends, hearth and home -- then moves down to my feet where my toes start to twitch and tingle.

If left untreated, as has happened more than once, I can wind up chucking the whole kit-and-kaboodle and heading in all directions, depending on the season and where the sun happens to sit in the sky at the moment.

In the past, that meant landing in Paris, Santa Fe, the Soviet Arctic and Kazakhstan and other less-scenic spots, but always far from my childhood home near Boston.

This condition -- which can lead to various states of euphoria followed by a certain level of disappointment -- most often afflicts the young and the young at heart.

Those are the ones who feel tugged to live a different kind of American dream -- not the one that features a steady job and a white picket fence, but the one first brought to this country on the Mayflower and transported out West by the pioneers.

It still lives in those who grow up in an East Coast suburb and can't wait to dip their restless toes in the Pacific, for example, or in those who find themselves in a rut in middle age and who sign up to work in Africa with the Peace Corps.

One of the symptoms of restless feet syndrome is a nagging boredom with the status quo, with the comfortable groove we can so unwittingly dig for ourselves out of the raw material of our oh-so-brief life.

I confess -- I do get bored quickly. I think my mother had to constantly change the mobile over my crib because I wailed when its shiny butterflies or stars and fish had spun around once too often. And as a kid I explored every inch of my neighborhood, dreaming of far-off lands still yet to be seen.

Those restless feet. They tap to a rhythm all their own.

Is there a cure? I hope not.

But some methods of treatment have been proven helpful, especially when the victim has run away from home enough times to know the costs can sometimes outweigh the benefits.

Not that I regret having taken off when the syndrome hit -- there is a part of me that would always prefer trekking through the taiga myself to watching someone else do it on TV -- but at some point roots can start to grow beneath even the most restless feet and anchor us to the Earth.

Now, instead of giving in to my ennui and packing my bags, I pack my adventures into this blog and into a memoir -- yes, more about me but in book form! -- that I'm currently and constantly writing.

Rather than hunger to travel horizontally around the world, I'm moving more vertically within myself, exploring the inner and outer edges of who I am and perhaps, when I'm lucky, getting some sense of what this wondrous, restless journey called life -- for all of us victims -- is truly all about.

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