Somewhere between buying a house, starting a company, and settling into a new life in North Carolina, I lost touch with something pretty important. You’d think that the rather jarring events of the last few years would remind me that everything is temporary and life is a game of riding the cycles, but no. There …
And there’s the first-day-back jitters of seeing my teammates. Some of them I’ve met before, and it will be a nice little reunion. Others I’ve known for years simply as faces in a box on a Zoom screen. As we come together for the first time, what will we talk about? What is the proper response to that simple inquiry: “How are you?”
It’s never really about the things. Delightful distractions, the leather smells rich and the cashmere feels soft but after the novelty of the luxury wears off, we’re all still just electric meatsuits traversing a watery orb, bumping up against each other trying to make sense of it all.
I finally found a natural counterbalance for all that dogged seeking. It didn’t matter if I was shopping in Scotland or sipping coffee in Savannah, the highlight of every trip was always the same, and somehow perfectly unique each time. Perhaps driven by a subconscious urge to recharge, I learned to ground myself with microdoses of actual human connection.
For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted…
The impromptu flight, the dog sitter, Airbnb, and adventure money had stacked up, and rent was coming due. Suddenly, my place felt like a beautiful, beige prison. I couldn’t afford to pay rent and travel. I chose to travel.
I drank my coffee on the porch, listening to birdsong and smelling whiffs of ocean mist that spilled over the mountains. As far as I could tell, the spider was keeping her promise.
My recent nomadic tendencies are motivated by a search for a place that feels like home that I problematically don’t believe exists. When people ask me that fundamental question about where I’m from, hoping for a quick and relatable answer, I sigh and shake my head and try to gauge how long they might be …
I curse the season for being the only season that confronts us so directly with its impermanence. But fall is no shorter than summer or winter. I’m no physicist, but I am confident that time doesn’t move more quickly in October than it does in May.
I travel a lot, but not because I love it. I don’t have some great passion for exotic cuisine or penchant for historical sites. I do it mainly because it’s something to do. Moving around a lot as a kid instilled a certain level of wanderlust in me, and working a remote job now means that if I see something cool on Instagram, I can usually figure out a way to go there. So I do. And with each trip I add to my stack of interesting anecdotes, but I won’t list “travel” as a hobby. My hobby is people.