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Baby steps, business travel

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?”

The Book – First Chapters

I used the lockdown as my personal creative vortex and compiled the road trips, therapy sessions, business trips, panic attacks and all the rest into a book. And that book was published in June 2022 and is available on Amazon/Etsy now! What follows are the first 2 chapters.

what I can’t outrun

Two boulder-sized milestones – stacked on top of one another, heaped on top of me. The kind of life-altering moments that can exhaust your emotional faculties so completely that you need a few weeks of alternating deep tissue massages and tear-soaked therapy sessions just to get back to baseline. And I got a twofer over one long weekend.

re-contextualizing travel (with ghosts)

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.

tribute to fall

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.

secondhand

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.