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…
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 was, I thought, cool. Not in the real effortless Paul Newman way we think of cool, obviously, but I believed that if I adorned myself with enough physical trappings of cool, I would absorb it by osmosis. Like the giant bug alien (Edgar) in Men in Black, I was wearing a cool suit. And just like Edgar, I was not pulling it off.
Dear enormous family of vacationers, please take up the whole sidewalk. You’re in a national park, this is certainly not the place for situational awareness. And by all means,
I’m watching low clouds pour over the sandstone peaks of the Colorado Front Range from the window of my rented cabin. The grey damp lends itself to a productive day of work at my laptop, letting me get lost in deep projects or skim across my email inbox like a hawk across the glassy surface …