There’s no telling when Austin became home for me exactly. Which is strange considering how often I find myself missing it. Strange because I was all but consumed with where I might go next while I lived there. I was making new friends, establishing new routines, and planting roots while also waiting for the wind to catch me and fly me away to Europe over the summer. I’m not as good at “getting settled” as it seems, so I blamed it on the heat. I guess, in a way, I was obsessive about protecting this idea I have for my life needed to remain temporary enough to leave.

Travel is too important to me. It’s become a load-bearing pillar of my adult life and I rely on the dreaming and planning and experiencing of it too much to try to pretend that I don’t. Or that I can ignore that need for any period of time for any reason… or person. I like the interruption of departure. It’s all I know, in a lot of ways. It’s all I’ve ever known—in more ways than I may ever be able to convey here. I like airports more than any sensible person does, I think. I like learning a new city through my daily routines. I love the moment when the veil of unfamiliarity in a new place starts to lift itself. I like knowing—trusting—that whatever shape my life takes, there will always (hopefully) be stretches of it lived somewhere else.

Wanting to go home doesn’t change any of that for me. If anything, it confirms it and it’s that confirmation that makes it all that much more interesting. This isn’t the longing I usually associate with travel. Longing, for me, feels like the soul reaching outward toward something or someone or some place else. Like, somewhere else I want to go, something else I want to see, or another version of my life that might exist past wherever I currently am. I hate it, sometimes, but even when I am perfectly happy somewhere I find myself dipping in and out of the daydreams of Elsewhere. This time, the longing is pointed backward. Inward.

I miss Texas. I miss a lot of obvious and totally ridiculous things. I miss the way my life organized itself there. I miss the people. I miss my people. I miss my own (known) space. I miss knowing where things are because I put them there. I miss the random chats from the new acquaintances you casually make on your evening walks. I miss the Lady Bird Trail—crowds be damned. I miss the farmer’s markets and their hodgepodge selections. And, as ashamed as I am to admit it, I miss the convenience of being able to run essentially your entire life from your phone: patch up the grocery haul, do that Target run from the sofa, and call the Uber into town.

Of course, there are things I miss with considerably more force. There are specific moments and specific people and certain versions of specific evenings, characters, conversations, and routines that I hadn’t even seen as significant until I was out of it. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, what can I say? But that’s a whole other Sunday.

I’ve spent most of my life thinking of home as the place one leaves. I inherited a completely different definition of home than the one I hold now. My earlier definition was one of “family,” “history,” and obligation. Home was somewhere I had responsibility or some place that knew too much about me. Home was the place I left to see who I might be elsewhere. I almost don’t know how to accept or deal with the truth of it all: I’m homesick for Austin. Holding space for and processing the ebb and flow of gratitude in that truth, that I am homesick for somewhere I’ve chosen, is a real conscious daily practice.

From Ireland, Austin feels like somewhere the different parts of my life have begun to converge and less like a city where I just know I have an apartment and comfy place to land. Austin is somewhere that my work make sense. Hooch makes sense there. There are different relationships that I want to continue to invest in there and there are habits that support me that I actually want to stay long enough to see through.

I am sure I’ll wake up one cold February morning with the desire to be somewhere else and there will be summer afternoons when Texas feels actively hostile to human life. And I will still leave for work and for pleasure. There are just too many places I want to see, too many places to return to, and too many people I still need to meet. It’ll just feel different—lighter—without the burden of saving me.

There’s more to that than I am prepared to share here. But I know that not every feeling needs to be resolved the moment it appears. You can’t satisfy every craving. You can’t quench every thirst. It’s enough, for me, to just be mindful of where my attention is reaching.

There’s real irony in all of this coming up in Ireland for me. This place taught me over and over again that my life could be larger than any earlier version I’ve ever known. I come here and rediscover connection, movement, possibility, and a wider worldview each time. However, I’ve learned that expansion does not require endless motion; belonging does not require a container; building a life does not mean surrendering the right to explore everywhere else.

I can still fantasize about friendly reunions in Italy or Czechia or Portugal or plan for next summer in another European city I haven’t met yet. Or at least I hope to. This world is just too big and fun to not follow one’s curiosity through every cobblestone street of it.

If someone had told me, three years ago, that I would find myself homesick for Texas amidst an Irish summer, I would have been sure and certain that person didn’t know me. Yet, here I am—in a place that has always shown me how much bigger my life could become—mesmerized and motivated by a new perspective. That, maybe for the first time, the most interesting thing waiting for me isn’t somewhere I’ve never been… It’s home.

I had been looking forward to getting back for months. From the moment I knew I would get my European summer, Ireland was locked in as the place I would eventually land after everything else. I had planned for something like a personal and professional reset over a two-and-a-half month period: slow mornings, familiar trails, enough quiet to get serious about my work again, and long nights that stretch through deep conversations with close friends. I knew, after two months of bouncing around the US and Portugal, I would love not having to navigate so much of the usual transient guesswork; finding the best grocery store, learning a new neighborhood, or finding my evening route. (I love a post-dinner walk in a new place with a new book in a new park.) I knew the roads in Ireland. I knew the people. I knew how the days were going to feel here once I unpacked, re-stocked the cupboards, and allowed myself to finally settle into them.

Within a few days, I felt terrible with enough symptoms to invite theories from friends and family although none of them were particularly convincing. “Maybe something was going around.” “Maybe it was hayfever.” “Maybe it was exhaustion finally catching up with me.” “Maybe I had just done too much for too long and my body’s tally maxed out.” With a sore throat making it hard to speak and swallow, cold sores covering my lips, and stye partially obscuring my vision, I heard everyone out but never cared where we landed or what we called it. I didn’t need the particular satisfaction that comes with any kind of diagnosis. (I was just glad these were people who knew me before I looked like Quasimodo.) I just wanted to wake up and feel normal again.

But that didn’t happen for the better part of two weeks. Mostly, I stayed in and slept at an Olympic level. One weekend I found myself collapsing into bed at nine o’clock on a Saturday evening, only to rise at seven Monday morning. The entire Sunday only a few blinks in my memory. It was frustrating in the way illness always is but a pining disappointment pushed it to a deeper level. I had such a clear picture for what this time would be for me and now it was accounting to just about nothing.

There were people I wanted to see. Places I wanted to revisit. I dreamed of long walks and productive mornings and that particular intimacy of an Irish evening where time gets warped because nobody can bring themselves to stop the conversation. The distance of the last nine months had helped me to romanticize all of it again.

Instead, I was mostly alone and, in retrospect, that was probably for the best. I should say, I have a tendency to interpret everything (and especially the enforced stillness that comes with illness) as some sort of cosmic intervention. I don’t mean that every dose of the flu or head cold is a message from the Universe but I can’t say I don’t mean that either. (Ha!) I know well enough that sometimes the body is simply tired and that sometimes you get sick because the world can be a disgusting place. But, I also know myself well enough to see what would have happened if I felt perfectly healthy these past few weeks: I would have ran myself ragged. I would have filled the days to completion. Immediately. I would have gone and done everything I was invited to. I would have added more and more to the calendar, worked my ass off, and kept moving with the mantra “this is what settling in is.”

Illness eliminated that possibility and grounded me before I had the chance to avoid becoming truly grounded. And, once I had nothing to do but be, I really didn’t want to be here anymore.

I hated the truth in that so much that it brought me to tears. Literally, hunched over and sobbing on the sofa. It bothered me so much more than being sick.

Months were spent fantasizing about this time back. Ireland has always occupied such an important place in my imagination and in my day-to-day life that admitting I felt regret in the decision to come back almost felt like an act of treason. I resist using the word regret, generally, anyway. I hate the feeling of somewhere or something or some choice feeling like a mistake, especially when it comes to travel. I have lucked out though and almost always find something in somewhere, eventually. Feeling the hum of a new place counts. Trying a new type of local food counts. Even coming to the conclusion that a place isn’t for me counts. My belief is that nothing is ever wasted if your eyes are open and you’re paying attention.

But then again, there I was, wasting away in Ireland and ruminating on why I had committed so much time to being somewhere I suddenly wanted to leave. There was no excuse. Trust me, I looked everywhere for an inciting reason. It wasn’t Ireland’s fault. But that only made the feeling harder to explain. Nothing had really happened. No one had done anything to me. My town, county, and country were really no different than how I had left it. The same trails. The same cliffs. The same current, flow, and waves of connection and solitude.

What made it all so strange was how much Ireland has given me. Over these last three years, I’ve encountered a version of my life I never could have even imagined nevermind have gone in search of. It was the depth of connection that surprised me. I found family here in new ways and established friendships that quickly became consequential. I walked more. I lingered more. I breathed more. I learned the value of spending an afternoon doing nothing.

Ireland arrived in my life at a time when expansion wasn’t simply desirable. It was necessary. I needed cold-hard evidence that my life was capable of stretching beyond the boundaries I had been self- and forcibly-contained in. I needed a new rhythm, new routines, new people, and other ways of spending the day. I needed to get reacquainted with curiosity, creativity, and contemplation. I needed to let myself feel the uneasy confidence in belonging somewhere I didn’t come from. I needed the world to get bigger here and my world did get bigger here.

For most of my life, Ireland has always represented that kind of growth and expansion. Maybe that is the stealth expectation I had set when deciding to come back. I don’t believe I booked the flight thinking I could recreate some earlier version of myself, although I am known to do that. I’ll attach an era of my life to geography and check back in as often as I can to see how far I’ve gone and how much I’ve grown since then. I return to restaurants where important moments happened, cities where I felt the most alive, and always make a point of walking past the apartments I used to live in—checking the windows for ghosts of Christmases past.

I can’t be the only one who expects a place to hold our life experiences in escrow. Sometimes it does (or seems to) and, other times, I come back to realize a place can change at an equal or greater rate than I did. The better I felt the easier it was for me to admit that. It became clearer the less I could blame the feeling on being sick; the more I could see people; the more I could do things; the more I could feel the restlessness didn’t entirely disappear.

Ireland hadn’t failed me in delivering an experience I remembered or needed. I had already had those experiences—when I needed them. Ireland has always done an extraordinary job of being what I need—when I need it. Expansive. Connective. Grounding. It has become the touchtree to the better part of a lifetime of becoming, but I think I confused my gratitude with an obligation to keep recreating it. That’s an immense and strange pressure to put on a place one loves.

If somewhere once made me happy, I expect it to continue to make me happy in all of the same and familiar ways. If I once found freedom somewhere, I hate to admit that my relationship might change with it later out of fear of diminishing it completely. But changing my relationship with a place doesn’t change what happened there. It confirms it.

At first I felt like I shouldn’t have come. Now I know, I needed to come back to know this. There was no way to see or feel or learn this lesson from Austin. There was no amount of meditation or contemplation this whole summer that could have given me the same answer. I, who planned two months in Ireland back then, remembered how important this place had been to him and wanted to return to it. The only way to have become aware of and accept that I had moved beyond some part of that relationship was to return.

So, during the first week here, I edited the itinerary: I chopped the plan to stay for two and a half months to just six weeks and began looking at flights. I wasn’t disappointed in Ireland and I certainly wasn’t angry with it, or even particularly sad about the change of plans either. I’d say I felt something closer to a wave of gratitude and a twinge of discomfort in recognizing that an old idea about myself was no longer true.I came back to Ireland expecting it to help recalibrate me and it did—just not in the ways I had been expecting.

Sometimes we return to old places expecting to find ourselves there, only to discover we’ve moved on before we even arrived. And somewhere in the middle of realizing that for myself this go-round, I shocked myself and said, “I want to go home.”

I usually think of gratitude as more of a corrective thought or a small moral adjustment made when my focus is too fixated on what is missing. Which is often, to be honest. But, I also know gratitude to be a more physical sensation as well, like a wave of recognition over the body. In just a few seconds, an intentional moment of gratitude can remind us, “This is good,” “this is happening,” “I am here.” And, even if only for just those few seconds, the ever-present search of meaning and purpose evaporates.

Having a strong gratitude practice is like having a pressure-release valve in every corner of your life. Moments of gratitude do not need to point toward anything or improve us, teach us, generate, or justify anything. They simply give us a container accept, acknowledge, and affirm that we exist.

I’m convinced this is where the real work begins. However, I am not convinced that everyone can eliminate all pressure and I am certainly not convinced that I can. My dimmer malfunctions. Remember? Even in the glow of the most radiant gratitude, I still wonder whether I am falling behind; or worry that if I stop reaching I will fall into failure; or fear that—if I relax—something will go awry. And all the while, knowing all too well that admitting something is good may require me to confront how long I have lived without it.

I have to hold those truths with compassion because I also know those thoughts do not disappear simply because I can name them. Fear feels different when I stop treating it as some kind of instruction and guilt becomes less convincing when I remind myself that it speaks only as an old reflex, rather than a current truth. The pressure to become loses some of its authority when I allow myself to accept and appreciate who I already am and the life that I have already built.

Our truths should not feel like they’re contributing to an already oversized pack on our shoulders. When we meet them with enough acceptance, compassion, and tenderness, they become more like dandelion “wishies” letting the wind guide them to their next incarnation. The same histories that teach us vigilance also make us capable of recognizing freedom when it appears. The same hunger that drives us can lend attention to the moments where momentum is no longer necessary. The same fear that falsely prophesies everything needs to change suddenly becomes the little voice within that makes gratitude feel most urgent.

Nothing lasts forever. And, there is a version of personal growth that is always oriented toward a better, bigger, brighter future. It asks us to become more disciplined and more successful; to heal our wounds and accept our scars; to deepen our self-awareness for a more authentic and purposeful life. Make no mistake about it, there is unquantifiable value in that no matter how you choose to view or live your life.

Growth can simply mean not asking what an experience means but letting yourself enjoy it. That means taking the personal day, staying in bed a little longer, having the sex, booking the trip, sitting in the sun, or simply enjoying the next meal and refusing to convert the pleasure into a lesson before you have actually felt it.

Responsibility is real and it’s impossible to organize our entire lives around pleasure but, honestly, sometimes you are just meant to have a good time. The future deserves care and there’s no denying or ignoring the reality: We have a lot to do, but the future should not consume so much of our attention that the present becomes little more than raw material for what comes after it.

I am not interested in completely silencing the little voice within that wonders what’s next. It has done important work in my life and I still want to build, grow, and believe in possibility, direction, and a becoming future. I am simply learning that the question does not always deserve an immediate answer.

Sometimes what comes next is not another goal or plan or destination or reinvention. Sometimes what comes next is awareness, compassion, and care. Sometimes it’s just a moment of gratitude to illuminate the false sense of urgency in the panic. Sometimes it’s the recognition that the life you’ve been working toward is already happening all around you, in every moment of every day, even if corners of it still feel a little scary, a little wild, and a little unresolved.

This is the third and final essay in a three-part series on What’s Next. Read the first one, “Identifying What’s Next” and the second one “Trusting What’s Next” at your leisure:

There is an [overwhelming] part of me that is afraid of success. Or, “success” as I have always defined it. I never want to become the kind of person who avoids striving or feels they no longer need to serve or show up for their community because they have earned the privilege of stepping back from it.

There are seasons when becoming is necessary but there can also be years when survival depends on our ability to visualize, work hard, and move with a certain kind of intention. When purpose is not a luxury but a force. But, at some point, we must allow the act of becoming to give way to simply being.

A friend and I were recently discussing existential dread. Casually. The way friends often do. And, the endless search for purpose, and the ever-present pressure people feel to become something recognizable, consequential, and complete. My friend is not American and always someone I’ve thought to have seen, felt, and moved through the world differently than most but, alas, they admitted to “feeling a force inside of them;” pushing them to find their purpose, chase their goals, and achieve something more. I have felt the same force for as long as I can remember so, naturally, I empathized and affirmed my understanding with an eye-roll. “I get it.”

“How do you do it?” They asked, “How do you carve out the space to vacate for three months and not go completely crazy?”

“First of all,” I said, blinking with surprise, “I don’t. I work every day while I travel. Most of the time, weekends too. I don’t remember the last time I ‘vacationed.’ I live nomadically.”

Then I leaned in to emphasize the truth. “Secondly,” I said, “Sometimes we’re just meant to be having a good time.”

Sometimes the inner force and external pressures eclipse one another and block out one of the most fundamental truths I know: We are meant to live well. Not perfectly and not recklessly and not without responsibility but well.

It’s not only in our best interest but, I believe, it’s encoded in our divine purpose that we are meant to identify the sources of happiness, pleasure, joy, and aliveness available to us and meet them with some degree of courage. I’m talking about the expansion that comes with travel, the companionship we find in our connections, the nourishment we get from good food, the peace we gain through prayer, the pleasure in sex, the wonder in nature, and so on. I’m talking about familiar comforts, long conversations, a day with no demands, and that “Sunday on the porch” feeling—if you will. We’re meant to recognize what makes us come alive and lean into those things with gratitude and grace wherever they find us.

There is a persistent cultural belief that joy and pleasure are what is meant to find us or are granted to us after the important work is finished; after the bills are paid, after the goals are met, after the body is improved, the career is secure, the relationship is stable, the house is in order, or whenever the future finally stops threatening us. But, I’m sorry, spoiler alert, the future never stops threatening us. There will always be another invoice. There will always be some element of uncertainty, grief, and impossibility. If we wait until the conditions are perfect before allowing ourselves to experience the fruits of our labor, we may (and many will) spend our entire lives cultivating something we never allow ourselves to taste.

This is all that occupied my mind two weeks ago, lying under a canopy on the main beach in Matosinhos, trying to do right by my body and its severe melanin deficiency. There I was in the middle of what should have otherwise been a productive workday. Nothing had been solved or resolved to grant me the permission to be there. My life is less stable than it has been in more than a decade. There was a recent break-up, an ever-present (ever-darkening) cloud of financial turmoil, and the existential dread of not knowing exactly what I am doing next. I simply succumbed to the desire and mustered up the nerve to be under the sun. And still, lying there and listening to the wind lapping the parasail above me, I felt something stronger than that pressure.

I thought, I cannot believe this is my life. Then immediately, I am so grateful to be here right now. My mind snapped back to a moment five years ago when I was juggling entrepreneurship with caregiving and hardly ever getting what I needed to survive—never mind thrive. The feeling moved me to tears before I had the moment to intellectualize it and suppress it. That was all the relief I needed. I didn’t need an apology for the heartbreak, an email to confirm opportunity was out there, or any other breakthrough of any other kind. The facts of my life were fine to remain exactly as they were because, I knew, I was exactly where I needed to be.

This is the second essay in a three-part series on What’s Next. You can access and read the first one, “Identifying What’s Next",” for free here:

Most of my life has been spent wondering what comes next. I’d like to say the question is typically framed as a hope practice but, truthfully, sometimes it comes more from a place of desperation. But, no matter how I look at it, it’s long been the only question that has carried me through life and gotten me through moments I knew I could no longer live inside. “What’s next” has helped me accept the inevitable ends of things, identify opportunities, find the necessary exits, and imagine future versions of myself I’ve wanted to become. It’s given me a reason for my ambition, language for my dissatisfactions, and the momentum I’ve needed to chase change and shake myself awake in moments that have come to feel unbearable in their stillness.

Sometimes the question comes from a place of generosity. What’s next? I’m ready to make the space and time and commit the resources to obtaining it. Sometimes it’s almost been a prayer for possibility. What’s next? Please find me. It’s even been a humbling act of rage. What’s next? Hit me with your best shot. (Don’t taunt the Universe.) Either way, it always reminds me that where I am isn’t necessarily permanent or who I am (or how I am) is never the end state.

I wish the question didn’t sometimes provoke a sense of lack; the belief or feeling that who we are or where we are or what we have is in any way not enough. Sometimes what’s next will put me into a paradoxical freeze state. Like the one I am in right now. I love when I get the chance to finally stop moving (even for a month or a week or a weekend) and feel how fragile everything really is. Always wondering what’s next can prevent me from living in the present. Especially when the promise of the next thing feels safer than leaning into the present.

For people like me who have constructed our lives through vigilance, “what’s next?” doesn’t just disappear with improvement. Serenity doesn’t come at the flip of a switch. I’ve always thought of serenity as a sort of dimmer and everyone has different technology. For me, even when my dimmer is on its lowest setting and serenity feels real, I can still see the room I’m in and the surrounding property. The idling remains. What I mean is, even in periods of “rest,” some part of me is always anticipating, evaluating, scanning, or wondering what is gathering along the edge of the moment—just outside the emotional horizon. I liken it to a soft electrical current beneath the surface of a day. A low internal hum that asks, constantly, whether I should be doing more or preparing better or responding quicker or thinking, looking, or living further ahead.

Until recently, I have only ever felt safe in motion. Planning helped me avoid uncertainty, work gave me a necessary structure, ambition always lifted me out of circumstances that came to feel too small, too painful, or too unstable. Holding space for what’s next was not an act of avoidance but agency.

TO BE CONTINUED…

You don’t realize how much anticipation you’re carrying until you find yourself somewhere that doesn’t ask for it.

For a long time, I mistook anticipation for responsibility. I stayed awake later than I needed to. I kept my phone close. I made myself available across time zones that had little regard for the life I was actually living. During my first few months in Ireland, I routinely pushed myself into ungodly hours in case a client needed something or someone in my family suddenly called. The strange part was that this almost never happened. It had not happened with any meaningful frequency before I left, and it did not suddenly begin happening once I was abroad. Still, I remained “prepared.” Readiness can quickly become its own kind of obligation.

At the time, I would have described this behavior as conscientious. Professional. Generous, even. I thought I was doing my best to remain reachable and responsible while living somewhere else. What I did not yet understand was that I was still allowing the imagined needs of people thousands of miles away to determine the shape of my days. I had changed countries without fully changing my posture. My body was in one place, but my attention was still reporting for duty somewhere else.

That is what anticipation has come to mean to me: the low, persistent expectation that something is about to be required.

An email. A question. A request. A problem. A small emergency. A decision only I can make. A new opportunity that will disappear if I do not respond quickly enough. It is the feeling that the moment directly in front of you is provisional because another, more important moment may interrupt it at any time.

It is not exactly anxiety, although anxiety often lives inside it. It is not exactly ambition either, although the two are easily confused. Ambition can be intentional. Anticipation is more atmospheric. It is the constant idling beneath your thoughts. The sense that you should remain mentally dressed and ready to leave, even when there is nowhere you need to go.

For some of us, this is so familiar that it barely registers as discomfort. It simply feels like adulthood.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, my body confronted it.

I first noticed the conflict during a slow Italian summer a few years ago. I had spent so long imagining the freedom of extended travel that I was surprised by how little freedom I seemed able to feel once I had it. I had reached the place I wanted to be, and yet I could not settle into the fact of being there.

The days moved differently. Shops closed when they closed. Meals took longer. Entire afternoons seemed to pass without producing anything I could measure. People lingered. Streets emptied and filled again according to rhythms I did not understand. The pace of daily life seemed to resist my instinct to make every hour justify itself.

I recoiled from it. I wish, however, that recoil had felt more poetic. It did not. It felt like forcing myself to sit on a bench.

My mind would race while my body remained restless, almost like that feeling you get when you are over-caffeinated and under-nourished. Anxious. Antsy. Clammy. I would feel that knowing that I needed to discharge whatever energy was collecting inside me, but I also needed to stop. Sitting still felt intolerable. Continuing to move felt exhausting.

So I developed a kind of personal sequence. I would walk until I encountered something capable of interrupting me. A gallery. A museum. A church. A narrow street opening onto an unexpected view. A sunset dramatic enough to briefly overpower the noise in my head. I would try to shock myself into wonder, then sit somewhere nearby and force myself to take it in.

Even then, I often felt guilty. I often still feel guilty.

The guilt tends to become especially pronounced later in the day, when I know someone somewhere is still in the middle of their Monday for example. Even though I had already surpassed mine. Survivor’s guilt. I can be sitting beneath a tree, looking across a square, or watching the light change over an old building and still feel vaguely irresponsible for ignoring my empty inbox and not answering a question no one had asked.

It’s been two years and I still glance at my phone every few minutes, regardless of the time of day or day of the week. There are rarely any urgent messages.

It does not matter. The checking has become instinctive. My hand moves before my mind has formed a reason. I am not responding to an actual demand. I am responding to the possibility (or codependent hope) of one.

Much of modern life is organized around real obligations, but a surprising amount of our emotional energy is spent preparing for imagined ones. We rehearse conversations before they happen. We anticipate problems before they appear. We monitor our devices for evidence that someone requires us. We remain available not because anyone is currently asking, but because we have learned that availability is a form of virtue.

Over time, the body stops distinguishing between being needed and being potentially needed. That is how vigilance becomes identity.

By the end of that first summer, something begins to loosen. I am walking slowly through the streets of Verona when I notice that I am no longer trying to outrun the day. Nothing dramatic happens. There is no singular revelation, no decisive moment in which I become a more enlightened person. I simply spend enough time inside a slower rhythm that my resistance to it begins to exhaust itself.

I start to understand that acceptance is not passive.

It requires participation.

I have to stop insisting that the day unfold according to a pace imported from somewhere else. I have to allow local life to remain local life. I have to stop treating every inconvenience as evidence that the world is poorly arranged. I have to notice how much of my frustration comes from the belief that reality should have anticipated my preferences.

This summer feels different.

Porto is not somewhere I need to go. Nothing forces me here. It is not a reaction to a crisis or an escape route from a life I can no longer tolerate. I choose it. I work hard to claim this time, and I am now working—with surprising ease—to protect it.

That difference feels significant.

Italy, in many ways, is something I need. I need the distance. I need the interruption. I need proof that another version of my life can exist. Porto feels less like rescue and more like stewardship. I am not here because I am trying to get away from something. I am here because I now understand that certain conditions allow me to become more available to myself.

I arrive exhausted.

It is only the second time in two years of frequent travel that I need to sleep immediately after arriving. Normally, I get right to work establishing order. I unpack. I locate the grocery store. I shower. I go outside. I walk the neighborhood. I force my body into the next time zone before it has an opportunity to object.

There is something almost ceremonial about that routine. Unpack quickly. Orient immediately. Prove that I can transition without disruption. Become functional as fast as possible.

This time, in Porto, I asked for an early check-in. The moment I entered my apartment, I turned down the sheets and climbed into bed. I did not bargain with myself. I did not decide that I should first accomplish three small tasks so the nap feels earned. I noticed how tired I was and treated the exhaustion as information rather than inconvenience. Recovery became the first priority.

That decision is small, but it establishes the terms of the weeks that follow. I am not going to spend the summer overriding myself. I am not going to turn freedom into another test of endurance. I am not going to arrive in a life I have deliberately chosen and immediately recreate the conditions I want relief from.

The mornings are my favorite part of the day here. Nobody who needs me back home is awake yet.

There is something deeply relieving about being unreachable without actually being unavailable. The world I usually respond to has not begun moving. No one is waiting. No inbox has gathered enough momentum to feel urgent. No conversation has advanced without me. For a few hours, I am released from the sensation that something may already be underway.

Eight in the morning can melt casually into one o’clock in the afternoon. And, even at one, I can often realistically rest until three.

That kind of openness once made me uneasy. I interpreted it as waste. I looked at the hours and wondered whether I was using them correctly. I felt pressure to convert the quiet into productivity, growth, planning, exercise, content, reflection, improvement, or some other recognizable form of value.

Now, I am beginning to understand that the quiet is not keeping me from my life. It is part of my life.

My afternoons are productive because that is when the rest of the world begins to find me. Emails arrive. Meetings happen. Conversations pick up. Work moves forward. There is an ease to this division that I once resisted. I no longer need every part of the day to serve every purpose. The morning can be slow. The afternoon can be useful. The night can belong to curiosity and connection.

At night, I walk. I roam the streets. I people-watch. I sit outside. I devour gelato. (The gelato stand hates to see me coming.) And, I follow whatever catches my attention. Sometimes I visit somewhere with intention. Sometimes I simply allow the evening to reveal itself.

The existence of work or responsibility does not change. But the degree to which I allow myself to live inside the life surrounding them does. I am still building. I am still writing. I’m still desperately searching for the next opportunity. I am still responding to people, making decisions, and moving projects forward. I am just doing it from a nervous system that is not permanently braced.

This might be the closest I have ever come to understanding rest: Rest is not necessarily the absence of effort. It is the absence of resistance. It is the experience of not fighting the conditions of the day. It is allowing the hour to be what it is without immediately trying to extract more from it.

Radical acceptance becomes my primary coping mechanism.

I do not mean resignation. I do not mean passivity. I do not mean abandoning agency or pretending that every circumstance is desirable.

I mean the willingness to stop arguing with conditions I already understand.

The time difference is the time difference. The language barrier is the language barrier. The shop may close before I arrive. The client may not respond until tomorrow. My family is probably not about to call with an emergency. The street vendor will still be there after lunch. The work will still be there at three o’clock.

The day does not need to resemble the one I would have lived somewhere else in order to count. There is freedom in accepting that. There is also something unsettling: Once I experience a nervous system that is not permanently braced, I begin to understand how much of my life has been lived in false anticipation.

I notice the tightness I once called focus. I notice the urgency I once called motivation. I notice how often I confuse being on edge with being engaged. And, I begin to see that what feels like readiness may actually be fear rehearsed until it becomes familiar.

I do not think this experience belongs exclusively to Americans, but I recognize something distinctly American in it.

We are taught to regard rest as the space between useful activities. We turn leisure into self-improvement. We turn hobbies into income. We optimize our mornings, quantify our sleep, track our movement, measure our attention, and ask what every experience is producing. We become suspicious of time that does not generate an outcome.

Even our freedom tends to arrive with an agenda. What did you see? What did you learn? What did you accomplish? What are you building? What comes next?

That last question follows me everywhere.

What’s next?

It appears when I finish a piece of work. It appears when I reach a goal. It appears when I sit on a bench. It appears in the middle of a quiet morning that has not asked anything of me yet. It is less a question than a reflex, a small internal demand that the present moment needs to explain where it is leading.

The question is not always harmful. It has carried me through difficult years. It has helped me leave situations I have outgrown, survive periods of uncertainty, and build things I once believed were beyond me. There are times when “what’s next?” is exactly the question that needs to be asked. But it is not the only question worth living by.

There are moments when “what’s next?” is less an expression of curiosity than an inability to accept what is here. It becomes a way of withholding attention from the present until the present proves useful. It insists that each moment justify itself by pointing toward another.

I feel this even in Texas, where I live only an hour behind many of the people I work with and still wake with the sense that the day has already started without me. I am less and less meaningfully displaced by time, but I carry the emotional experience of being late like oversized luggage. (What is the cost?)

That is how I know Porto is not the lesson. Porto is simply where the lesson becomes easier to see.

I am learning to recognize the moment when anticipation becomes unnecessary. I am learning to notice when my hand reaches for my phone before there is anything to check. I am learning to sit on the bench even when some part of me believes I should be moving.

Sometimes I still need to walk first.

Sometimes I still need a museum, a river, a long street, or a sunset powerful enough to interrupt the noise. Wonder, as I know it, is what allows (if not forces) the body to rest. Sometimes rest is the only thing that makes wonder possible.

I am not trying to perfect this. I am trying to practice it; to allow a morning to remain a morning; to let the world begin without me; to work when the work arrives; to stop measuring the day against a life taking place somewhere else; to trust that being present does not make me less responsible.

The old question still returns.

What’s next?

Lately, I am trying not to answer it immediately. I let it sit beside me. I let it become restless the way I know all good things do.

I look at the river, or the people passing, or the cappuccino I have not finished yet. I notice the urge to move forward before I have fully arrived.

And then, quietly, I ask something else: What if nothing needs to be next? What if we lift the drawbridge of this moment? What if, for now, this is enough?

For me, it has never been exclusively about dating. Some of my favorite travel experiences have begun with a coffee, a museum recommendation, or an afternoon spent wandering a neighborhood with someone who already calls that place home. It’s become part of my ritual of arrival.

One of the first people I matched with was a local photographer. Around my age, deeply curious, unmistakably creative. Handsome, sure. We exchanged the usual early messages before our conversation drifted toward the work each of us spends our time making.

Then he said something that caught me completely off guard: “if you have a blog or something like that you can share with me, i would love to read it.”

I hesitated.

Not because I didn’t have anything to send him, but because of what the question actually meant.

It’s one thing to tell someone you’re a writer. It’s another to hand them something you’ve written. To say, “This is how I think. This is how I see the world. Here.” There’s a particular kind of vulnerability in that.

Still, quicker than I probably would have a few months ago, I sent him the link to my Substack.

A few moments later, he sent me his work in return.

His writing revolved around photography and place, thoughtful photojournalistic essays from cemeteries across Europe. I love cemataries, personally, and make a point to visit a city’s biggest everywhere I go. I found myself lingering over every photograph, reading each essay slowly before wandering over to his Instagram, noticing more details I might have otherwise missed.

Meanwhile, he was doing the same with mine. Notifications blinked at the top of my iPhone, with him quoting passages back to me from essays I’d almost forgotten writing.

We weren’t simply making conversation anymore. We were meeting through the things we’d each been quietly building. And somewhere in that exchange, I realized something that had escaped me until then.

For a long time, I thought this newsletter existed to prove something. That was the initial intention anyway. To prove that I could establish and maintain a writing practice. To prove that I was disciplined enough to eventually join a writing group. To prove that I was serious.

In my mind, it had always been preparation for becoming a writer. I don’t think I ever stopped to consider that it had quietly become the thing itself.

Every Sunday, for nearly a year now, I’ve sat down somewhere—sometimes at my kitchen table in Austin, sometimes in a café in Ireland, sometimes from an apartment in Austria or Portugal—and tried to make sense of whatever was haunting my mind or shaping my life that week.

Some essays came easily; others fought me until Sunday afternoon; a few felt unfinished even after I pressed Publish. But together they became something I never intentionally set out to create: a body of work.

I don’t say that to elevate it beyond what it is, just to acknowledge what consistency does over time.

Week after week, ordinary reflections begin accumulating into something larger than any individual essay. They become evidence. Not of perfection or expertise, but of attention. A record of what one person has been paying close enough attention to that they felt it was worth putting into words.

I think that’s why his question stayed with me. He wasn’t asking to see my best piece. He was asking to see what I’d been making. There’s a difference.

When we’re younger, we often imagine creativity as something tangible. We picture paintings leaning against studio walls. Pottery drying on shelves. Sketchbooks filled with drawings. Handmade furniture. Film reels. Quilts. Songs.

I still find myself wishing, every now and then, that my medium lived in the physical world. Something I could point to. Something that occupied space. But maybe writing has been doing that all along. Not on shelves, but in people. Not in a studio, but in a place I return to every week.

Especially because, at this particular moment in my life, I own very little and everything I need fits into a suitcase. My apartment changes by the month. The cafés change by the day. The language outside my window changes by the minute. The people around me change with every step.

Almost everything feels temporary. Except this.

Every Sunday, I know exactly where I’ll be.

Back on the porch.

I hadn’t realized until that conversation that this newsletter has quietly become one of the most stable places in my life. A place I return to regardless of which country I’m sleeping in or what season I’m moving through.

In some ways, it has become a home. Not because it’s fixed, but because I keep returning to it.

I wonder if that’s true of all meaningful creative work. Maybe the goal isn’t simply to make something beautiful. Maybe it’s to build somewhere others can visit. A place that introduces you long before you arrive. A place where someone you’ve never met can spend an hour wandering around and leave feeling like they know you just a little better.

Looking back, I don’t think the most meaningful part of that exchange was that another creative person appreciated my writing.

It was realizing that, when someone asked to see what I’d been making, I finally had an answer. Not an idea. Not a plan. Not something I hoped to create someday. But something real. Something I could lean across the virtual table with and simply say, “Here.”

The truth is, I don’t think I ever set out to make older friends. I just never learned to see age as much of a barrier to connection.

My grandmother spent most of her adult life as a caregiver. After immigrating from Ireland, she built a second family for herself here in the States, many of them older than she was. There were the women she cared for, the friends who became fixtures in our lives, and the relatives who always seemed to have another story waiting to be told. My childhood wasn’t divided neatly into adults and children. It was shared with people who had already lived entire lives before I arrived.

Looking back, I think that shaped me more than I realized.

Even now, whenever I arrive somewhere new, one of the first friendships I tend to make is usually with the oldest soul I can find. Not because older people are automatically wiser (they’re just as varied as anyone else) but because they’ve watched a place become itself. They’ve spent decades watching the same streets, the same people, the same rhythms. Their perspective is naturally wider than mine—not because they’ve seen more of the world, but because they’ve had more time within it. They remember the neighborhood before the new apartments arrived. Before the cafés had lines out the door. Before everyone else discovered it. The traditions that quietly disappeared and the ones that somehow survived. They don’t just know a city; they’ve watched it evolve.

As someone who spends so much of his life moving through places, that’s a kind of knowledge I’m drawn to.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed something else: The conversations I have with my older friends are fundamentally different from the ones I have with people my own age.

My conversations with peers are usually anchored in happenings. Where we’re traveling next. Businesses we’re building. Relationships we’re beginning. Relationships we’re ending. Projects we’re excited about. Goals we’re chasing. The future occupies most of the conversation because, at this stage of life, so much of it still feels unwritten.

My older friends certainly talk about current events and politics and what’s happening in the world. But somehow those conversations almost always find their way back to people.

The friend they’ve had lunch with every Thursday for twenty years. The partnerships and marriages that found evolution instead of ending. The neighbor they couldn’t live without. The neighbor they could. The people they miss. The people they’re grateful for that have never left.

It isn’t that their worlds have become smaller. If anything, they seem larger than mine. They’re simply organized differently.

Relationships have become the geography.

I had lunch recently with my friend Fran, who was my high school art teacher. We’ve been making time to connect for years. Usually once around her birthday in May and once around mine in December. We recently spent a couple of hours catching up before I headed back to Europe. And then, purely by chance, we ran into each other again at the grocery store just as I was leaving town.

As we hugged goodbye, she looked at me and said, “You have no idea how much this connection means to me.”

“Me too,” I replied.

She smiled gently.

“No,” she said. “You have no idea.”

I’ve thought about that moment ever since. I don’t think she was questioning whether I cared. I think she was reminding me that we experience time differently.

For a long time, I assumed I was the one benefiting most from these friendships. I got the stories, the perspective, the local history. But somewhere along the way I realized that friendship isn’t mentorship in disguise. It’s still friendship. Fran wasn’t grateful because she had someone younger to talk to. She was grateful because we had continued choosing one another’s company, year after year.

At thirty-six, I still tend to assume there will be another lunch. Another visit. Another chance to circle back through town. That’s how most of us move through early and middle adulthood. We live as though time is generous.

My older friends don’t seem pessimistic about time. They just seem more acquainted with it.

They know how unusual it is to reconnect with someone after years apart. They know how many people they thought they’d see again but never did. Every return carries a little more weight because they’ve learned, firsthand, that not all returns happen.

I’ve noticed something else about older friends, too.

They’re remarkably poor at pretending.

If the government is failing people, my friend Dona (who is 81) will tell you exactly how she feels about it. If a restaurant isn’t worth the price, she’ll let you know that too.

Fran, after lunch, looked at me for a second and said, almost matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen you with a belly before.”

I chuckled with embarassment.

She wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t seen one before either.

Very few people in my life would say something that direct. Fewer still could say it that way and get away from it unscathed.

It’s flattering to know there is a freedom on her side of the friendship that has outgrown performance. To stop spending so much energy protecting one another from honesty and start trusting that honesty itself is an act of care.

The older I get, the more grateful I become for these friendships.

Not because they give advice all the time. Most of them don’t.

Not because they’ve figured everything out. They certainly haven’t.

I’m grateful because they’ve lived long enough to know what keeps mattering after everything else changes.

I’ve spent much of my adult life collecting experiences. New cities. New countries. New work. New ideas. I hope I never stop. Curiosity has given my life a shape I wouldn’t trade for anything.

But spending time with people who are further down the road has made me wonder if, eventually, our lives begin to organize themselves around something quieter.

Not the places we’ve been. Not the accomplishments we’re most proud of. But the people we’re still calling. The people we’re still having lunch with. The people we’re genuinely delighted to run into at the grocery store.

Maybe that’s why I keep finding friends in their seventies and eighties. Or maybe they’ve been finding me all along.

Either way, they’ve given me something I don’t think I could have found on my own: the chance to see my own life through a wider lens.

I typically raw dog my flights. No movie. No music. No podcast. Just a window seat, a few hours, and whatever decides to surface.

My mind moves through thought topics like a casino slot machine. Family, work, relationships. Work, childhood, travel. Travel, relationships, future. Childhood, relationships, family. Future, relationships, family. The combinations keep spinning until eventually something lands.

It was ‘dreams, dreams, dreams’ on a recent flight between Minneapolis and Philadelphia. Not any particular dream but the role dreams play in our lives. Jackpot.

I’ve always been fascinated by the things that call to us. The places we want to go. The people we hope to become. The visions we carry for how we’d like our lives to look and feel. Some dreams arrive loudly. Others whisper for years. Some feel practical and attainable. Others seem to come from somewhere beyond logic entirely.

What struck me during that flight wasn’t the dreams themselves. It was the way they follow us. The way they evolve. The way they quietly change shape as we do.

Dreams often arrive as destinations when we’re young: a career; a relationship; a city; a home; a title; a certain kind of life.

We imagine that one day we’ll arrive and discover that we’ve finally become the person we were trying to be. But the older I get, the more I wonder if dreams were ever meant to work that way.

I think my biggest dream was to survive.

That might sound heavier than I mean it to but it’s true.

For a long time, I mistook the things I wanted for the reasons I wanted them. I wanted acceptance. I wanted professional growth. I wanted stability. I wanted independence. But, looking back now, many of those dreams were proxies for something deeper. Acceptance was really belonging. Professional growth was really security. Stability was really safety. Freedom was really the belief that my life could become larger than the circumstances I found myself inside.

Nearly ten years ago, I sat on a bench overlooking the Surf City bay on Long Beach Island and had the distinct feeling that the water was rising. It wasn’t, of course. But life was.

Responsibilities seemed to be accumulating faster than I knew how to carry them. The future felt smaller than I wanted it to feel. I couldn’t see a roadmap forward. I couldn’t see an exit. I couldn’t even clearly articulate what I wanted. I just knew I wanted more room than I felt I had.

What I couldn’t see at the time was that freedom had already become the dream. Not travel. Not entrepreneurship. Not living abroad. Freedom. The others were simply manifestations of it.

Ten years ago, I desperately wanted this life. I wanted flexibility. I wanted autonomy. I wanted the ability to wake up and make choices that felt like my own. I wanted the freedom to follow curiosity.

Today, many of those things have become so ordinary that I rarely stop to acknowledge them. Working for myself. Spending summers abroad. Building a life that isn’t tied to a single zip code. These things used to live on vision boards and journal pages. Now they’re calendar entries.

That’s the strange thing about dreams: the ones that come true often stop looking like dreams. They become normal. Almost part of the furniture. Background scenery. And if we’re not careful, we can become so focused on the next dream that we forget to notice the fulfillment of the last one. But, somewhere above the clouds, another realization surfaced.

A twenty-year-old dream can quietly become a burden. Because we change—not because we fail. Sometimes we remain loyal to dreams that belonged to earlier versions of ourselves. We continue chasing outcomes long after we’ve outgrown the person who wanted them. We cling to destinations when the real gift was the direction they pointed us in.

I’ve come to believe that dreams aren’t contracts. They’re correspondence. They arrive to tell us something. And then they change as we do.

The dream that once taught us courage may later teach us surrender. The dream that taught us independence may eventually teach us connection. The dream that helped us escape may one day invite us to stay.

These days, the dream I’m revising has less to do with freedom than it does with presence. Less to do with getting somewhere than understanding how I want to show up once I arrive. How I serve. How I contribute. How I participate in the lives and communities around me. How I spend the finite hours that make up a life. The questions have changed.

Maybe that’s what growing up really is. Not abandoning our dreams. Not achieving them but staying in conversation with them and allowing them to evolve as we evolve. Allowing them to reveal the deeper truths hidden beneath them.

I’ve come to think of dreams as points in a constellation. For years, we focus on individual stars; the promotion; the relationship; the move; the business; the adventure. Only later do we step back far enough to see the pattern they were drawing all along.

What if the purpose of a dream isn’t to arrive there? What if its purpose is to move us toward the next version of ourselves?

Maybe that’s why the most important dreams never truly disappear. They simply keep pointing us forward, one star at a time.

Bluebirds used to gather outside my apartment window every morning. The first apartment I had here in Austin. And, not one or two. Dozens.

They’d fill the branches of the tree outside my second-floor window and chatter away while I made coffee. Sometimes I’d catch myself staring at them longer than I intended, mug cooling in my hand while they carried on with whatever important bluebird business had brought them there.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. Then again, we rarely recognize symbols while we’re standing inside them. Only later do we look back and realize something had been trying to get our attention all along.

I’ve been thinking about departures lately. Naturally. Not the kind with slammed doors or impossible decisions. The quieter variety. The kind that come disguised as acceptance. The kind where nobody has done anything wrong. The kind where the ending isn’t a surprise because you’ve been watching it creep closer for weeks, feeling it approach from miles away.

I think we’ve been taught to believe that certainty should make leaving easier. It doesn’t. Sometimes certainty just removes the argument. You stop debating reality. You stop trying to negotiate with timing. You stop pretending there is one more conversation capable of changing the shape of things. And then you’re left with the harder task: Accepting what you already know.

For most of my life, I’ve been remarkably good at leaving. Different cities. Different apartments. Different countries. Different versions of myself. It’s in my blood and bones. A hardwired condition of my existence. I called ten places “home” before my tenth birthday.

While movement has always less frightening than staying still, there is a particular kind of departure that remains difficult no matter how many times you’ve practiced it: Leaving behind possibility.

Not a relationship. Not even a person. Possibility.

The possibility of an imagined future that exists only in your mind. The possibility buried in the story you started writing before life decided to edit the ending. Those are the departures that linger.

Because possibility never arrives with evidence. It arrives with potential. And potential is easy to love. Potential asks very little of us. Reality requires something else entirely.

The older I get, the more I notice how often grief and gratitude arrive together with that signature ebb and flow.

You meet someone who reminds you parts of yourself are still alive. Gratitude. You realize they may not be part of your story in the way you briefly imagined. Grief. You discover both things can be true at the same time. More gratitude.

There was a season of my life when I believed every meaningful connection was meant to become something. A relationship. A business. A friendship. A future.

Now I’m less certain.

Sometimes people arrive simply to reveal a truth. Sometimes they show us what we’re ready for. Sometimes they show us what we’re no longer willing to settle for. Sometimes they remind us we’re capable of feeling excited, hopeful, vulnerable, interested, curious. And then they continue on their way.

The lesson remains even when the person doesn’t. I used to think that was failure. Now I think that’s life.

This summer’s departure is different than the one that took me out of Philadelphia. It’s not purely about wayfinding. It’s about placemaking. I’ll spend time in places I’ve grown to love, places I’ve never been, and places I’ve been longing to revisit.

I’ll walk streets that already know my footsteps. Sit in cafés with no chance of running into anyone who needs something from me. Return to coastlines that somehow feel both foreign and familiar.

Years ago, those departures were an escape. Now they feel different. Now they feel like a return. That’s the strange thing I’ve discovered about building a life over time.

Eventually you stop traveling to find yourself. You travel carrying yourself. The search becomes less urgent. The movement becomes less about reinvention and more about expansion. You don’t leave because you’re lost. You leave because you’re alive.

Maybe that’s what the bluebirds were trying to tell me all those mornings. Movement isn’t abandonment. Flight isn’t rejection. The sky was never a place they escaped to. It was simply where they belonged. And perhaps growing older is learning the difference.

Learning that some chapters are meant to be carried forward and others are meant to be released. Learning that appreciation doesn’t require possession. Learning that a beautiful thing can end before it fully begins and still leave your life better than it found it.

Most of all, learning that letting go is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it’s the proof of it. So here we go. Not because leaving is easy. Not because I have to. Not because certainty has removed the ache. Not because every question has been answered.

But because the wings still work. Because the horizon is still there. Because the next chapter won’t write itself. And because, every now and then, life gently places a bluebird outside your window and reminds you what it was built to do.

Fly.

By then, the apartment starts to change shape all by itself. The rhythms loosen. The piles begin. Chargers are gathered from outlets. Laundry gets folded directly into organized stacks instead of casually tossed over a chair. Open tabs become bookmarked lists. I check flight times and weather forecasts more often than necessary.

But first, usually two days before departure, I cook. I make whatever is left in the house. Eggs become breakfast burritos. Vegetables get roasted before they spoil. Rice gets stretched into lunches. If there’s enough left over, I make myself something for the airport. If not, almonds and protein bars usually do the trick. Nomadic living, at least the sustainable kind, is less about spontaneity than systems. Leaving well is a skill. And over the years, I’ve gotten very good at it.

The day after cooking comes packing: I store almost everything I own in plastic bins spread across a handful of places now: Philadelphia, Ireland, Austin. Clothes. Linens. Kitchenware. Cables. Cold-weather gear. Books I’m not ready to part with but not ready to carry either. Everything labeled. Everything organized. Everything designed to make movement easier the next time around.

In Ireland and Philadelphia, I even keep what I jokingly call “go bags”: a few preferred outfits, toiletries, chargers, enough familiarity to soften the landing if I need to keep moving after I arrive. I like knowing that I can land tired, grab the bag, and go—in all of my familiar places.

People imagine this lifestyle as perpetual motion. In reality, it’s infrastructure.

What most people are really asking when they ask about nomadic living is whether it feels lonely. Whether it feels untethered. Whether, eventually, you start wanting a place to stay.

The truth is more complicated than that.

The older I get, the less interested I am in escape. I’m not searching for a fantasy version of life anymore. I’m trying to build one that feels expansive enough to hold multiple versions of home at once.

That was part of the reason I came to Austin in the first place.

I wanted to prove something to myself: that travel could remain integrated into my life rather than becoming something I only spoke about nostalgically. As soon as the first person warned me of it, I knew I wanted to make good use of the harsh Texas summers as a reason to leave and get back to Europe. I knew I had things to tend to in Ireland. But I also knew I didn’t necessarily need another three uninterrupted months in the same city just because conventional adulthood says that’s what stability looks like.

At first, I thought Lisbon or Barcelona. Then I remembered how much I tend to love secondary cities. Cork, Turin, Frankfurt, and Melbourne all changed me in undeniable ways. And, you’ll notice, these are all cities with a little grit left in them. Places that still feel lived-in. Porto and Madrid suddenly became the frontrunners for July and August, and eventually Porto won.

Porto seemed to offer much of what I loved about Lisbon, but with a slightly different energy. Slower in certain ways. Rougher around the edges in others. A little more grounded. A little less polished. The kind of city where I suspect you can still become a regular somewhere if you stay long enough.

I already have places bookmarked. Cult of Pita. Muu Steakhouse. Mercado Porto Belo. Urban Market. Early for a slow weekend morning. Wish You Were Here for the kinds of nights that usually begin with “just one drink” and somehow become something larger than that.

Before Porto, though, there are other stops: New Orleans for Switchback, the outdoor industry gathering that increasingly feels like a family reunion disguised as a trade show. Then Philadelphia for ten days to celebrate my brothers graduating high school and to spend time with family before crossing the Atlantic again. I leave Philadelphia late on June 30th and land in Portugal the morning of July 1st.

Lately, life has felt full of transitions like that. Endings blending quietly into beginnings before you’ve fully processed either one. There’s grief in this departure that I didn’t fully anticipate. But not because Austin failed me.

Somewhere over these past months, between familiar coffee shops, slow mornings, long walks, conversations that stretched unexpectedly late into the night, and the steady rhythm of building a life here, Austin stopped feeling temporary.

There are departures where you are relieved to leave. This isn’t one of them. There’s unfinished business here. Friendships I want to keep deepening. Corners of the city I still haven’t explored. Work that feels increasingly rooted. For the first time in a long time, I built routines here that I didn’t feel the need to escape from.

And somewhere inside all of that, there was also connection. The kind that arrives slowly enough that you almost miss it while it’s happening. The kind that makes departure feel heavier than expected when the time finally comes to go. Some doors close quietly. Without conflict. Without spectacle. Just two people standing honestly at different edges of timing and readiness. That carries its own kind of grief.

The strange thing about building a life across multiple places is that eventually all of them start to feel like home. Which means every departure contains a little loss now. Every airport becomes a temporary negotiation between excitement and sadness. Between movement and rootedness. Between who you were in one place and who you may become in the next. And who you’ll be when you’re back.

Seasons change. People move. Relationships evolve. Cities enter and exit our lives at different moments for different reasons. The goal was never to outrun attachment. It was to stay open enough to experience it fully while understanding that movement is still part of who I am.

So, I’ve stacked the bins in a friend’s attic and I’m zipping up my trusted 70L Cotopaxi Allpa Duffel. I’ll take one last look around the apartment before turning the lights off and locking the door behind me.

And then I’ll go. Not because I’m running away. Because I promised myself I would keep going. And because, for the first time in a very long time, I finally have a life worth returning to when I come back.

Dear Me,

You’ve spent a lot of your life learning how to survive uncertainty by staying in motion. New cities. New projects. New ideas. New versions of yourself.

Some of that movement was freedom. Some of it was avoidance. Most of it was both at the same time. You don’t need to punish yourself for that anymore.

You were building a life from instinct long before you had language for what you were actually searching for: belonging without captivity. Stability without numbness. Intimacy without self-erasure. Work that meant something. A home that felt alive.

You are closer to those things now than you think. Not because everything is figured out. It isn’t. But because you’ve finally started telling yourself the truth.

You know now that exhaustion is not the same thing as purpose. That being needed is not the same thing as being loved. That admiration is not intimacy. That chemistry is not consistent. That freedom without structure eventually becomes drift.

You also know something equally important:

You are capable of building a life that actually fits you. Not the younger version of you who needed to prove himself. Not the version performing capability for clients. Not the version trying to become indispensable so nobody would leave. Not the version trying to earn belonging through usefulness.

You.

The man who likes slow mornings and meaningful work. The man who wants a storefront filled with texture, conversation, and community. The man who wants people around his table. The man who wants to make things that outlive trends. The man who wants both adventure and somewhere to return to.

That vision is not unrealistic but it does require discipline.

You cannot build a grounded life while romanticizing instability every time things become emotionally complicated. You cannot ask for depth while remaining half-available yourself. You cannot keep treating transition as your permanent identity. All this, while boarding a plane for three months of travel.

At some point, the life you want has to become more interesting than the escape hatch. And to your credit, it finally seems like that’s beginning to happen.

You’re learning that peace is not boredom; that consistency is not creative death; that roots do not cancel out expansion; that commitment—whether to a city, a project, a person, or yourself is not confinement when it’s chosen consciously.

You are not behind. Your timeline only looked strange because you were building internally while other people were building visibly.

A lot of what felt like wandering was actually calibration.

You were learning taste. You were learning discernment. You were learning who you become in different environments; learning what kinds of people make your nervous system tighten versus soften; learning what ambition costs when it’s disconnected from meaning.

That matters but, still, there is a difference between reflection and hesitation.

You know that now, too.

The next chapter of your life probably will not arrive through one singular breakthrough moment. It will arrive through repetition. Through structure. Through staying. Through following through. Through letting your values become logistical instead of philosophical.

And honestly? That may be the bravest thing you’ve done yet: to stay; to no longer search for the ‘better’ version of yourself, to trade constant reinvention for the slow, steady, sustainable of a mindful evolution; to remain for the love of self and the life you have.

Trusting that your life does not need to be constantly disrupted in order to become meaningful. You’ve already survived enough versions of yourself to know this: You will be okay. More than okay, actually.

There is a version of your future that feels calmer, fuller, more reciprocal, more rooted, and more alive than the one you came from. But it won’t be handed to you accidentally.

Choose it deliberately.

Again and again.

Love,
Me

I pretty much booked Australia on a whim.

That is the cleanest way to say it now, though at the time it did not feel clean at all. It felt like a leap. It felt like pressing purchase on a flight before I had the full map of the year ahead. It felt like trusting verbal confirmations from clients, trusting the shape of work that had not yet hardened into contracts, trusting that the money would come, trusting that the world would hold, trusting that I was allowed to want something before I had earned perfect certainty.

I booked the trip in the middle of November 2024. Less than six weeks before I would leave Dublin, to land in Melbourne on Christmas morning.

There is something psychologically confusing about flying over Christmas. Maybe it is the way airports feel both full and abandoned. Maybe it is the way everyone around you seems to be moving toward something familiar while you are moving away from it. Maybe it is the strange permission that comes with being suspended between time zones while the rest of the world continues with dinner tables, wrapping paper, family arguments, weather reports, old traditions, and ordinary expectations.

I left Dublin in winter. I left in fleece and grey air and 30-degree temperatures. I landed in Australia in the summer. In light. In heat. Our landing felt less like an arrival and more like a complete atmospheric interruption.

By the time I got there, Christmas had already become something else. Not the Christmas I knew. Not the Christmas I had been raised around. Cold air was gone, the days were long, and none of the rooms or traditions felt familiar. It was disorientating. I had crossed more than geography. I had crossed out of the usual emotional architecture of the season entirely.

The reason I went was my great-aunt Mary. Gran’s sister.

She was turning eighty-nine three days after Christmas and had no idea I was coming. The plan was simple. Fly in. Surprise her. Attend the birthday celebrations. Meet the extended family I had only ever heard about in stories. Spend the better part of six weeks exploring Australia on my own.

That was the plan.

What happened was something else.

On Christmas morning, still hazy from sleep and lightly concerned about why everyone wanted her up so early, Aunt Mary came into the room and saw me. There was a moment before understanding landed. That tiny gap between seeing and knowing. Then the shock. Then the joy. Then the room changed.

I had imagined the surprise many times before I arrived, but there are some things you cannot rehearse your way into. I had never met many of these people before. They were family, but also strangers. Familiar in name and story, unfamiliar in body and presence. I had come prepared to be polite, grateful, and maybe a little outside of things. I had expected warmth, but I had not expected eagerness. I had not expected people to be as excited to meet me as I was to meet them.

That was the first surprise Australia gave me. Not the landscape. Not the heat. Not the scale of the city. Not even the strange miracle of arriving on the other side of the world on Christmas morning.

It was the feeling of being received.

The first week was not so glamorous. It was mostly sleep.

I have never known jet lag like that. I do not think my body understood what I had done to it. There were days when I had to go to bed at three in the afternoon, or four, or six, and then sleep straight through until one in the morning or three or six. I would wake in the dark with no real sense of where I was. I would stretch. Eat something. Go back to sleep. Try again. It felt like recovery.

That is the word I keep coming back to because it was not just travel fatigue. It was not just time-zone math. It felt physical and spiritual. As if the distance itself had forced my body to shut down all the systems I normally keep running. The old alerts. The old obligations. The old panic. The old habit of being available to every crisis in real time. Australia made that impossible.

The time difference did something to me. It created a distance I could not negotiate my way out of. There were only small windows of the day when a client could reach me and expect a real-time response. And, it showed me how rare of an occurrence this actually is. Outside of those waking windows, work was either something I leaned into or didn’t. A crisis was either still a crisis by the time I woke up, or it had already revealed itself to be noise.

That geography forced a prioritization I had not known how to choose on my own, too. For the first time in a long time, I was too far away to perform urgency at full volume. I was too tired to pretend everything mattered equally. I was too physically disrupted to maintain the same relationship to stress. “You’re a day ahead of whatever it is,” quickly became my mantra whenever the phone rang.

The distance did not solve anything. It did not make my life suddenly easier. But it changed the way my body received the demands placed on it. And inside that change, there was space. Space for excitement. Space for appetite. Space for curiosity. Space for constructive things. Expansive things. Space to let the day become more than a container for someone else’s need.

The first week, I slept, stretched, ate, and slowly came back to myself.

I also discovered chili scramble. This feels important to mention. Because not every resurrection is some grand celebration. Sometimes it is eggs.

In Australia, chili scramble is everywhere, and it’s rarely careless. It is not a heap of eggs slopped onto a plate because someone needed to move breakfast along. It is plated with attention. Scrambled eggs, soft and generous, dressed with crispy heat, herbs, sourdough, and some form of brightness. That, paired with coffee, iced water, and an orange juice, is a breakfast that feels awake.

At Brick Lane, tucked near Flagstaff Gardens, I ordered eggs and found myself returning to life bite by bite. Heat in the mouth. Coffee on the table. The city outside already moving. My body still lagging behind the clock, but something in me beginning to catch up. I think the chili scrambles brought me back.

By the time I felt normal enough to leave the softened rhythm of recovery, my cousins Little John and Ash took me down the Great Ocean Road with Ash’s kids. I had spent weeks loosely planning Australia and somehow had not understood that this road existed in the way it does. I had not understood that a day could unfold with that much beauty in it and still feel unforced.

We stopped again and again. Viewpoint after viewpoint. Coastline after coastline. The sea opening in impossible blues. Cliffs dropping down into surf. Long bends in the road where the land seemed to keep revealing another version of itself.

The generosity of it is what stays with me.

Not just the landscape, though the landscape was astonishing. Not just the Twelve Apostles, which are no longer twelve but still hold the strange authority of a natural wonder. Not just the waterfall tucked into eucalyptus, the smell of the trees so aromatic it felt medicinal. Not just the first Australian iced coffee, made with vanilla ice cream instead of milk or half-and-half, which felt completely excessive and completely correct.

It was the fact that they wanted to take me.

They wanted to show me something. They wanted to spend the day doing something they knew I would love. Historical things. Adventurous things. Coastal things. Things I had built whole parts of my life around seeking.

That eagerness was almost trippy. I had not grown up inside this particular branch of the family. I knew names. Stories. Fragments. The kind of inherited knowledge that makes people feel both intimate and far away. But there I was, on the other side of the world, being driven along one of the most beautiful roads I had ever seen by people who had every reason to treat me like a guest and instead treated me like someone they had been waiting to fold in.

I was buzzing for weeks after that day. I am still buzzing a little, even now.

After the Great Ocean Road, something opened. I had slept enough. I had eaten enough chili scramble. I had begun to understand the heat. I had begun to understand the shape of the city. I had begun to feel the strange privilege of being far enough away from my familiar life that my familiar anxieties could not reach me with the same force.

So I did what I always do when a place starts to become real: I tried to live there.

I learned the routes. I walked the city. I made coffee stops part of my morning. I wandered through shops. I sat in parks. I let the tram system become less intimidating. I watched how people moved through the day. I tried to understand the pace, the posture, the casual rituals.

Melbourne was not what I expected. For some reason, I had imagined something smaller. More residential. Maybe a handful of skyscrapers and a lot of natural beauty around the edges. There was natural beauty, yes. But the city itself was enormous. Dense. Vertical. Alive. Dozens of skyscrapers. Millions of people. “Locals” by way of western Europe, Asia, America, and beyond. Tourists. Tennis players in town for the Australian Open. Workers. Families on their summer holidays. Students on their gap year. Everyone moving through peak summer as if the whole place had been turned up slightly louder.

I stayed at Nesuto Docklands, a serviced apartment building designed for longer stays, and it gave me exactly what I needed. A room with enough function to feel settled. Staff who paid attention. A base. Docklands was not where my heart ultimately landed, but it gave me the structure to arrive properly.

From there, the city became accessible. Melbourne’s central business district held me more than I expected. The range of it. The diversity. The public life. The shopping corridors. The laneways. The ease of falling into a coffee shop or a museum or a tram line or a park. There was a hum to it that I understood quickly.

I found Federal Coffee in the middle of Bourke Street and made it a mid-morning reset. Coffee. People watching. The ordinary pleasure of being briefly anonymous in a busy city that did not feel indifferent.

There are cities where anonymity feels like disappearance. Melbourne made anonymity feel like participation. You could be alone without being erased. You could sit with a coffee and watch the day move around you and still feel somehow inside the life of the place.

Family helped me see more than I would have seen alone. My cousin John, Lil’ John’s dad, took me to Sovereign Hill in Ballarat—an old gold-mining town where the early settlement story sits inside dust, costume, machinery, ambition, and that familiar human hunger for a better life somewhere else. Another day, John and his wife Loretta and her brother Stephen took me off-roading out to Craig’s Hut, an iconic wooden cabin perched in the mountains a few hours outside the city. Again, history and adventure. Again, people choosing to show me something not because they had to, but because they had listened closely enough to understand what might light me up.

I was not prepared for that kind of attention. I was not prepared for how emotional it would feel to have people I had just met make plans around my interests. Not vague plans. Not obligatory hospitality. Real plans. Roads. Museums. Mountains. Old towns. Coastal drives. Meals. Conversations. The kind of welcome that bypasses performance and lands somewhere deeper.

Melbourne felt like acceptance in a way I had not known before. The city gave me one kind of belonging. The family gave me another. And then, unexpectedly, strangers gave me another still.

I have a history of using dating apps as a way to meet people in new places. There are pros and cons to this approach. I know that. It can be messy. It can blur intention (both ways). It can create false intimacy or transactional closeness. But in Melbourne, something different happened.

Most people felt more grounded. Intentional. Physically present. That sounds simple, but it was not simple to me then. I was still in a re-explorative phase around my sexuality. Before leaving Philadelphia, I had met someone who made me feel, in a way that startled me, that I could imagine spending my life with a woman. Then I left. Ireland, Italy, Germany. Movement upon movement. City after city. I did not really lean into emotional intimacy during that stretch. I was traveling, yes, but also quietly holding something. Testing what I wanted. Testing what felt true. Testing how much of myself I was ready to let be visible.

In Melbourne, that testing became less theoretical. Sometimes someone wanted to show me a bar. Sometimes someone wanted to show me their favorite hike. One person wanted to help me understand public transit, so we rode trams through the city as if that was a perfectly reasonable way to spend time with someone new. Another bloke and I walked around Fitzroy one evening, then ended up lying in the grass of a local park as the sun went down, talking while bats moved above us.

That image has stayed with me. Not because it became something grand. Not because it resolved into romance. But because it represented a kind of ease I had not known to expect: Two men in the grass at sunset. No rush to define it. No immediate pressure to make it useful. No performance of hardness. Just bodies in a park. Conversation. Heat leaving the day. Bats circling overhead.

The strange intimacy of being beside someone while a city moves into evening around you. It disrupted something in me.

My expectations around male intimacy had been shaped by absence, guardedness, performance, tension, longing, and the long private work of figuring out what desire meant when it was not yet fully spoken. Melbourne did not solve that. A city does not solve a life. But it showed me something. It showed me that closeness could arrive through ease. That connection could feel grounded instead of frantic. That physical presence did not have to become immediate possession. That wanting could breathe.

For a few weeks, I had a routine.

That was when Australia clicked. Not at the airport. Not on Christmas morning. Not even on the Great Ocean Road, though that day lives in me as one of the great days of my life. It clicked when I stopped counting the trip and started inhabiting the days.

I had my own interests. My own routes. My own breakfast spots. My own coffee breaks. I saw Aunt Mary weekly. I made friends. I knew where to go when I wanted to work. I knew which neighborhoods pulled me in. I knew where I wanted to walk. I knew what kind of morning I could build.

At some point, I lost sight of the fact that I would have to leave. And, for the record, for anyone planning for nomadic existence, that is when a place becomes dangerous.

Not dangerous in the obvious sense. Dangerous because it starts making a claim. Dangerous because a life begins to take shape without asking permission from the life you already have. Dangerous because you begin to imagine ordinary things there. Groceries. Rent. A favorite table. A regular walk. A person texting you to see if you want to make the most of the time you have left, except the ache beneath that sentence is that the time is already measuring itself.

I remember trying to convince the bloke from Fitzroy that we should let whatever that was be what it was. To make the most of our time. To force ourselves to lean as far in as possible, even though I only had two weeks left in the city. Even though heartbreak was almost certainly guaranteed.

That is a difficult kind of honesty. Not because it asks for forever. Because it does not. It asks for presence without guarantee.

And maybe that is what Australia kept teaching me. Presence without guarantee. Joy without certainty. Belonging without ownership. A life glimpsed before it was secured. All the while, underneath the beauty, there was tension.

I had booked the trip on faith. I had verbal assurances that work would continue. I had reason to believe the year ahead was stable enough. But while I was in Australia, I learned that my biggest client at the time was losing their business after a period of gross negligence, and that the long-promised past-due balance on our earlier retainer agreement might not be coming at all.

By the time I was preparing to leave Melbourne, parts of my life felt suspended.

I was not walking around in a constant state of panic. That is important to say because it would be easy to flatten the story into crisis. It was not crisis in the obvious way. The trip had done something to my nervous system. The distance had changed how much urgency I could absorb. But the information was there. The uncertainty was there. The possibility that the security I had worked so hard to build might not be as secure as I had believed.

And still, I chose to live inside the trip. I am proud of that now. I am proud that I did not let uncertainty steal the whole thing from me. I am proud that I let myself be there. Fully. Not perfectly. Not without fear. But there. On the road. In the parks. At breakfast. On balconies. In museums. With family. With strangers. With the version of myself that had enough space to feel excitement again.

That feels connected to the moment I am in now.

I have been trying to align myself only with relationships and projects that feel secure, mutual, and in service of something real. Not because everything must be safe. Not because risk is bad. But because uncertainty created by negligence is different from uncertainty created by growth. One drains you. The other asks something of you.

Australia was risk. But it was not reckless. It was a leap toward life.

When it came time to leave Melbourne, I cried while packing. I was not sobbing. This wasn’t a total collapse. Just tears. Happy tears, mostly. Gratitude moving through the body with nowhere else to go.

I was texting with cousins in Ireland, trying to explain what had happened over those weeks. Trying to unpack the road ahead. The stops between Melbourne and Sydney. The days still to come. The return that would eventually follow.

And then I realized I did not really want to go back to Ireland either.

That realization complicated things. Ireland had been important. Italy had been important. Even that brief albeit long weekend in Germany had been important.

Each place has shown me something, stripped something from me, restored something in me, and redirected something around me. But Melbourne had done something different. Melbourne had not only given me experience. It had given me evidence.

Evidence that I could belong somewhere in a way that did not require shrinking.

Evidence that family could be expansive.

Evidence that male intimacy could feel warm and grounded.

Evidence that a city could hold ambition and softness at the same time.

Evidence that if I had just a few more weeks, a life might begin to take shape.

That was the unfinished business. Not a missed museum. Not a restaurant I did not get to try. Not a neighborhood I failed to fully explore.

A life.

I left Melbourne and drove toward Sydney by way of the southeastern coast. Originally, I had planned to move through that stretch in three to five days. I had expected Sydney to be the larger destination, the big finish, the iconic end. But Aunt Mary advised me to avoid spending too much time there and to give the coast as much room as possible. And, Aunt Mary is never wrong.

I am grateful I listened. I stopped first in Lakes Entrance, then Merimbula, then Batemans Bay. Motel rooms. Coastal roads. Water appearing and disappearing beside me. That particular kind of road-trip solitude where you are alone, but not lonely exactly. Just in motion. Your life packed into bags. Your next room waiting somewhere ahead. Your mind moving through everything that has happened and everything you do not yet know how to name.

Batemans Bay became a five-day-long slow-motion exhale.

For some reason, I remembered it as longer. Until writing this, I would have told you I was there for more than a week. Maybe that is because it expanded. Maybe some places do that when they give your nervous system exactly what it needs.

My room had two balconies overlooking one of the most beautiful natural marine spaces I have ever had daily access to. I could sit there and feel my lungs swell and release with the tide outside my window. That is not metaphorical in the decorative sense. It felt physical. Breath matching water. Body remembering how to release.

After Melbourne’s intensity, Batemans Bay gave me a different kind of belonging. Not social belonging. Elemental belonging.

Water. Air. Light. Tide. Balcony. Quiet.

I had other cousins nearby, about half an hour south, and I connected with them too. That mattered. (Partially because they brought me to the best Beef Basil Stir-fry known to man, and also the kinship.) But much of Batemans Bay was solitude in the best sense. Solitude without abandonment. Solitude with a view. Solitude that lets the body digest what the heart has been too busy receiving.

There was no romance in it. But there was a meeting that felt important: I met a local yoga teacher who seemed, in some quiet way, like a future version of myself. He had trained locally, earning his yoga teaching certification with a local practice, but he was also well-traveled. He moved between Australia, Europe, and Asia, personally and professionally. He had integrated movement, work, travel, place, and practice into a life that did not require the old division between ambition and freedom.

I remember thinking, I want to be like this guy. In this place. Not literally him. Not exactly his life. But the integration. The ease of it. The evidence that a person could build a life around movement without becoming ungrounded. That travel could be more than escape. That professional life could stretch across geography. That the body could be part of the work, not an afterthought to recover from after the work had taken everything.

Batemans Bay gave me that image: A man by the coast. Trained in something embodied. Connected to a local place. Moving through the world. Returning to water. Not frantic. Not endlessly proving. Still building. Still participating. Still free.

I had been thinking about all the ways I might integrate travel into my personal and professional life during the drive, and then there he was. A version of the question, standing in front of me.

That is one of the stranger gifts of travel. Sometimes the landscape gives you beauty. Sometimes the people give you welcome. Sometimes a stranger gives you a model.

After Batemans Bay, Sydney was hard. I spent three nights and four long days there over the Australia Day holiday. The city was packed. The sun was brutal. Crowds pushed me away from the major museums and tourist sites I might have otherwise tried to see. I mostly roamed the streets, sat in parks, and read.

Sydney did not hold me the way Melbourne did. But maybe it did not need to. By the time I arrived, I had already received the trip’s central offering. Sydney became contrast. A reminder that not every famous place becomes intimate. Not every destination asks to be claimed. Sometimes a city is impressive and still not yours.

That realization made leaving easier.

If Sydney had opened the same way Melbourne had, departure might have been unbearable. Instead, Sydney gave me heat, crowds, distance, and a quieter ending. I sat in the park and read. I let the days pass. I let the country begin to loosen its grip. Still, Australia as a whole stayed with me.

People often ask me, of all the places I have been, which was my favorite. I can see the question forming as soon as I mention Australia. The lights go on. They hold back just long enough for me to rattle through the list, but I can feel what they expect. They expect Australia.

For a long time, I did not say that. I would say, “Everywhere was different.” And that was true. Everywhere was different from the life I had been living in Philadelphia. Every place carried its own weather, its own lesson, its own version of aliveness. Ireland gave me one thing. Turin gave me another. Florence another. Verona another. Munich another. Melbourne another.

It felt too simple to name a favorite.

Then my mother was surprised when I did not immediately say Australia. “I thought you’d say Australia,” she told me.

Her surprise surprised me.

But maybe she could hear something I had not fully admitted. Maybe she had noticed the way I lit up when I talked about it. Maybe the evidence was there in my voice before it was there in my conclusions.

There is something in that. The way I almost cannot believe I did it at all. The way I still think about the heat of Christmas morning, Aunt Mary’s face, the cliffs on the Great Ocean Road, the bats over Fitzroy, the balcony in Batemans Bay, the chili scramble, the iced coffee with ice cream, the cousins who wanted to show me their version of the country, the room in Docklands where I cried because I had been so grateful to belong somewhere so quickly.

Australia did not become my favorite because it was perfect. It became important because it gave me a picture of the life I actually want to build.

A life with space. A life with movement, but not constant escape. A life where work does not get to colonize every hour of the day simply because technology makes me reachable. A life with chosen routines in cities that make me feel awake. A life with coffee shops and coastal roads and museums and family and physical presence and bodies in parks at sunset. A life where ambition is still present, but not at the expense of breath. A life where I can be both rooted and roaming. A life where the geography itself helps me remember what matters.

That is what Australia did to me. It took me far enough away from the familiar that I could hear a different rhythm. Then it placed me among people who seemed genuinely glad I had come. Then it showed me roads and coastlines and rooms and meals and conversations that made me feel, maybe for the first time in a very long time, that expansion did not have to be lonely.

I went to Australia to surprise Aunt Mary for her eighty-ninth birthday.

I did do that.

But Australia surprised me back.

It showed me that I could be received. That I could recover. That I could want more. That I could survive uncertainty without handing my entire emotional life over to it. That the future might not arrive as a five-year plan. It might arrive as a morning in a new city when you realize you know where to get breakfast. As a cousin, asking if you want to see something beautiful. As a stranger lying beside you in the grass while bats move through the evening sky. As a balcony where your lungs finally match the tide.

And once a place shows you that, you do not really leave it cleanly. You carry it forward. Not as nostalgia. Not only as nostalgia but as evidence.

Where You’d Find Me in Melbourne

Nesuto Docklands

80 Waterfront Way, Docklands VIC 3008

Nesuto Docklands was my base in Melbourne, and it worked beautifully for a longer stay. It is a newer serviced apartment building, which meant I had the structure and function of a furnished apartment without being fully on my own. The staff were excellent. Attentive, accommodating, and quietly aware of the details that make a longer stay feel easier.

Docklands was not ultimately the neighborhood I fell hardest for, but it gave me a steady place to land. If you are visiting during the Australian Open, it is especially practical. The location is relatively close to the tennis activity, and during my stay it was frequented by some incredible players. There was something surreal about recovering from jet lag in the same building as people whose bodies were tuned for peak performance.

Brick Lane

33 Guildford Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000

Brick Lane is the breakfast spot that turned me onto chili scramble. It sits close to Flagstaff Gardens, which makes it especially good for a slow morning. Breakfast first. A walk after. No need to rush the order of things.

Their “Eggs Any Way” was the beginning of my love affair with the Australian breakfast plate. I had been so tired that first week, so physically scrambled by the travel, and this was one of the places that helped me return to myself. Coffee, heat, eggs, a well-plated breakfast, the city waiting outside.

Flagstaff Gardens

309-311 William Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003

Flagstaff Gardens became one of those simple city pleasures. Not a grand destination. Not something you need to over-plan. Just a good place to walk after breakfast or sit for a little while when the body needs green space.

I think every good city needs places like this. Small resets. Breathing spaces. Public rooms without walls.

Federal Coffee

350 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000

Federal Coffee became my favorite mid-morning break in the CBD. It is centrally located, which means there is excellent people watching, especially if you have been shopping or wandering through the city.

I liked it because it felt easy to fold into a normal day. Not precious. Not overly designed around being discovered. Just coffee, movement, and the pleasure of sitting inside the pulse of the city for a while.

Melbourne Museum

11 Nicholson Street, Carlton VIC 3053

The Melbourne Museum is an easy recommendation, especially in midsummer when the heat starts to feel relentless. It offers the practical gift of air conditioning, but also the deeper pleasure of stepping into a city’s memory and structure for a few hours.

It is a strong midday break if you are trying to balance outdoor wandering with something slower and more interior. I found it grounding in the way good museums can be. A reminder that every place has layers underneath the version tourists usually see.

National Gallery of Victoria

180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne VIC 3006

The National Gallery of Victoria is another must-visit if you need a summer-day pause. It is spacious, cooling, and generous. A place where you can let the day soften around art.

I would not over-program it. Go when the heat is too much. Go when the city feels too loud. Go when you want to be surrounded by form, color, rooms, and quiet movement.

The Conservatory at Fitzroy Gardens

298 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne VIC 3002

The Conservatory inside Fitzroy Gardens is one of those places that feels small but memorable. It is worth seeing because it offers a slightly different register of beauty. Held, cultivated, floral, calm.

Fitzroy Gardens itself is also worth time. Melbourne has a way of giving you dense urban energy and then, suddenly, somewhere green enough to change your pace.

Industry Beans

70-76 Westgarth Street, Fitzroy VIC 3065

Industry Beans in Fitzroy was one of my favorite places to work from. It is a trendy roastery in a former warehouse, with innovative brunch options and strong house blends. It has the feeling of a place where people are doing things, making things, building things, thinking through things.

For me, Fitzroy was the neighborhood that felt most aligned. If I returned to Melbourne for a longer stretch, I would look seriously at Fitzroy or neighboring Collingwood. There was a creative intelligence to the area that made sense to me. Cafes, shops, parks, texture, a bit of edge, a bit of ease.

Fitzroy and Collingwood

Neighborhoods northeast of Melbourne’s CBD

Fitzroy was my favorite centralized neighborhood in Melbourne. Collingwood, right next door, also had the kind of atmosphere I would want to explore more deeply on a return.

These are the places where I could most clearly imagine a life taking shape. Morning coffee. Work blocks. Evening walks. A loose social rhythm. Interesting shops. Good food. People who seem to be building lives with intention but not sterility.

If Docklands gave me a practical base, Fitzroy gave me the emotional picture.

Country Road

Multiple locations in Melbourne

Country Road was a pleasant surprise. A lot of retailers in Melbourne carried familiar American or European brands, but Country Road felt distinctly Australian in a way I appreciated. It is still fast fashion adjacent, but the quality and design were better than I expected.

For men especially, they make a great short and a strong carryall. I bought an oversized adjustable tote there that I still use regularly, and people stop me all the time to ask where it came from. That is usually a good sign.

Great Ocean Road

Day trip from Melbourne toward the Twelve Apostles

The Great Ocean Road deserves its own post, and I may eventually write one. It was one of the most unforgettable days of my life.

If you have the chance to go, go slowly. Stop often. Let the road be the point, not just the destination. The coastline is astonishing, but so are the smaller moments. Eucalyptus in the air. A waterfall tucked away from the road. The strange joy of an Australian iced coffee made with vanilla ice cream. The feeling of coming around another bend and realizing the landscape still has more to give.

The Twelve Apostles are worth seeing, even if the number has changed. But the day is bigger than that. It is road, water, cliffs, conversation, and the generosity of whoever is willing to experience it with you.

Torquay

Surf Coast, Victoria

Torquay was one of my favorite places in all of Australia. We passed through it briefly during the Great Ocean Road day, and I went back two or three times before leaving Melbourne.

It is a huge surf location, but it did not feel overcomplicated to me. There is a small commercial corridor, then mostly you and the water. People seemed to be there simply to be there. To surf. To walk. To sit. To exist near the sea without making too much of it.

It had that rare quality I always notice in beach towns I love. A sense that life has been organized around the water, not merely placed beside it.

Sovereign Hill

Bradshaw Street, Ballarat VIC 3350

Sovereign Hill is an old gold-mining town in Ballarat, and it gave me a window into the history of early settlement and the hope that pulled people toward new land. It is immersive, historical, and interesting in the way reconstructed places can be when you let yourself take them seriously.

I went with my cousin John, which made it more meaningful. Some places are better when seen through family. You are not only learning the history of a country. You are learning what someone thought was worth showing you.

Craig’s Hut

Mount Stirling, Victoria

Craig’s Hut was part of an off-roading day trip with cousins, and it gave me another version of Australian landscape. Less coastal. More rugged. Mountainous. Expansive in a different register.

The hut itself is iconic, perched in a setting that feels almost cinematic without needing to be exaggerated. The drive, the elevation, the remoteness, the company. All of it made the day feel like a different chapter of the same welcome.

The booking itself was easy. The permission to want it took longer.

I came to Austin in December. February, really, in any meaningful sense. My body arrived immediately but the rest of me caught up some six weeks later, when I stopped waiting to feel like a visitor and started feeling like someone who lived somewhere. That had not happened in a while. I had spent the better part of two years moving: Ireland, Italy, Germany, Australia, places in between. And while I loved the motion, it had also meant I was in a perpetual daydream between the life I was building and the life I was testing. Austin was the first place that didn’t ask me to perform either of those things.

I surrendered. That’s the right word. I stopped pushing for the next thing and let the city have me for a while. By March I was making quiet promises to myself: No overcommitting, no overanalyzing, no forcing the next move before this one had finished speaking.

There’s something genuinely different here. I come from Philadelphia, which I will always love the way you love a difficult family member. With full awareness of why you needed to leave. Austin is not that. The people here are, broadly, happier in the day-to-day way. The way someone at the coffee shop talks to you, or a stranger on a trail does a little more than give a nod. I’ve felt more alive in my regular hours here than I did in years of trying to engineer the right life back home. That started to matter.

And then the fear crept in. The quiet kind that sounds like: what if the impulse to leave has gone quiet? For two years that impulse had been my most reliable compass. It told me when to move, where to go, what I was made of. Standing in a city where I finally felt at ease, I couldn’t hear it the same way. I didn’t know if that meant I had arrived somewhere or if I had simply gotten comfortable. Which are two different things and not always easy to tell apart from the inside.

I joked with an Uber driver a few weeks back. I said, “I tell the Universe, don’t let me meet nobody. Don’t let me fall in love.” She let out roaring knowing laughter, enough to say there was more truth in it than either of us would have to admit out loud.

A lot of people in this country never leave. The cost of travel is real and prohibitive in ways that don’t get discussed enough. I’ve been lucky and deliberate in equal measure, but I also know how easy it is to build a life that quietly makes leaving harder: commitments, routines, relationships that calcify into reasons. The fact that I finally felt stable was the thing I was most grateful for and, at the same time, the thing I trusted least. Safety had been unfamiliar for so long. I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

Porto was not a complicated decision once I stopped resisting the idea of going anywhere. Lisbon came to mind first, but I tend to do better in secondary cities. My month in Turin taught me that a few years ago. When someone passed it along the same way someone here passed along Porto. It turned out to be one of the better decisions I’d made. I like the pace a smaller city offers. The way it makes connection more likely and memory more specific. There’s coast nearby, proximity to other hubs for weekends when I need to move. It felt right the way things sometimes feel right before you can fully explain them.

Then there was the other thing.

I’ve been spending time with someone recently who is, in the clearest terms I have, a lot. In the best possible way. He is, somehow, a combination of everything I have ever wanted in a person. Every version of someone I’ve been drawn to, assembled into one person who is also, genuinely (like, genuinely), drawn to me. That felt like confirmation. Like evidence that the patience had been pointing somewhere real.

But. His lease is up in November and he doesn’t want to stay in Austin beyond that. I sat with it and have acknowledged and accepted I have unfinished business here. I want this to be the place I return to with a sense of permanence. I’m not ready to leave this city. Not for another city. Not for any reason I can currently articulate clearly enough to act on. And telling him I’d stay if he stayed wasn’t something I could offer honestly. It wouldn’t have been fair to him. It wouldn’t have been fair to me.

So I booked the flight.

Not as escape. Not as answer. As practice and a reminder that the life I’m building was always supposed to include this. The motion. The independence. The willingness to keep moving toward what I need rather than what is simply in front of me.

What I keep returning to is the truth that love will not ask you to make yourself smaller. That has been true every time I’ve felt it. Romantic love. Self-love. The love that comes through place and belonging. Real love opens the door. It says go. It says you shouldn’t have to choose. It says: if this is meant to be, it will exceed expecations and survive your expansion and mine.

I believe that. I’m trusting it.

Porto in July. And whatever comes after, after that.

I noticed this in myself early. Six, maybe seven years old. I remember sitting with a particular kind of quiet certainty, watching my parents, thinking: I know you better than you know me. Not as a judgment. Just as a fact I had arrived at without trying. Something in me was already in the business of connecting dots.

I didn’t know what to do with that and, for a long time, I thought the right thing to do was question it. And there was good reason for that.

When you’re growing up inside of the dysfunctional systems I did, the people around you have a stake in what you believe. Not always out of malice. Sometimes survival just requires a certain story, and children who see clearly are a threat to that story. I spent years having my own read on things quietly rewritten. Things I knew were wrong got explained away and, before I could fully form the thoughts or words, things I felt would be quickly dismissed. If you internalize that often enough, you start to wonder if the instrument is broken. You stop trusting the signal.

Getting out helped. Turning eighteen and getting distance from the day-to-day helped. But unlearning something that was built in over years doesn’t happen on a clean timeline. I still found myself second-guessing. Still caught myself rehearsing the ways I might be wrong before I allowed myself to act on what I knew. The practice of trusting your own perception is a practice in the most literal sense. It requires repetition. It requires patience with yourself. And it requires, at some point, deciding that your read on things is worth more than the discomfort of acting on it.

That is what I mean when I tell people intuition is a spiritual practice. Not spiritual in any formal sense. But in the sense that it asks something of you consistently, over time, with no guaranteed return. You sit with it. You test it. You watch what happens when you follow it and what happens when you don’t. Slowly, a kind of internal authority builds. You stop needing outside confirmation as much. You start to trust the shape of things before anyone else names it. But it comes at a cost.

When you develop the ability to get a finely tuned sense of who someone is, you arrive early. You are already three steps into understanding them while they are still in the introduction. You see the constellation before they’ve finished placing the stars. And because you’ve done the work to trust what you see, you don’t dismiss it. You don’t talk yourself out of it. You accept it. Sometimes you feel something close to love before the other person has even decided whether they’re interested.

That’s the curse. Not the clarity. The timing. Because now you are waiting. And waiting, for someone like me, has a particular shape. It doesn’t look as frantic or as scared as you might think. It doesn’t look like there’s an appetite or an anxious need in it. It looks like patience. But underneath the patience is a very old pattern: I see you clearly. I’m giving you time to arrive. I’ll be here when you do. It is the same posture I learned in from the backseat of my childhood, watching and knowing and staying quiet about it. I have shed much of my inheritance. Except this.

The honest version of it is this: I don’t feel the pull other people seem to feel when the dynamic is lopsided. When I care more than someone clearly cares back, I don’t chase. I don’t lobby for myself. I sit and I wait for them to come around, to ask questions, to show up. Which sounds like dignity, maybe even like self-respect. But it is also a losing strategy. Because some people… Because most people these days don’t come around. They just take the patience as permission to stay where they are.

What I’ve come to understand, slowly, is that when I’m ahead of someone else, I’m not really in the relationship yet. I’m in my own assessment of it. The other person’s continued introduction isn’t the story unfolding for me. It’s data. I’m watching for confirmation of what I already believe. Using their behavior to close the loop on a read I’ve already made. That is not intimacy. It’s surveillance with good intentions.

And so the question I’ve been sitting with lately is whether the arrival with another person is ever really about them, or whether it is always, primarily, about me. Whether what I’m feeling when I think I understand someone is connection, or whether it’s just the satisfaction of the constellation clicking into place. The pattern that recognized itself. The instrument confirming it still works.

I think there is something worth building in the space between those two things. Between clarity and closeness. Between seeing someone accurately and actually letting them in. The practice I’ve gotten good at is perception. The practice I’m still learning is staying in the room once the picture forms. Not stepping back to assess it. Not waiting at a patient distance for them to catch up. Just being there, in the mess of it, with someone who is still mid-sentence.

Because as beautiful and complex and grounding as they might be, we’ve got to remember, constellations are also just light from things that are very far away.

There are some connections and conversations that exists entirely at the surface.

You can feel it when someone answers a vulnerable question with a joke just polished enough to redirect the moment. Or when two people begin circling something honest before one of them casually changes the subject. Or when someone says, “I’m just figuring things out right now,” and both people instinctively understand that the sentence means more than it says. And everyone agrees to agree not to press further.

I’ve started to notice how much adult life is built this way.

We learn how to keep things moving. How to stay warm without becoming vulnerable. How to remain emotionally available enough to experience connection while still preserving the shape of our lives. We become experts in controlled depth. In calibrated intimacy. In knowing exactly how much of ourselves to reveal before the conversation risks changing form entirely. And increasingly, modern life rewards this.

People move cities. Change careers. Rebuild identities. Spend years becoming more independent, more self-aware, more mobile. We meet one another in transition now. Halfway through healing. Halfway out the door. Halfway into some future version of ourselves we haven’t fully committed to yet.

Sometimes the connection is real. The timing simply isn’t. And I think that creates a strange kind of emotional choreography between people. A mutual, often unspoken agreement to keep bringing the conversation back to the surface before it drifts too far downward. Because depth asks something of us.

It reorganizes things. A deeper conversation changes the emotional temperature of a room. A deeper connection changes the way people think about distance, time, possibility, risk. It creates gravity. And gravity, for people carefully constructing lives around freedom or movement or independence, can feel complicated.

So we become careful. And then someone does the unthinkable and asks one more question than the moment was prepared for.

“How did you feel after that conversation with your mother?”

“What made you decide to leave?”

“Do you actually see yourself staying here?”

And the other person answers. Honestly, even. But only briefly. Just enough to acknowledge the opening before gently steering the conversation back toward safer waters. Back toward flirtation. Back toward humor. Back toward the ease of the present moment.

I don’t think this always comes from fear. That’s the part I’ve been reconsidering lately.

For a long time, I assumed surface-level connection existed mostly because people were emotionally unavailable or unwilling to be vulnerable. And certainly sometimes that’s true. But I’m beginning to think there’s another version of it emerging now. One rooted less in avoidance and more in self-preservation.

Modern adulthood produces a lot of almosts. Almost the right timing. Almost the right city. Almost enough permanence. Almost enough emotional availability to let something fully unfold. And when two people recognize that reality at the same time, restraint can start to look a lot like emotional intelligence.

Not every meaningful connection arrives at a moment where it can become a life.

That’s difficult to admit because we’re often taught to think of depth as something that should naturally progress toward commitment, certainty, or permanence. But some connections seem to exist in a more temporary emotional architecture. They appear in transit seasons. Transitional cities. Between larger decisions. At moments when both people can feel the pull toward something deeper while simultaneously recognizing the instability underneath it.

What fascinates me is how quickly people can sense this without ever explicitly discussing it: a conversation slows itself down, certain questions stop getting asked, and people instinctively begin protecting the present from the weight of the future.

Sometimes that protection is mutual. There’s a certain kind of intimacy in knowing exactly how much not to ask. (That sentence sounds sadder than I mean it to.)

Because, I don’t actually think there’s anything inherently wrong with surface-level connection. Some of the most enjoyable relationships in our lives exist precisely because they are light.

Not every person we meet is meant to become foundational. Not every connection needs to carry the full emotional weight of permanence in order to matter.

But I do wonder sometimes whether we’ve become so fluent in ambiguity that we rarely stop to acknowledge when something deeper is trying to emerge underneath it.

As curiosity. As attentiveness. As one more real question than the moment required.

I think about how many forms of connection compete for our attention now. Notifications. Dating apps. Group chats. Flights booked months in advance. Careers that ask for flexibility. Cities that no longer feel permanent. Entire social lives built around movement and optimization and optionality.

There are endless ways to remain connected now. But meaningful depth still asks for the same thing it always has: presence. Attention. A willingness to let another person affect the shape of your inner world. And that’s harder to maintain in a culture built around motion. Especially when both people know motion may soon resume.

Maybe that’s why restraint has become such a defining emotional skill of modern adulthood. Not because people are incapable of intimacy, but because they’ve become increasingly aware of its consequences. Real intimacy creates attachment. Attachment creates consideration. Consideration complicates freedom. And freedom (particularly hard-won freedom) can become difficult to negotiate against.

I understand that tension more now than I used to.

I also understand something else: There’s a difference between people who cannot go deep and people who consciously choose not to, despite being capable of it. The first feels empty. The second feels strangely human.

Two people noticing something. Two people understanding the circumstances surrounding it. Two people quietly deciding not to pull too hard on the thread.

And still, I can’t help but wonder what gets lost when everyone becomes this careful with themselves? What possibilities disappear before they’re ever fully named? What kinds of relationships might exist on the other side of one more honest conversation? Or how many people move through each other’s lives feeling something real while convincing themselves that timing alone made depth impossible?

I don’t know that there’s a clean answer to any of this.

Maybe some connections are meant to remain partial. Maybe not every meaningful moment needs resolution. Maybe adulthood is partially learning how to recognize depth without immediately demanding permanence from it.

But I do think it’s worth paying attention to the people who make you want to ask one more real question. And I think it’s worth noticing when someone does the same for you.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
—Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

I have always thought we underestimate how much of our lives are shaped by ruin.

Especially the quieter versions of ruin. The relationships that lose their alignment. The service that starts to feel like work. And the work that starts to feel heavier than it should. The structures we’ve built that no longer hold in the same way.

We tend to resist those moments. Or rush to replace them. But most of the places we admire carry their history in what’s been broken down and rebuilt. Old cities. Natural landscapes. Even the stories we return to. What remains isn’t untouched. It’s weathered. It’s shaped by what didn’t last.

Ruin isn’t the opposite of progress. It’s often part of it.

Sometimes it happens to us. And sometimes, if we’re paying attention, it’s something we have to choose to actively opt-in to.

I recently stepped away from one of the most meaningful collaborative relationships I’ve had in recent years.

It was a client that, for a long time, acted as a kind of safety net, especially while I was traveling. It filled in the gaps. It made things feel more stable. But over time, something shifted. The reliability I had built a life around started to erode. And gradually, without calling it out directly, I found myself adjusting to compensate.

At a certain point, it stopped feeling like support and started feeling like drag.

So I let it go.

There wasn’t a replacement waiting. There still isn’t, in any clear or immediate way. Just a stretch of open space where something consistent used to be. And if I’m honest, that kind of space comes with a level of uncertainty that doesn’t fully go away, no matter how many times you’ve been through it.

But I’ve seen a version of this pattern before.

A few years ago, I packed up everything I owned in Philadelphia with the intention of moving to Ireland. I sold what I could, let go of the rest, and booked a one-way ticket with less than $1,000 in my account. After the flight, I had less than half of that left. It wasn’t reckless in my mind. I remember thinking, very clearly, “I know it’ll be okay.” Not because I had a plan but because I trusted my ability to respond once I got there.

And something shifted almost immediately.

Clients I had been in conversation with for years finally committed. Retainers came through. Almost everything I sold moved quickly, often at or above what I had paid for it. It felt like the moment I created space, things started to move toward it.

I’ve experienced some version of that more than once. Not every time or even with perfect destruction or severance. But enough to recognize the shape of it.

You let something go. There’s a moment (or stretch) of emptiness, uncertainty and the unknown, where nothing has filled in yet. And then, sometimes unexpectedly, things begin to arrive: opportunities, support, momentum. Critical things. Not always in the way you imagined, but in a way that meets the space you created.

I don’t think that pattern is guaranteed. It probably depends on how honest you’re willing to be with yourself in the first place. What you’re actually letting go of. And, why. But I trust it enough to pay attention when I feel it starting again.

For me, it’s not just about the work itself. It’s about how the work is done. The rhythm of it. The mutual respect. The sense that both sides are showing up in a way that makes the whole thing better, not heavier.

When that starts to slip, it doesn’t usually correct itself on its own.

So you make a call. You create a little bit of ruin where something no longer fits. You clear it out, even if you don’t know exactly what’s going to replace it yet.

And then you sit with the space.

Right now, I’m there.

Over the next few days, something will take shape. A new client could come in. One of the projects I’ve been building quietly could land. Or I could feel the full weight of the decision financially before anything replaces it.

All of those are real possibilities.

And still, this feels like the right move.

There’s a difference between something being difficult and something being wrong. It’s easy to confuse the two, especially when stability is involved. We hold onto what works. Until we realize we’re the ones doing the extra work to keep it working.

At some point, you have to decide what you’re willing to build around. Not everything fills in immediately. But that doesn’t make the clearing wrong. If anything, it might be the part that makes whatever comes next possible.

“You’re in a race against AI.”

I remember the words landing strangely. Not because they stung. Though they did, a little. But because my first instinct wasn’t defensiveness. It was something closer to relief. I looked at the screen. I thought: I’m so glad people have access to this. So I don’t have to do all of that rushed, silly stuff anymore.

Those two reactions arriving almost simultaneously told me something: I’m just still working out what.

I didn’t respond well in the moment. I said I didn’t think of it that way. They said, “You look surprised.” I said I was.

The truth is more complicated: I have located my value in the output for most of my professional life, actually. Designs. Deliverables. Things you could point to, pull up, send over. I know how to do that. I’m good at it. And for a long time, being good at it was enough of an identity to carry me through.

What I’m sitting with now and what I have been sitting with for a while is the recognition that it’s a fragile place to stand. When clients, partners, or even I stake the majority of my value in creative output, it flattens the work I care most about: the connection-making, the thinking, the architecture. The conversation and soft skills that come to serve as the mortar for what we’re actually building. The relationship stops being interesting and, from there, I start going through the motions until the pleasure drains out of it. Slowly, completely, and all at once.

I’ve been trying to retrain myself away from needing the output to be the proof. It’s slow work. But the comment landed in the middle of it, which is maybe why it landed the way it did. So I took it to a handful of other clients just to see. The responses ranged from shock to flat disbelief. Not one of them outright agreed with the framing.

All of this took me back to working retail in high school. Self-checkout was being installed and the two dozen cashiers on staff were convinced it was going to replace them. Nobody wanted to bring it up with management. So I did.

After that conversation, I was the only person in the room who raised their hand to learn the system. To run it.

I think about that version of myself sometimes. Not because I’ve always been fearless around change. I haven’t. But because that instinct is still in there somewhere, that is who I am, underneath the performance anxiety and the need to prove. Something in me knew then that what I was attached to wasn’t going anywhere. The machine wasn’t the threat.

I’m trying to find my way back to that clarity.

Here’s what I actually thought, watching the Canva ad this morning: Thank god this exists. Because now I can build my own things the same way everyone else is.

That’s the shift I’m reaching for. The technology isn’t replacing the work I value. It’s releasing me from the work I don’t. Hours of production that kept me from thinking. Deliverables that kept me from creating. If there’s a race I’m running, it’s the same one everyone is—or should be—running: figuring out how to use what’s available to do more of what actually matters to you.

People often ask me how I use AI across the different ways I serve as a co-founder, creator, and coach. The honest answer is that the use cases are completely different in each context, but the intention is the same: I use it with guardrails to support the things that interest me. I’m also paying attention to what it’s doing at a larger scale. To the culture. To the quality of what we make and say and gather around.

Because here’s what I keep coming back to: the more creative output gets automated, the more human involvement is going to mean something. The more people try to use AI to shortcut connection or manufacture impact, the more real presence is going to stand out. The signal gets clearer as the noise gets louder.

To lead is to always be subtly pivoting but, right now, I’m pivoting with pride. Toward less creative output, more strategic partnership. Less building websites, more real-world gathering. Less deliverable, more presence.

I don’t know if that’s wisdom or just exhaustion talking. Probably some of both. But it’s where I’m pointed — and for now, that’s enough.

The first thing Germany gave me was cold.

Not the polite, soft kind you ease into. The kind that meets you on an exposed train platform and doesn’t negotiate. I had flown in from Donegal, missed my connection, and was standing on the upper deck of Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof waiting for the last train south. It reminded me of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. That same semi-exposed, industrial grandeur.

I finally boarded the train.

If there’s one thing Germany gets deeply right, it’s trains. The Deutsche Bahn felt less like public transportation and more like a moving hotel. Warm. Smooth. Quiet. I remember sitting back and watching the dark countryside scroll past the window and feeling the cortisol finally drain out. I had made it. I was moving. The train would do the rest.

By the time I checked into Motel One in Stuttgart it was nearly midnight. Cold, tired, hungry, and the kitchen had already closed. The bartender looked at me the way bartenders look at late arrivals. Unbothered. Competent. Slightly amused.

“I’ll take a gin and tonic,” I said.

Liquid dinners are underrated.

My friend Mike’s company is headquartered in Stuttgart. He had been trying to get me over there for years. It’s hard to say no to travel when you’re already moving. And yet I had managed. I had no real expectations for the city. No real interest, if I’m being honest. I wasn’t sure I could have found it on a map six months earlier.

He was in back-to-back meetings all of the first day. So I did what I always do in a new place. Found a reliable omelette. A good cup of coffee. A bookshop. An outdoor retailer. Another coffee, this one “a roadie” as I watched the city move.

Stuttgart is organized around Königstraße - a long, wide pedestrian corridor that everything else seems to orient itself around. Not unlike the central arteries you find in other European cities. But there’s something grounded and gritty about this one. Less performative than some. The stores were prepping for Christmas but nothing had been fully switched on yet. The city felt caught between versions of itself.

What surprised me most was how many people were out on a regular Thursday. Moving, shopping, sitting in the cold. Not tourists. Just people. Living their day in their city.

The Globetrotter in Stuttgart deserves its own sentence. It’s the German experiential equivalent of REI. Multi-level, immersive, slightly overwhelming in the best way. The staircase is lined with thousands of photographs from customers, from expeditions all over the world. I stood there longer than I planned to. Something about that wall caught me off guard. All those places. All those faces. I bought a set of SealLine dry bags I still haven’t used. No regrets.

That first full day ended with schnitzel and a Dinkelacker. Both earned. Mike and I walked off dinner through the Christmas market, cups of mulled wine in hand, as expected in late November in Germany. Then he mentioned a speakeasy he’d heard about.

We found it. We stayed too long. At some point we were outside a McDonald’s at an hour that should not be named, attempting to bribe the staff into making us a burger before they closed. They declined. Diplomatically. We walked home.

Day two started the way most days start anywhere — breakfast, coffee — and then opened up. The Altes Schloss. The Markthalle. The art museum a friend in Italy had recommended.

There’s something that happens around the second day in a new city. The initial disorientation settles and you start to actually see the place. Stuttgart did something to me that second day. I found myself genuinely attached to it. In the “I could stay another week” kind.

I still want to go back. Dürrbachklinge and Wernhaldenpark are said to be beautiful hikes. The Mercedes-Benz Museum has been pulling at me since I left. There’s still so much there I didn’t get to.

The drive back to Frankfurt did not go as planned.

Mike had been excited about the Autobahn. The legendary highway. No speed limit. The kind of road you hear about in other countries. We sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for what felt like the entire route. I think we peaked at 50 kilometers per hour. The train I had originally booked, the one Mike had talked me out of, whipped past us in the other direction at what looked like lightning speed.

We laughed about it. What else can you do.

Mike flew home early the next morning and I had Frankfurt to myself for two days.

The first one followed the usual pattern. Omelette. Coffee. Bookshop. You know how it goes by now. Then late in the afternoon I took a notion and wandered into the Städel Museum. The crowd was surprisingly thin. I had the corridors mostly to myself. The Städel holds world-class work and to land a quiet Saturday afternoon, that kind of access feels like something you’re getting away with.

That night I ate a burrito alone in my hotel room and watched terrible television. No shame. No apologies. No regrets.

Day two: breakfast at Café Hauptwache. At the next table, a group of guys in their 20s were piecing together the previous night. Proper breakfast talk. A stag party. The details were chaotic. Probably illegal. I appreciated the preview of what lay ahead for whoever was getting married.

After breakfast I walked up to Grüneburg Park and back through the city, stopped at Coffee Fellows before the Frankfurt Archaeological Museum. Then I looped through Römerberg and found a bench in Nizza Park. The river was there. The light was good. Retirees were being directed off cruise ships and corralled toward the old town for dinner and drinks. They looked content. Or at least prepared.

That evening I went back to Römerberg and had dinner at Alten Limpurg, a traditional German restaurant right on the square. Busy. Loud. Exactly right.

One thing stayed with me from the whole trip.

We were out one night in Stuttgart, the three of us, when someone mentioned the flags. The way you don’t see German flags the way you see American flags. Not on private homes. Not hanging from porches. Not on bumper stickers.

Mike put it plainly. Germans don’t do that. Not after what their nationalism produced. There’s a shadow side to pride, to power, to any big beautiful plan that goes badly enough. They’ve lived inside that shadow. They built their culture in the aftermath of it. So the flag stays folded.

I sat with that one for a while. Still am.

This was my first proper “quick pop out of Ireland.” My friends there talk about it like it’s nothing. Hop over to Germany. Pop to Barcelona. Be back Sunday. It didn’t feel especially convenient to me. Not for my lifestyle, anyway. But it gave me something I wasn’t expecting: a genuine taste for the German cities, a warmer feeling for the people, and a fuller picture of a country I had only held in the abstract.

What it also clarified was something I had been quietly sitting with for a while. A long weekend is a preview. A postcard. What I actually wanted was more time on the European mainland. Something with real roots. Somewhere I could stay.

But that’s a different postcard.

Where to Find Yourself in Stuttgart

Cafe Hegel Hegelplatz 1, 70174 Stuttgart

A breakfast place in the truest sense of the thing. Unhurried. Reliable. The kind of morning anchor a new city needs. I came here both days and left each time feeling settled. If you need somewhere to start the day before you’ve figured out what the day is, start here.

Leonidas Chocolate Shop (inside Königsbau Passagen) Königstraße 28, 70173 Stuttgart

Belgian chocolates inside a beautiful old arcade. I came in looking for gifts and stayed longer than I needed to. Worth a slow browse even if you leave empty-handed. The building alone earns a step inside.

Altes Schloss (Old Castle) Schillerplatz 6, 70173 Stuttgart

A mid-day activity with no agenda required. The castle sits at the center of the old town and holds a regional history museum inside if you want to go deeper. I spent most of my time in the surrounding square. There’s a pace to that part of the city that slows you down in a good way.

Carls Brewery Stauffenbergstraße 1, 70173 Stuttgart

A proper dinner spot. Good beer, good food, the kind of atmosphere that earns a long evening. Go with someone. Order more than you think you need.

Jigger & Spoon Calwer Str. 21, 70173 Stuttgart

A speakeasy that delivers on the premise. Find it late. Bring someone you don’t have to explain yourself to. It earned us a very long night.

Where to Find Yourself in Frankfurt

LUME Boutique Hotel (a Marriott Autograph Collection Property) Wiesenhüttenplatz 36, 60329 Frankfurt am Main

Boutique feel without boutique anxiety. Comfortable, central, well-staffed. A better base than I expected and one I’d go back to without hesitation.

Café Hauptwache An der Hauptwache 15, 60313 Frankfurt am Main

Start here. The building anchors the pedestrian zone and the breakfast is dependable in the best way. Good light in the morning. Worth arriving before the city fully wakes up.

Nizzawerft Nizzawerft, Frankfurt am Main

A footpath running along the Main river. I walked it twice and it was different each time. Quiet in the morning. More leisurely by afternoon. Worth the time in either direction, with no particular destination in mind.

Städel Museum Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main

One of the better art museums I’ve spent time in. The collection is world-class and the building doesn’t get in its own way. Go on a quiet day if you can. Lunch at Cafe Wacker afterward held up.

Römerberg Römerberg, Frankfurt am Main

The old town square. Go in the evening, after the tour groups have cleared out. Walk the cobblestones without a plan. The architecture earns a slow look.

Alten Limpurg Römerberg 19, 60311 Frankfurt am Main

Traditional German food on the square. Busy in the way that means things are going well. I ordered the obvious things. They were the right call.

Sullivan Cocktail Bar Seehofstraße 30–32, 60594 Frankfurt am Main

A good room, a well-made drink, a place to end the night without needing an occasion.

I’ve been letting myself look at it more directly lately.

It’s morning. My department heads know well where to find me. No standing meeting. Just a window in my day they know to look for. By the time they walk in, I’ve already gotten my own day started. We give ourselves an hour. Coffee. We talk the way people do when they trust each other and have work in common: new groups that need outfitting, a brand looking to collaborate, a maker who just moved to town in search of studio space, a yoga instructor interested in the morning slot. We look at what’s moving and what’s stalled. Nothing urgent. Everything considered.

Formal meetings fill the afternoon. In between, I work through the things I should be doing. By three or four, I let that go and move toward the things I want to be doing: checking in with collaborators, unboxing and testing new gear, passion projects, housekeeping. The day slows. People start heading out, a quick check-in on their way through the door. See you tomorrow, we say.

What I keep returning to, though, isn’t the rhythm of the day. It’s what’s underneath it.

Matchbox Twenty, Fleetwood Mac, Sublime, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Oasis, and other familiar friends over the speakers. The smell of cardboard in the mornings. That productive, particular smell, the one that means something arrived and needs attention. During operating hours, the store’s signature scent settles in: oaky, smoky, something masculine with a quiet note of rose water. By evening, whatever’s keeping the lights on shifts everything. A food truck in the parking lot, a baking class in the kitchen, a bonfire out back. I can feel the day moving through my body. My back and arms and chest and legs, stronger from a more active life. I can see the people helping bring it to life. The way my office looks. The way the it all feels.

I don’t usually let myself go there that specifically. But only for the sake and power of visualization. There’s something that happens when you stop approximating the future. I tend to hold it loosely. Describe it in general terms. Leave enough room to avoid being wrong about it. That version stays soft. And soft things are hard to build toward.

This one didn’t feel soft. I knew what the morning smelled like. I knew what four in the afternoon felt like. I knew who I’d say goodnight to on the way out the door. And every time I sit with it, it feels less like something I’m imagining and more like something I’m slowly growing toward; a life that, when I picture it clearly enough, already feels like mine.