Expand and Contract
As someone who typically travels quite a lot, it’s important to me to have comfortable, sustainable inflated and deflated modes of operation. This means having a sense of what goes where in my bag, what I wear for which travel…
Fluffy and Foundational
I’ve historically experienced a significant shift in my lifestyle, priorities, and thinking every seven years or so. Based on that schedule, I’m likely to see another such shift around a year from now. Between these fairly radical recalibrations, I tend…
Tools
When I’m learning something new and looking to veteran practitioners of that field, study, or craft to see how they do things, I almost always find they’re less fixated on gear than newbies and middling-range practitioners. Instead, they tend to…
Grief
We grieve we when lose someone, but we also grieve when we lose a sense of place or time or self, a path we feel we’re walking (toward something important), or a reliable-seeming understanding of how the world works. A…
Probably Don’t
Social media is great for some purposes, but much of what the networks (or rather, the people running and managing them) want from me is not aligned with my priorities. I don’t want to post more stuff, more aggressively. I…
Purpose
As a general policy, I try to do things purposefully rather than passively. “Purposeful” can mean different things, though, depending on what aspect of life we’re talking about. Exercising each morning is purposeful in that I hope to remain fit…
Now and Next
In any discussion, there’s a collection of intuitive, shared contextual understandings. If you’re engaged in a conversation about labor rights, it’s typically understood that you’re addressing the topic as it exists within the current economic, social, and geopolitical paradigm. You…
Being Interested
Almost always, people we find interesting come across that way because they’re interested in other things and people. Such interest often starts with a spark. For most of my life, catching these flashes of potential was a luck-laden, periodic thing.…
Who Where How
I’ve got a birthday coming up this weekend: I’ll be 37-years-old. Part of me believes I should mark the occasion with chin-stroking, navel-gazing, and other ponder-related pastimes; that the day should serve as a neon sign and a full-stop on…
Bypassing Blockages
The benefits of traveling are myriad, and I’m an enthusiastic proponent of visiting even the nearby, the perceptually humdrum, the everyday and mundane-seeming because although many of us have been sold on the idea that travel needs to be exotic…