Out In The Wilds
I have been home in Reston for the past three weeks. On one hand, I was getting a lot done, and it was good to recharge after the frantic pace of the last sequence of travels, where in one short period I had worked with clients in Toronto, Mexico City, and the Bay Area, and then immediately attended O’Reilly’s Etech in San Diego. Three solid weeks on the road. Although, on reflection, it was only the San Diego stint that wore me out: four days at the conference, and not much to show for it, except meeting a handful of interesting folks.
But, after that short hiatus, here I am, back on the road. Travel is starting to feel more like the natural order. For some time, I have felt that my greatest value for customers arises from face-to-face interaction. so it is logical that I would need to spend time visiting them, since I am the soloist and they are the orchestra.
However, my making peace with travel is more than accepting the inevitable consequences of my calling. There is a true attraction to getting out, living within the constraints of the knapsack, and having time alone out in front of everybody. At home, I have ample time alone: sitting in my tiny 9x6 foot office, hearing the endless whine of the leaf-blowers, and seeing the same trees, changing, always slowly changing, from my single east-facing window. Taking the walk from my house through the park to Lake Anne for Vietnamese soup at Cafe Montmartre, or a Jameson’s at the Tavern on the Lake. There is something strong that comes from doing the same things, again, and again. But I am clearly not intended for the monastic life, since after a week or two, that pull starts tugging.
In a period of a handful of days, this week, I will have as many as a dozen meetings, with savants and seekers, entrepreneurs and engineers, and companies large and small. I will see a never-seen-before product, learn about a company’s recent formation, and hear some juicy bit of gossip that would have passed me by at home. I will walk many miles, ride trains, cabs, and planes, and flit around within an unforgiving schedule like a nightingale in a silver cage. I will stay out late with new friends and old, laughing and learning, and I will work alone in coffeeshops, here, there, and everywhere.
I am a modern nomad, carrying the minimum of possessions in service to the maximum of obsessions. And it’s different sort of strength that comes from this wandering, from staying in different hotels instead of the same old bed, from seeing the sun rise from different windows, through different branches, reaching for the light.
They say that migrating birds can sense the magnetic fields of the Earth, and calibrate their flight with the arcs of the stars, swirling through the skies. What forces am I skating along, as I swing westward, like some 21st century hobo? I feel a humming in the blood, a deep murmuring in my meat: a call, some nearly intangible sensation of being pulled, going, like the birds stroking the air, like the stars sweeping westward.
In the airport, this morning, it felt like the Earth was speeding up, spinning faster beneath my feet, taking me out on the road, as a traveler, a nomad, an unsettled wanderer. Not some civilized villager, living in the sprawl surrounding an eastern metropolis. No. Something else than that, something wilder, something not bounded, something older and deeper, closer to the birds and the stars. A better way to live, a more alive way to be, out in the wilds.
