Traveling, Thinking, and Thinking About Traveling

Turns out, I'm not actually nomadic by temperament

Yesterday, on the flight home to Seattle from Edge Esmeralda, I had my first proper brainstorm in nearly six months, as in a natural flood of usefully coherent unstructured thoughts that I was able to capture on paper. As is often the case with proper brainstorms, I was in a slightly tired but relaxed mood. The reason for the tiredness was obvious, since I’d just been facilitating a week-long workshop, which is something like a 9-5 task and a month’s worth of social energy. The sort of normie duty cycle I’ve never been able to sustain for long. But the relaxed part was interesting. I realized I hadn’t been in a properly relaxed mental state for nearly 8 months.

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The Contraptions Book club June pick is Monkey King/Journey to the West (pick either the Lovell or Jenner edition). We will discuss this week of the 23rd.

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The culprit is travel. I’ve been on 8 work trips in the last year, including three longer international trips (one of which was a month-long round-the-world trip). The longest I’ve been home continuously was last summer, July-October. I don’t think I’ve ever logged this many miles in a single year. I think 2009 and 2004 perhaps had as many trips, but I wasn’t logging so many miles or so much time away.

Though I’ve been a very frequent mover (23 apartments in 10 cities in 28 years), and have had a few intense corporate-style globetrotting travel years, I’ve never been a proper digital nomad, working as a seasonal transient out of temporary accommodations. The closest I’ve come has been one long road trip of about 6-7 weeks in 2011, when I moved from DC to Seattle and made a book tour of it. But I wouldn’t call that a proper nomad phase, since I was basically funemployed, having just quit Xerox, and not yet found gainful gig work. I think the best description of my lifestyle history is slow drifter with bursts of jet-setting every few years.