Month: March 2023

As if I am a digital nomad in my own home. Yesterday we arrived at this new location, where we plan to live for several months. Most of the day was consumed by jet lag.

I have a co-working space to go to (my office). It has three nice indie coffee joints within a block, and plenty of restaurants — ranging from mom and pop family joints yo tired chains (Chipotle and its ilk). Maybe I will take a break and sit in one of the coffee joints a while.

There is a nice place to run I have heard of (gone to hundreds of times before) that I will go to today.

Due to jet lag I won’t be at the co-working space too long, so I will do some work, run, and then go back to my Airbnb (the house I have lives in for 16 years).

Let’s see how this goes. Live in my hometown as a visitor.

This is all because I want to do this in other cities. Go, live for 6 months in New York, Milan, Singapore, Bangkok, whatever.

I’m going to test the theory here.

At home. Jet lag. First cup of coffee the way I want it in my own home, after two weeks of travel.

What makes it home? Probably “everything in its place” has a lot to do with it. Familiarity. It’s certainly not the things themselves: the furnishings are entirely disposable, occupying space without any particular aesthetics.

But it’s home.

Would a rented space feel this way? Would a rented, furnished place feel like home? Does time make it feel like home?

The people, sure. But that’s not sufficient, because she was with me the whole trip and while that was comforting it did not make a hotel room a home.

What makes a physical space a home?

This is important because of the long-held dream of getting a space to live somewhere for a long-term temporary stay, maybe a year at most. Maybe (but probably not) where we were in Manhattan or Milan. “Probably not” because aesthetics. There are other places that would be preferable in Italy, other places I would rather be in the USA.

Start with here. I can make it happen here. All my theories about how I would do it, I can do here.

So it’s interesting. This is home, but what does home mean? I want to long-term camp out somewhere, and I can camp out at home.

And I shall start where I am, with what I have.

Here’s the idea. I can work from anywhere? Well, there are great coffee joints to work from, here in my home town. Go there. I would join a gym wherever I went. Great. I know exactly how I’d do that here. Now the interesting part. What are my theories for making new friends in new places? Do that here as if I know nothing and no one.

JFC my hometown is immortalized in one of those chill/downtempo albums. Found it last night on Spotify on the plane. Why go to Dubai, Ibiza, etc. etc. when it’s here all along?

From a Tweet from a book (4,000 weeks I think)

“… the futile attempt to “get everything done,” which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of deciding what to do with your finite time—because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities.”

Yeah that.

Choose one thing. You can’t do everything.

Five minutes of writing in the taxi. A Benz. Different from mine, but the same.

Headed for Malpensa on a Saturday morning in early spring.

Back to liminal space: airport lounges, airplanes. It’s not as if Milan itself isn’t liminal space to me — well, maybe it isn’t, but hotels and restaurants feel like it to me. No fixed abode, buying my right to be present.

I feel untethered. And for the first time realizing that if I moved here I would always feel grafted, not rooted. Like it or not, I know where home is.

The urge to Do. I have it. And I have it for the weirdest reason: because it’s today, and today will never be here again. It’s not the persistence of time, it’s the ephemeralness (word failure) of time.

I’ve bought into the belief. I believed it is a true idea and therefore I Must Do. (Do what? Don’t know. But must do something).

Then, I will judge myself on the quality of what I did. And believe that I could have Done More. And feel bad.

How about not? How about I think a different thought? Like the thought that allows me to sleep until 11 am? What difference would that make? Does a difference matter?

I’m operating on embedded beliefs. I just saw one today, accidentally, and I don’t think it is particularly healthy.

Today is the last day in Milan. I will meet someone in a while. We will talk business. That’s a decision that yesterday me made. Otherwise, I am free. All I really want to do is sit outside in the sun (it’s a nice day) at an ordinary cafe.

When you’re writing for yourself and don’t care if other people read it or not. Or buy or not.

When you go where you want to go for lunch, reviews be damned.

When you wear the shoes you want to wear because they’re comfy, whether or not they are fashionable. (Hint: fashionable is the opinion of others, an opinion most often created commercially).

Twitter again has been sobering. At a superficial level (which is all that I can see) it is 100% marketing, 100% of the time, by 100% of the users. Only some of the marketing is commercial. But all of the communications are marketing messages.

Ok let’s say 90% marketing. There is a small and visible element of apparently sincere, one-to-one care and attention. One person sincerely caring on a non-performative level for another person. But even that is suspect: is the personal connection sincere or manipulative? Who knows.

I am on Twitter . . . why? Same reason as everyone else. Get followers. Why? Make money. Why? Money is good. Why? Uhhhh.

I am on Twitter . . . why? Because my brain wants a treadmill to run on so it feels the appearance of accomplishment, which is so much easier to reach than marching through the drudgery to real accomplishment.

I am no better than everyone else.

But this is back to the headline. Life is simple when . . . you don’t care about the analytics. The praise. The payoff. Just do something, because it feels like the right thing to do.

Life is only real then, when I am.

(If I can coin a phrase, haha).

Now. A hotel room in Milan at mid-day, looking through the window at the Pirelli Tower outlined against a grey sky, with Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto Number 1 in D Minor playing quietly on my iPad. The window is open and the cold winter air streams into the room and feels crisp and invigorating.

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

(To coin a phrase, haha).

Is not where I am. I’m starting with an accumulation.

True in the micro. Starting the day with jet lag, sinus infection, lack of sufficient hydration, sleep deprived, nowhere to go.

True in the macro. The accumulated knowledge, assets, momentum of my existing business. The cash flow needs of education and family support.

True in the meta. Mindset, perceptions.

No one starts from zero, as appealing as it sounds sometimes. There is no such thing as a clean slate.

Why do we want a clean slate, anyway? Why start from zero? Maybe to shed the perceived limits of current reality. Others see the assets that we have. We see that those assets are, on their flip side, liabilities. Anchors are anchors. Could be good, could be bad. Depends.

Go to where the asset is underpriced. Me? There is no one like me in Bangkok. Go there. That’s an example.

But the mythical “start over” is just a fantasy. Even my total reset a few decades ago wasn’t really total. I brought things with me. Some academics and credentials. Mindset of hunger. Others who reset at that time also brought attributes with them. And paid the price for it, just as I paid the price for bringing mine.

There is no zero. You always pay the price. Reap and sow. Cosmic balance of asset and liability.

Keep trudging.