Friends,
I know. I know.
I'm back in London.
I also haven't written in some time, and I have missed you all very much.
Tonight I want to say hello, thank those of you who are letting me help plan your upcoming trips (thank you!), and share something that has been sitting with me.
Travel pulls us out of comfort in ways we understand and do not. I lay awake in a hotel bed last night afraid of what I had left undone at home. My children cried about multiple things in the past thirty-six hours even though nothing was (materially) wrong.
And we all crossed the Atlantic Ocean together today in just over six hours. I attempted to work via our 777's barely operable wifi while my wife and daughters napped and watched movies. It was about as divine as crossing an ocean gets.
It takes almost three times as long to get from North America to New Zealand, but I digress.
Crossing oceans is something real to humanity. We've done it with mixed results for millennia. And today we can spend hours doing what used to take months or longer, without dysentery, largely disconnected from the wild that surrounds us.
I struggle to notice it. The wild of ocean and the sky and everything that is totally out of my control. I sip club soda, whine about the wifi, and wonder if the code on our AirBnb's lockbox will work as described. Here my family is, blasting thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean below us, and I'm concerned about wifi.
Travel is so much more than that.
It connects me to every other time I've crossed a great distance — and makes me remember those who crossed greater, scarier ones, and had the courage to do it anyway. It makes me feel small, and a part of something big. Something beautiful.
Fly well.
