On The Go

For a guy who claims to like spending time at home, I sure haven’t been doing it a lot lately.

It’s not that I don’t like to travel. I love to travel. I love to meet people, to eat local foods, to try to puzzle out the local culture and badly mangle the language. I love to visit places I haven’t been before, soaking in the sense of place about a destination, experiencing the folding together of topography and architecture that descriptions never quite convey. Whenever I travel for work, I try to extend my trips for a few days, taking the opportunity to see and do things I can’t normally at home.

When I’m not at home much, there is no sense of normal, and those breaks in routine become chaos to manage instead of enjoy. This is the lesson I forget every time I’m at home for a while. When I spend three weekends in a row in the house, I forget how exhausting having three weekends away is. And so I plot my own demise.

I found steps towards a solution. I’ve cut back on my project load, focusing more on day-to-day maintenance, reducing the need for weekends to keep myself, the house, and my relationships in good working order. I try to focus on using weekends for things that I can’t do during the week, and I’ve discovered there are lot more things that I can do on weekdays than I used to think.

So I’m trying to strike a balance. I love the trips I take and the things they let me do. I just don’t want to define myself by what I do when I’m not at home.1

1 That I wrote this on an airplane is not lost on me.