In 2008, corporate lawyer & city slicker Jodi Ettenberg quit her job to travel the world for a year…and then just never went back to her old job (or self). For 10 years, she traveled and ate her way through the world, documenting her adventures at Legal Nomads. For the 10-year anniversary of the site, Ettenberg has posted a retrospective highlighting some of her most memorable times.1
Writing in a true voice was important. Presenting a glimmering version of yourself that doesn’t feel real is an easy path to discontent. You can follow your passion all you want, but if you’re not expressing it authentically, in a way that is indisputably you, the gap will catch up with you. The space between who you are and who you express yourself to be exists in varying degrees. But if it’s too large, especially if your work involves sharing your thoughts creatively, the disparity can easily engulf you.
As I’ve been lucky enough to travel a bit over the last couple of years, this post about The Overview Effect, Mindfulness, and Travel particularly caught my eye.
You cannot ignore the happenings in other places, or stick your head in the sand, because it’s too late — you’ve stepped away and looked at the planet in a different light. (Or, as I said to someone recently “once you’re a pickle you can’t go back to being a cucumber.”) While far less vivid or spectacular than a space trip, travel does tend to push people to think about the forest through the trees and to constantly pin current observations against past experiences. We all do this, naturally. But I think that the more you see, the more you have to compare ‘against’, which then permanently alters your views of the planet and of its people. The ultimate example of this, of course, is seeing it all from above, an orb glowing in the darkness of space.
This reflection on her travels in Mongolia also had my head nodding.
I included this post because nothing since has compared to the magic of simply watching the identity I had dissolve, replaced by pure wonder. Who I was shortly prior didn’t matter, because everything in front of me felt so intensely new that it blotted out anything familiar.
These wonder-filled moments, large and small, have happened to me while traveling, looking at art, lost in the company of others, watching heavenly bodies eclipse each other and even while working on this here website…and that’s a perfect succinct description of how it feels when it happens.
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Even though writing is a difficult task for her these days. Nevertheless, she persisted indeed.↩
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