About the Untethered Traveler
Most people come home from a trip and see the same reflection staring back.
The encounters were there. The moments of recognition, the collisions, the invitations to see themselves more fully. What could have been the making of movement toward a greater calling, a realized purpose or a return to self, landed instead as short-term relief. Escape. Distraction.
I believe travel is a gift. An underutilized, glorious tool of self-discovery and self-actualization. If we choose to receive it, travel will come to be our life companion, a continuous journey of our becoming.
When we accept its invitation to grow into who we were meant to be, and extend our own invitation back to travel to join us in the journey we finally come to unlock the real gift, travel’s power to ignite and transform us.
By doing so, we click our Tessera into life’s bigger mosaic. And one tile at a time, the joy of our discovery ripples out into the world, inspiring the next click and the next click…
For a decade, travel had been trying to tell me something. I just hadn’t yet developed the fluency to hear it. And then, after being laid off in November of 2024, movement started to unlock and shift something within me. As my intent and presence increased, so did my appetite for finding my true calling and purpose. At 45 years old I was ready to finally face and become what I felt the world was asking of me.
In Vietnam, a stranger’s question about why I picked the countries I visited planted a seed. In San Sebastián, a city I believe to be muse, I broke the spell of inertia that had tethered me to the wrong path of complacency and misguided ambition. Over a pot of peppermint tea at the Hotel Maria Cristina, I sketched the first outline of what would become my purpose: The Untethered Traveler.
Travel continued to shape and guide me and the philosophy I was forming, living and moving around. Tokyo handed me my first lens from which to turn what I was looking at into meaning. Collisions with shopkeepers in Finland, chefs in New Zealand and artists in Slovenia fortified the feeling of discovery that was nudging me from place to place. Florence lit the creative fuse. And Rome’s Roscioli counter and its Amatriciana, twice, bookended a year that stitched every last moment, bite and sip and encounter into my calling.
Along the way, across 52 countries and 32 solo, a philosophy and a way to move took shape. Most of all, I took shape.
The Untethered Traveler is what I am building from it.
