Travel with Purpose
When a heartbreaking career intermission broke bad on me last Fall, I knew exactly how I would spend the empty days and hours ahead. I would finally and fully indulge my passion for solo, untethered travel. I would cross more countries off my list, taste new flavors, shop cute boutiques, sip local cocktail creations, dig my toes into the sand, hit some museums, and discover new artists until I was ready to get back to it.
I was planning on treating this inconvenient layoff like one big, long layover. But as it turned out life had me in motion for no other reason than to stop me in my tracks. As the next few months played out, I realized I wasn’t traveling to kill time between resume bullets, I was traveling to get it right in this next act – to unblock my creative flow, to nurture my inner child and to finally authenticate the voice in the back of my head and at the bottom of my heart. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was traveling head-on into my purpose.
To give the most sincere, unencumbered account of what’s to come, I should first establish some fun, lighthearted context. As a fallible human, I all too often subscribe and fall back on status, materialism and luxury for luxury’s sake. This sense of entitlement has been a crutch, sin, shortcoming, vain pursuit, character flaw… for as long as I can remember. I grew up very middle class in a small, insulated and unrefined town in the Midwest. Shuffled between divorced parents every spring break and summer, I would come to nibble on fleeting tastes of a better life during my childhood when my father was in make-money-mode. And just as soon as I came to expect and crave those tastes, the pendulum inevitably swung back and in lost-money-mode I would come to dread the unimaginative, dull flavors that piled up on my plate.
No sooner have I punctuated the sentence above, do I feel a hair-on-fire kind of responsibility to put on record that my mother is a great cook and the most amazing baker – the best from-scratch pies, brownies, and cakes ever. So, I didn’t grow up without good taste and fresh food in my life. I just grew up with a very schizophrenic, feast or famine, transitory experience with taste. And that’s why I believe in retrospect that taste is both a word and pursuit that’s come to define and consume me.
To ensure my tone and words land just so, I’m not saying that the only meals that can taste good have to cost a lot of money or be plated on a white tablecloth in front of a killer view. What I am saying in jest with total self-deprecating awareness of my ridiculous first world problem is that when I look back at my childhood this kind of cruel but invaluable conditioning for my young palate ultimately ends up shaping me, my passions and my purpose.
Fast forward to life in my forties, this sense of entitlement to own, gift and experience life in a more discerning tasteful way has now become a trademark feature of my personal navigation system. And instead of shamefully shying away from that entitlement, I’ve come to embrace and leverage it, even trust it. Over the years, I’ve started to master the subtle art of calibrating when to tame or lean into the myriad of intuitions, proclivities and cravings that feed it. And I think it’s fair to say I have fed this inclination - my figurative and actual gut if you will - spectacularly well for the last decade making up for having only humored and teased it for the first 30 years or so of my life. It’s become a trusted travel companion nudging me down unassuming streets where hidden gems bursting with flavor and design await, encouraging me to let go and be exactly where my feet are in the here and now and imploring me to try-it-again even if I didn’t like it the first time (hello…anchovies, pistachio gelato, lamb, uni, and bitters!).
One of my gut’s more fabulously flavorsome and fortuitous nudges in Vietnam was a reservation at Ho Chi Minh’s Anan Saigon. It was here that my answer to a run-of-the-mill question from a young stranger set the course of my life in its current direction.
Why did I pick the countries I visited?
Without flinching and with the utmost conviction, I said their food. While I sensed this was a significant self-truth at the time, I didn’t know simply by confessing it I would come to pass through the requisite gateway to my purpose. By inviting my love of taste to play a larger role in my life which was essentially giving myself permission to be my authentic self, I opened up more ways to be present and purposeful with my first true love - travel. It was as if I was rudderless until these two compulsions collided – their impact coming to reveal the thrilling possibility that taste and travel as one colorful force was my calling.
After I stepped across that threshold, life became meandering and messy. Not surprisingly, I never received one of those get-out-of-jail-free, crystal clear “so now what?” bulletins from the universe, but I did intuitively seem to understand that I needed to kindle and stoke this new mysterious slow burn simmering deep down inside of me. I was reading, meditating and creating. I was detecting coincidence and assigning meaning. Most of all, I was traveling. I would come to find that nothing got my full attention like travel.
In looking back, I see now that my purpose played triangle offense – it simultaneously summoned, cornered and challenged me. Each tactic building off the momentum of the other and each tapping dormant sources of strength and longing within.
Purpose by Summons
Somewhere over Saigon, my calling still finding its form, I sensed I was about to ride a once-in-a-lifetime wave of hard-core growth and momentum. I committed the energy and most of all the space to recognize, understand and nurture my sense of self. Almost immediately, my self-awareness started to shift. I wish I could then say it was as easy as owning up to who I really was but there is nothing easy about unearthing our true selves when decades of dreams, disappointments, and distractions have distorted and manhandled them. But I did the work. I dismissed, discharged, dismantled old assumptions, ambitions and attitudes. But I didn’t actually move forward until I embraced that special thing that lights me up as my compass. It was only then that I realized this wasn’t a journey about running from or chasing toward anything, it was about unconditionally letting go to be blissfully pulled into.
As much of an effort as all that was, the journey was just getting started. Now I had to parlay that self-discovery into intentional living that would at once nourish my soul and brighten up the world. Easy, right? I’m talking about defining my purpose. I believe to honor our innate abilities, talents and dreams isn’t decadent, childish or selfish, it’s the ultimate self-realization. It’s why we’re all here. To do that thing.
And not everyone’s thing can be to inspire the signing of a peace treaty, build water systems in Africa, and reform criminals or the system that incarcerates them. It’s okay that our thing is bringing real and simple joy to the world just like a few of my favorite founders did and do. Ina Garten dishes out elevated hospitality and togetherness as the Barefoot Contessa, Jeni Britton inspires ear to ear smiles with colorful pints of deliciously eccentric ice cream flavors and legendary shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo handcrafted the most elegant but comfortable women’s shoes which alleviated instead of contributed to our aching feet. So, if I believe “taste and travel as one colorful force” is the calling behind that thing for me, then I must actively line up my life choices - the big and the small ones – to animate my purpose in that direction.
As it should be animation will look and feel quite different to each of us because no one journey is ever going to be the same. Our first step toward building a life around what we love might be a premeditated itty bitty, baby one or in my case an out of left-field seismic shift.
Cornered by Purpose
Before I was laid off, I wholeheartedly believed I was in my dream job at the top of my industry and function living my best life. I had enough of everything I needed and then some and I felt successful. So how is it that a job lost from a single strategic business decision could topple my career aspirations over like a weak and wispy tree? Because I didn’t have a vocation rooted in purpose and passion. And the only way for me to come to see that, to finally get that was to live without it.
When cornered by my purpose as I was, it was so much easier to autopsy how I lost my way starting with one of my more fatal miscalculations - self-identity and self-worth are not the same. When I wasn’t suddenly any or all of that stuff anymore, who was I? I wasn’t what my business card said, I wasn’t the only female at the proverbial leadership table anymore or in the coveted corner office patting myself on the back for burning the candle at both ends. I was… what? An unemployment statistic? An I told you so? A failure of a change agent? A cliché? The host and guest at my own pity party?
Hell no.
Deep down I knew the medicine I needed to take even before I felt the affliction. And I knew travel, unlike any other play in the book would console and resuscitate me. But not just any travel. I compassionately set myself up to spend day one over a bowl of Amatriciana pasta at one of my favorite restaurants in the world - Rome’s Roscioli. Here from the Eternal City, I was traveling truly untethered by time and distance, hypersensitive to what I had to extract – an intact soul! –to be successful in dispatching this ambitious Italian severance project.
Thankfully, I knew enough about Rome to know that its massive, majestic beauty coupled with travel’s perspective and potential would be all I’d need to go from believing I was nothing more than who my LinkedIn status said I was to recognizing I could be anything I wanted. And as this conviction grew under a starry Roman sky, I felt the underpinnings of a new inside-out identity taking hold. I didn’t have any of the answers yet but I knew I was staring down at a crisp blank page at the start of a brand new chapter with the pen in my hand this time. I felt then and I still feel now an amazing and unexpected rush of gratitude and relief for being spared, saved and freed.
The Purpose Challenge
It wasn’t that my purpose hadn’t long been trying to reveal itself to me. Up until the very end I was so wrapped up in working the work, I didn’t even notice my purpose more intensively and frequently confronting and challenging me. I was just too self-absorbed with being busy that I never paid attention when it tried over the years to rouse me from the comfort, complacency, and compromise I had unwittingly allowed to seep into nearly every crevice of my life.
Ever wonder why we can always seem to recall each and every time we said or did something that undermined our passion or self-conviction? It’s as if our inner child is sitting in wait not just to archive but to burn even the slightest of self-betrayals into our memory. It isn’t until the sting is finally too much for us to bear, ignore or live with that we finally trade self-sabotaging for change and transformation. In doing so we consciously open our hearts and minds to grow with a more determined awareness into who we are meant to be. Therein lies the purpose challenge.
Purpose At Work
When we become so consumed by our own soundtrack, we have no choice as it turns out but to tune in when the universe drops the mic on us. So, bringing it back around; when well-intentioned recruiters, friends, and colleagues flooded my inbox with job descriptions and introductions, peppered me with questions about my dream company and role, and lobbed out ideas and strategies for what could be next, I had to learn to get uncomfortably quiet to hear my inner voice. I had to learn to confidently slink back into a more introspective, contemplative mode and focus on what I was feeling instead of what I was doing to answer their questions and calls to action. Today, I have redirected my type A personality to focus on the journey, not the destination, on intrinsic motivation not external pressures or validation, and on me and my purpose not my resume, the market or career momentum.
I couldn’t have gotten here without the transformative power of travel. With every bit of confidence, I can say it was a growing mindfulness those first days in Italy, thereafter across breathtaking Vietnam and even more so up and down sensuous and scrumptious Spain that set me up to hear and act on my calling to spread the gospel of untethered traveling with intent. I believe from my gut it was kismet that the exact way I had reappraised my own life through untethered, intentional travel had fatefully led me right into the premise of my own purpose.
My whole life I’ve been a loyal subscriber to the Rule of Threes. If not for the gentle, compounding impact of my purpose’s triplicate invitations – the summoning, the cornering and the challenging – I wouldn’t be right where the universe wanted me to be. If I can examine and advance the role travel plays in both unlocking self-discovery and self-empowerment and elevating well-being and interconnectedness, then I believe I’ve indeed found that special thing for me. As it should be, it is a most precisely fitting and most fulfilling life say-do. And while its discovery has no doubt selfishly helped me make sense of and line up who I am, I know its intended benefit is so much more expansive and magnanimous.
The Untethered Traveler then is my humble way of giving voice to and casting light on how the abundance of taste in this world can come to feed, sustain and most assuredly inspire us if we embrace what it is to travel with intent.
I promise, it is a trip worth taking.
