Confusing Pilot Lights for Beacons
Two years ago, Zurich left just enough behind to convince me it was a story. Then it stepped aside and pointed toward the real one.
For no other reason than I could book direct flights to and from both Chicago and Crete through it, Zurich went on to shape my story in the Spring of 2024.
Outside of this single Star Alliance-inspired itinerary, I had been to Switzerland only one other time for work. It was the Summer of 2019. Our group was passing through Geneva to attend a meeting at FIBA’s House of Basketball headquarters. Each of us found our proper place around FIBA’s impressively large conference room table by taking a seat behind a personalized sleeve of Swiss Toblerone chocolates. My vivid memory of these clever name tags, even now, is evidence that Taste was always making a lasting impression on me.
That first trip to Switzerland had been part of a whirlwind European business tour I had taken with my old team years before getting the bump up to the big job as head of global brand. We started in Milan and Turin. On our way to Geneva, we ended up being excruciatingly delayed for hours somewhere quaint and picturesque. Fenced in on all sides by the Western Italian Alps. We would go on to have meetings in Lille, France, and finally Amsterdam. This season of life would be my job, and the work travel that came with it, at their most fulfilling and fun. I smile until my cheeks hurt just thinking about it all over again.
I still remember every bite and sip from that trip too. There was the horse tartare I tried in Milan for the first, and last time, that I still agonize over the ethics of. There was charcuterie, decadent bowls of Milanese pasta and French mussels, plates of shared frites and too many bottles of red wine to keep track of. I remember somewhere on the route introducing the guys to either Aperol Spritzes or Negronis. I am just sorry now that I can’t remember which one.
As I plunge further into the memories of that 2019 trip, accidentally brushing up again against some of the pressure and accomplishments from that time in my career, my heart starts to sink under a surprising swell of loss and regret. It is a presence and heaviness that forces me to instantly stop writing. To slow down. To start investigating.
I sigh in anxious resignation. As much as I know this exercise will hurt but also help me, I know I have to pull on this loose thread. It’s dangling in morbid temptation just in front of me. This isn’t where I was expecting a Tessera on Zurich and neutral Switzerland to take me. But I must trust the process. Just as I always have.
I struggled to open up a meaningful floodgate of memories from Zurich. Much like my reflections on Palma, Mallorca, I discovered there wasn’t a whole lot of material waiting for me. At least not on the surface. I did the best I could with the sparse photo feed and saved green Google flags I had to recall movement there. Meals and moments eventually returned. But I can’t say there was much feeling in between them. Not about Zurich anyway.
As fatigued as I have become writing about my layoff, I have to appreciate it is impossible to reflect on a trip taken that same year, without acknowledging how it influenced my life and movement. Armed with that grace and context, I drift reluctantly back to “the office” and the Spring of 2024.
I was preparing a brand presentation for a May Global Sales meeting in Crete. I was politely unapologetic for routinely tagging personal travel onto work travel. I not only always paid for it personally, but I incessantly worked my ass off so no one ever questioned it. In this case, I had bookended two stayovers in Zurich, one on either side of the meeting in Crete. I, of course, extended that stay in Crete, too.
I never could resist a chance to see more of this beautiful world.
It was about this time when the ground below me shifted seismically. While nothing was explicitly ever stated in any one conversation back then, enough was inadvertently implied. I knew I wouldn’t make it through the year.
I remember being strangely detached as I listened and observed in the coming weeks and months for likelihood instead of false hope. I felt, anyway, that I held the distinct advantage of having feminine intuition on my side. I didn’t need the decades of more seniority or seasoned stage presence of all the other guys in the room to ascertain that all of the alliances, agendas and appetites on the playbill could basically only produce one outcome.
It was May when I traveled with this hunch to Zurich. June when I carried it to the Nordics. And August when I tried to take it to Iceland. It was November when I finally sat down – without it – unemployed and untethered – for my Italian Severance Project lunch at Roscioli Salumeria in Rome.
But I didn’t have the luxury of knowing where that hunch would lead when I set off to Switzerland in the Spring of 2024. Sitting down this morning to reflect on my travels there, I expected to share that I had been reading Michael A. Singer’s The Untethered Soul in Zurich. It is hard to imagine that Zurich wasn’t where the word “untethered” first settled inside of me with any lasting resonance. I also have to believe that given what was going on in my life, my receptivity to Singer’s work was at an unusual all-time high.
While my photo feed wasn’t exactly a treasure trove of insights, I could still sense that Zurich had been a place of consequence in my story. In fact, the only discernible insight I was able to glean from my Zurich feed was that I had a predictable proclivity to turn to steak tartare for comfort in the face of life’s uncertainty.
The batch made theatrically tableside at Terrasse was an unexpected treat on an otherwise rainy, dreary day. The tartare I feasted on in between other inspired plates from the butcher at Boucherie AuGust had been on my radar long before I landed for the first time in Zurich. It was always a must-enjoy. And enjoy I did.
But the most consequential encounter I had was a collision in a silk scarf boutique in Zurich’s old town. There, the store manager and I spoke about the store’s exceptionally elegant (and expensive!) inventory and its struggles to recover from losing so much foot traffic and momentum during Covid.
The manager had asked me in that conversation if I knew anyone in Chicago who would be interested in distributing his scarves. Caught off guard, but not offended by any means, more thrown by the inquiry, I took his card and promised I’d think on it.
And I did. Again and again.
I can say with every bit of certainty that this was the most important question I would ever be asked and never come to answer. It ignited something real and uncontainable inside of me. It lit the pilot light for my creator within.
I would come back to this Zurich collision countless times in the months leading up to my layoff. I was convinced it had triggered something that not only required my attention, but demanded my deciphering. I would return to it even more frequently in the months after founding The Untethered Traveler.
But what if I had it wrong? What if it wasn’t as much a pilot light as it was a lighthouse beacon? Here I was some two years later still searching for meaning in Zurich. Where had this collision really led me?
To Geneva.
To that swell of loss and regret.
To that loose thread.
Suddenly, I am stopped in my tracks just as I was seven years ago with half my team at the Trenitalia train station in Domodossola, Italy. I am also struck dumb wondering how I could possibly have ever felt any shade of impatience stranded for any length of time at the foot of those soaring emerald green flocked mountains. And yet, I did. Embarrassingly so. I spent more time frantically searching for a Plan B than admiring what was stretched out before me. I took what I stood in front of for granted.
The Domodossola Train Station between Milano and Geneva
I wasn’t expecting to find meaning in the divide, the chasm between my first trip to Switzerland and the second. Yet, here I am comparing two very different Swiss work trips and two very different states of mind.
The first is full of belly, bowling-over laughs, inside jokes that will always be funny and epic stories inevitably set off by the random meal, nightcap or airport delay. Whether marketing was right for me in the long run or not, this stretch of time, on this specific team, bore friendship, success and joy.
It also launched the catchiest of breakfast traditions – the table pancake. The spirit of which was simple. Nobody loses when everyone starts their day with a couple bites of pancake.
A table pancake at the Waldorf Astoria in Las Vegas, Nevada
And yet, I never shared a table pancake with any other team thereafter. I can recognize now this befitting ritual in Taste as the symbol, signal and contract of trust and camaraderie it really was. Its absence is the most honest way I can sum up, too, the second state of mind that bravely showed up for that second trip to Switzerland to play out the second phase of my Wilson career.
Since being inspired by a substitute Yin Yoga teacher earlier this year, I’ve been reading Melody Beattie’s Journey to the Heart. It is a collection of daily meditations. Today’s meditation was entitled, “Find Places of Healing.” This wouldn’t be the first time I’d read something, metabolized it like I was twenty years old again and connected it to the Tessera I was writing. This might, however, be a record in digestion.
In my tidy attempt to move on as quickly as possible after the layoff, to the detriment of both sentimentality and grieving for my own displaced pulled-out-from-under me identity, I indiscriminately fenced off these two states of mind, together. And then I haphazardously moved on.
When we do that, when we let a bad taste linger in our mouths, we can forget and discard all that was delicious that has come before.
We can confuse pilot lights for beacons.
We can mischaracterize places of healing for pass-through, stopover, bookend destinations.
We can forget to take in the mountains.
