The Gift of Travel
How five early intentions shaped a year of movement and revealed the purpose already living within me
A December sunrise in Valletta, Malta
I will Tessera Edition 40 to life from a Maltese balcony facing east as the early morning sun transforms the Mediterranean Sea into a brilliant, shimmering carpet of scattered sparkling diamonds. I am almost too mesmerized to think, let alone type as boats drift across the horizon, clouds morph from one pastel shade into another and gentle waves rhythmically rock to shore. I feel a tremendous rush of gratitude as I realize I won’t ever see pattern and color or sky and sea as they’ve come together to look right here, right now. This morning, these minutes; they are a gift.
Inspired by the touching and contagious generosity of so many who have supported me this past year, I am sharing a set of five, deeply personal intentions that have come to guide and ground me as The Untethered Traveler. I had no idea when I drafted these eight months ago where I’d be in the world or on my journey today. Or that I would come to adopt the practice of reciting them every morning.
My reflections captured here are less about what I have learned in every port of call and so much more about what I feel travel can teach us. Remarkably too while my brand vision has evolved, my roadmap has been rewritten a dozen times over and my perspective on how to activate my purpose has changed, these five intentions have remained the same.
Through the gift of travel may I be inspired to feel and act on my purpose as I experience the world every day with a grateful pair of fresh eyes.
When we travel, we carve out a fixed amount of time to see the world. Whether we are traveling for release, alignment or ignition, or good old-fashioned escape or indulgence, we always try to maximize our time. We will register and record joy, discovery, gratitude and everything in between. At some point, we’ll stop and marvel in our own little way how magical it is to take in a new place for the very first time and even the third.
How do we channel that same sense of wonder and curiosity when we’re back home, mining it for fresh perspective, positive energy and renewed motivation? How do we live like we’re fully awake for the first time? Or… how do we wake up like we’re alive for the very first time?
Eight months ago, when I penned my first Tessera, Travel, My Life Companion – How Intentional Journeys Shape Who We Become I was dancing up against this intention without really knowing it. I was leaning into travel to find some semblance of clarity and purpose. In doing so, I exposed the underpinnings of my life’s next chapter and a skeleton philosophy in movement. Writing that first piece – watching those words pour out of me – was a breakthrough into the second half of my life. When we commit to overcoming inertia that has anchored us to the wrong place, we must trust the right answers will materialize. That often means, the first move we have to make is from within.
After repeating this intention – these same words – over and over for months, its message surprisingly shifted while writing The Journey is Far From Over Once We Get Home. I felt then as though I had stumbled upon a special power to extend travel’s reach and impact beyond geography, time and space. Up until that shift, it was as if I had been traveling with one of my engines out, not fully tapping the transformative power of travel to light me up, lift me up and level me up. When we travel with fresh eyes, we see that moving with meaning brings greater meaning to moments of stillness too.
Through the gift of travel may I be led by my purpose and mission as I listen always to my heart and what it pulls me toward.
Orvieto, Italy
I have navigated my way through a year of growth and transition most effectively and poetically when I have summoned mind, body, gut and soul into alignment. However, make no mistake, every invitation I’ve accepted this year, and in some cases well before, has been at my heart’s insistence and subsequent willingness to explore where life has called me. By strengthening and conditioning our hearts to ignore petty interference from our minds, social norms or critics, we teach ourselves to trust – not silence – our inner voice.
By listening to this inner pull, we allow instinct not conformity to inspire itinerary. When we follow our heart and not vanity, convenience or groupthink, we move with piqued intent. New places feel like home. Return-Again travel feels like a second chance. We feel challenged and engaged by something bigger than us. What’s more, we are met by a reassuring sense of flow and peace. And, most importantly, we free ourselves to answer and travel alongside our WHY. Who better to trust our travel to than the organ that beats to move us.
Through the gift of travel may I be reminded to shape and expand my purpose as I absorb boundless energy from the vibrant, beautiful colors around me.
Every time I recite intention #3 I’m pulled into a different corner of the world, asked to revisit a different version of myself or drawn to look out a different window in my own imagination. At the mere positioning of color alongside travel, I’m swept back to so many places and plates, bursting with colors that moved and mysteriously motivated me.
Sometimes those colors, like the bright green roasted Guindilla peppers and ripe red tomatoes of San Sebastián signaled discovery of calling – the collision of passion with purpose. Sometimes they signaled growth and grace, as I took refuge and comfort in the stories and lessons that lived inside the pastel fairytale facades of Eastern Europe’s old towns. Sometimes color signaled alignment as the Fall colors of Slovenia, Seoul and Kyoto blanketed my journey toward a clearer, more resolute activation of purpose.
While color’s power to dislodge inertia and inspire creativity, nostalgia and awe is potent and far-reaching, it is color’s invitation to investigate what lives below every pause, double-take and trace over that deserves our undivided attention. The more we can draft off color’s inimitable power to rouse and direct us, the more we can turn nudges and clues into the stepping stones of animating the passions that live inside us.
Through the gift of travel may I express and live more deeply into my purpose as I explore the world with focus, mindfulness and curiosity.
When we search below the surface, we uncover truths not only about the world around us but about our deepest longings and desires. It is only after shedding baggage, pretense and entitlement that we come to see how many signals were already nudging us this way and that. The hardest part is stepping out clearheaded and openhearted enough to really listen.
I’ve come to relish these gifts. The lean-in moments where my pulse quickens, my body softens and my creativity revs up in the anticipation of absorbing and metabolizing a morsel that was always meant to land just in front of me. These are the collisions I go on and on about, the exchanges between strangers from different cultures, coordinates and circumstances that inspire joy, progress and yes, even purpose. When we stop expecting grand gestures and express an interest in learning from the micro-movements, our paths forward light up like a compass needle finding true north.
More fulfilling still, movement has the power to ripple out into the world to not only change our lives but the lives of those around us and around them and so on. Herein lies the true transformative power of travel. When we play our role, be that setting out to discover our purpose, stepping into our calling or simply showing up for another human being, we set life’s plans in motion in marvelously sprawling and mystifying ways.
I’ve come to call these our Tessera moments. Just as a Tessera is one piece, one tile in a mosaic, every positive interaction plays its role filling out the bigger picture across this big, beautiful and broken world. When we savor the smallest of what the universe so generously gifts us we can’t help but see goodness, splendor and bounty everywhere we turn. I found it talking to a 3-year-old boy in Toledo, Spain and feeling small and safe nestled amongst soaring mountains during a Slovenian sabbatical.
Through the gift of travel may I become closer to God and His will for me as I constantly seek Him in every place, person and moment that I meet.
While I’ve drifted from the organized religion I grew up in, it was travel that finally convinced me to attach meaning to inexplicable moments of grace, awe and wonder, and tremendous coincidence and connection.
When I met God where He was – out in this wild, wonderful world – I met a gentle, benevolent force, who inspires great creativity, ingenuity, goodness, resilience and peace. As I think back, He’s never failed to put the right story or the right person in front of me at the right time – the Hong Kong sushi chef; Sanda, the jewelry maker; the Istrian shopkeeper...
I have come to find Him everywhere, in movement and stillness, in connection and even in chaos, in the seemingly ordinary and overlooked. I was driven to expand my perspective, my understanding of faith, to include Buddhist teachings and the belief that a higher power does play a hand in connecting every little thing in this great big universe.
We don’t need to wait for a ceremonial invite, fire and brimstone to cleanse us or feel insufficient or excluded because we were born without a Y chromosome. The higher power I encounter in the faces and voices of our world, who I listen for and talk to in the quiet of the night knows only of acceptance, inclusion and unconditional love.
I haven’t figured it all out and don’t know any more than the next soul, but for the first time in my life I do know I have a real, growing relationship with God.
Mine is a deeply personal journey that may or may not sit with some, most or any, but it is my story. And this journey, this genuine heartfelt re-discovery of my faith is the most elegant and resonant gift of travel I have ever received.
The Gifts of Travel
I said these intentions for the very first time in Paris last April and just this morning in Malta. I actually wrote them before The Untethered Traveler found its true shape. That means they lived somewhere deep inside of me and broke free before I really knew what to do with them.
When I decided to write them as travel intentions to meditate on before each trip and then later adopted the practice to recite them every morning, I inadvertently laid them out like a blueprint without knowing at the time I was laying the foundation and framework of my purpose. It was only after a season of travel blessed by great self-discovery and connection, that their greater meaning was revealed.
I wonder how long they’ve been waiting for release? To travel alongside me, awaken me, set my future in motion? But what I really stop to wonder is: were they meant for me or you?
Every week, I send one new Tessera Blog on taste, travel and the truths we collect along the way. If this piece resonated, I’d be honored if you’d share or subscribe.
