The picture above is a picture I just took on my phone. It’s almost 9 PM and the sun is forming the perfect silhouette of the castle-like structure on the hill. I landed at NCE airport at 12pm today and the novelty of a new place has my brain on a high. The weather is a perfect 81 degrees right now. There is reggaton playing in the background from other visitors who are having a glass of wine around the corner. The noises of the city are subtle but can be recognized. The occasional car hums as it comes around the corner. There’s a dove cooing and crickets chirping in perfect sync. A few birds are flying overhead heading to their nightly reprieve.
Hopefully, I’ve set the scene as to where my 31st birthday ended. Rested from an afternoon nap, filled with tasty pizza, and doing the thing I enjoy the most, traveling to a new place and writing about the experience.
Traveling for me is more than something experiential. It’s like taking your brain to the gym. Routines fall apart so you gravitate to the things that make you feel alive—reading and writing. When you couple novelty, reading, and writing your brain feels like it’s on fire. Novel ideas come easier. Those ideas begin to marinate and mutate into other ideas. Those ideas become a thesis to behavior and those behaviors become actions which eventually turns into habits which forms the foundation of a character. Whew! That was long.
But traveling and writing also does something else for me. It gives my brain downtime. It’s my personal hack. As Amos Tversky says, “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” So, waste hours relaxing and let your mind wander for a bit.
la vie en rose,
Daviel