Meet Travel Is Light
Round and round and round, I spun my new globe, fascinated by the world and all that I found. At the age of 7, 3 things happened that have shaped the course of the rest of my life: 1) I heard a foreign language spoken for the first time, 2) I opened the first page of my first journal and started to write, 3) My parents bought me a globe.
Since then, travel has always been a part of me…. I studied in Germany, lived in Paris, served in business development in Peace Corps Nicaragua, got my MBA at Thunderbird School of Global Management, launched my corporate career and traveled around the world.
Somewhere along the way, though, I got lost in the sea of life, estranged from that distant anchor: the things I knew definitively at the age of 7. My boat was merely drifting, shifting with the wind.
Like the horizon, my dreams were hazy and always off in the distance, out of reach. Over the course of the daily regatta that was my life, I had left them – even forgotten them – at a distant harbor, gradually, over time, without even realizing it. Still, I kept rushing towards something: society’s – someone else’s – dreams.
On the surface, I may have seemed to have it all: a devoted husband, two healthy children, a successful career, a passport so full of stamps that I had to request an insert to hold them all. Yet, I still found myself waiting for my ship to come in. Somehow, someway, I had charted my course but lost the destination.
My life was rolling along like the waves… Somewhere in a forgotten drawer, my empty journal lay waiting for me to rediscover it.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
… And so it was for me. Amidst stormy seas, I peeled back the layers I had built up. By having the courage to be the butterfly, I rediscovered what I have always harbored inside. My purpose in life is in the power of words: Enlighten. Connect. Transform. Love.
The butterfly, the sun… they were in me all along, waiting to be discovered, waiting for me to be who I was meant to be.
Once I had my ship charted back on course, things begin to happen. People started to appear at just the right time – to keep me on the right tack, to help me maintain my courage to step out of the shadows, to know when to trim the sails, and when to land. Maybe they were there all the time, I was just moving too fast to see them. Nevertheless, I have found peace in knowing that all of the tacking brought my boat exactly where I need to be… and without it, I wouldn’t be who I am today.
And so I ask of you, Do you know where you’re pointing your sails? Are they luffing in the wind, or propelling you at full speed – to the wrong port? Do you know where you’re headed, and are you enjoying the journey along the way?
This is my story; what will yours be?
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.”
– Abraham Maslow