My dad had a regular foursome, and one of them couldn’t make it. This left an opening that apparently could be filled by his favorite older daughter, who had almost no golf experience but was technically capable of holding a club. The other two members of the foursome were former teachers of mine who, because I had graduated from college and returned to teach at my old high school, had suddenly become my colleagues.

So, you know. No pressure.

Me, during my brief and illustrious career as a high school math teacher,
around the time my golf potential was identified.

I had been to a driving range a handful of times. My dad, who can actually play golf and genuinely enjoys it, had apparently seen enough to determine that I had “potential.” I don’t remember the exact assessment, but it was something along the lines of, You could probably be halfway decent at this if you wanted to.

I am pleased to report that, approximately 25 years later, I have done absolutely nothing with this potential.

But on that particular day, I played 18 holes.

We also played a game called Wolf, the rules of which I did not fully understand then and absolutely cannot explain to you now. It involved changing teams throughout the round, and through some glorious combination of luck, timing, and being paired at advantageous moments with people who could actually play golf, I ended the day as the cash winner.

I won $1.25.

I don’t remember exactly how I was paid—I suspect it was 5 quarters—but I know I was paid immediately. I also know I was never invited to join the foursome again.

I have chosen to interpret this as fear.

Perhaps they simply could not bear the prospect of losing again to a 21-year-old substitute golfer who barely understood the betting structure. I will admit that there is an alternate explanation involving the quality of my golf, but I see no reason to entertain it.

I went out on top.

I still play golf occasionally, if we’re using the word golf generously. I go to Top Golf. I play mini-golf at ParTee Shack with my kids and their friends. I have discovered that I can crush people who actually play golf at Top Golf’s Block Party because the game rewards consistency and, as it turns out, I am remarkably consistent in my terribleness.

My dad, apparently attempting to develop the family’s golf potential in the next generation.

That’s what makes golf fun for me. My self-worth is in no way connected to how frequently I completely shank the ball.

This is not, generally speaking, how I operate.

I am a striver. I am good at school, and I know it. I like to succeed. The perfectionist monster has been alive and well for much of my life, although I’m working on depriving it of oxygen. I spend a fair amount of time trying to keep my perfectionist-leaning students from feeding their own versions of it, even as I still occasionally discover mine out and about, rummaging around the kitchen looking for a snack.

I’ve also spent most of my life in places where competence gets rewarded. If you’re good at something, people notice. Then, very often, you get to do more of it.

Congratulations! You’re competent. Here is another committee.

I’ve learned that there are at least two versions of this trap. There’s You could be good at this, so you should develop it. And then there’s You are good at this, so you should keep doing it.

I am exceptionally susceptible to the second one. Give me evidence that I can do something well and apparently some part of my brain immediately starts making it my ongoing responsibility.

But I’m pretty susceptible to the first one, too. I like improvement. I like knowing what I’m doing. I like succeeding. And once I discover I have some aptitude for something, it can be remarkably difficult to leave that aptitude alone.

There is a loaded phrase for doing exactly that: wasted potential.

But, hear me out. I’m not sure potential is something we can waste simply by declining to develop every ounce of it. None of us has enough years of life or bandwidth for all the things we could potentially become. Choosing one thing inevitably means leaving other perfectly viable versions of ourselves undeveloped.

Apparently I could have been a halfway decent golfer.

Okay. Cool.

I could have spent hundreds of Saturday mornings practicing, taken lessons, bought better clubs, learned what my handicap was, developed opinions about courses, and spent untold hours being furious at a tiny white ball.

Instead, I won $1.25 in approximately 2001 and called it a career.

This is not tragic.

What I’m actually starting to want are more things in my life that work like golf does. Things I can enjoy without needing to get better at them. Things I can try without immediately deciding whether I’m going to continue. Interests that don’t have to become expertise, identities, responsibilities, side hustles, or another thing where I need to measure my performance.

Adulthood has a remarkable ability to turn curiosity into tasks you now have to do. You take a class and start wondering whether you should take the next one. You start running and someone asks whether you’re training for something. You make something people like and somebody tells you that you could sell those. You find a hobby and immediately discover an entire internet community prepared to explain why the perfectly adequate equipment you bought is actually garbage.

This doesn’t mean I want to stop being good at things. There are things I care deeply about doing well. My students deserve a professor who knows what she’s doing. The people who depend on me deserve both competence and care. And there are things I genuinely enjoy getting better at.

I’m just getting choosier about where I spend my striving.

Because striving costs something. Time, certainly, but also attention. The part of me that wants to improve something is going to think about it, work on it, research it, notice where it could be better and, if history is any indication, probably make a mental flow chart of how I can get from Carrie has potential to Carrie is objectively good at this.

I can’t do that with everything I touch. More importantly, I don’t want to do that with everything I touch.

Being capable of doing something doesn’t mean I have to keep volunteering to do it. Being good at something doesn’t mean I have to become the person who handles it forever. And discovering that I might have potential doesn’t mean I’ve been handed an assignment.

Sometimes I can just … play.

Maybe I’ll get better. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll do it once. Maybe I’ll do it badly for years because I enjoy doing it, even if (especially if?) I’m doing it badly. The quality of my performance does not have to be the point of every experience I have.

Potential remains largely undeveloped. Enjoyment appears unaffected.

There are things I want to be excellent at. And there are also things I’m perfectly happy to be cheerfully mediocre at.

Golf, for example.

And, for the record, I’m still up $1.25.

A small experiment:

Find something you enjoy being mediocre at. Do it again. Resist the urge to improve.

Bonus points if you win $1.25. Bragging rights last at least 25 years

There is a glorious feeling that happens when you watch the last person you are responsible for disappear through airport security.

I know this feeling well.

It was nearly twenty years ago, and I had just spent two weeks leading a group of master’s students through the Netherlands — shepherding them through train stations, troubleshooting the things that go completely sideways when you put a group of people who have never been abroad into a country where nothing works quite the way they expect.

It was wonderful.

It was also a lot.

And then they were gone.

And I was standing in an airport in Amsterdam with an extra week, a loose idea of where I wanted to go, and absolutely no one to take care of but myself.

I remember thinking: Cool. Now what?

The answer turned out to be Paris.

Then Barcelona.

Then London, where a friend and colleague had offered me a place to stay and four days to entertain myself when she was occupied with her own students.

I had no real itinerary for any of it.

I had a hostel reservation in Paris because I knew I wasn’t going to spend much time in the room anyway — I’d rather spend the money on food and on being somewhere than on a bed I’d barely use.

I had an overnight train booked from Paris to Barcelona because it cost less than a flight and a hotel combined, and I liked the idea of falling asleep in one country and waking up in another.

Everything else I figured out when I got there.

Paris, briefly.

Paris gave me one night and a day and a half, which is not enough and also somehow exactly right for a first visit.

I climbed the galerie des chimères at Notre Dame — gargoyles staring out at the city with the kind of ancient indifference that makes you feel appropriately small.

I sat in a café with a baguette and a glass of red wine and watched artists paint on their easels in the street.

I watched the Eiffel Tower change from afternoon to dusk to night, a concert happening below it and fireworks going off, and decided the line to go up wasn’t worth what I was already getting for free on the ground.

I spoke terrible French to Parisians who were, without exception, completely kind about it.

I walked by the Louvre and didn’t go in. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I knew I’d feel rushed, and the Louvre deserves more time than that. I filed it under next time and kept walking.

Then I got on an overnight train and woke up in Barcelona.

Barcelona, without much of a plan.

I stepped off the train before the city was fully awake. Dropped my bags at the hotel and walked out into the morning with no plan except a general direction.

The old part of the city still has Roman bones in it, literally — remnants of an ancient past that the city just absorbed and kept moving.

From there to the 1992 Olympic sites, still woven into the urban fabric.

From there to La Sagrada Família, which looks like nothing so much as a drip castle — the kind you make by letting wet sand fall through your fingers on the beach — scaled up to something surreal and massive and utterly, improbably magnificent.

It shouldn’t work.

It absolutely works.

There is nothing else on earth that looks like it.

I took the subway to Park Güell — Gaudí’s park on the hill above the city, all mosaic and color and wild organic shapes, with the Mediterranean visible in the distance and the whole city spread out below you like something you earned by getting there.

And then I stumbled into a cooking class.

Sangria and paella, a handful of tourists from various corners of the world thrown together for an afternoon. I cannot tell you what went into the paella. I can tell you it was delicious and that strangers are surprisingly good company when everyone is equally willing to look foolish.

I found a restaurant doing a prix fixe lunch. Four courses. The house wine was remarkable. I sat there for a long time, on no one’s schedule but my own.

And I think that’s the part I remember most clearly about that week. Not being alone, exactly. But being entirely responsible for what happened next—and only being responsible for myself.

Hungry? Find somewhere to eat.

Curious about something? Go look.

Tired? Stop.

Don’t want to spend three hours rushing through the Louvre just because you’re supposed to see the Louvre?

Keep walking.

There was nobody else’s experience to manage.

Just mine.

London is where my parents lost track of me.

I was staying with my colleague Melanie, overlapping in the evenings, exploring together when she wasn’t teaching.

One afternoon while she was in class, I met up with Juliette — a friend from high school who happened to be living outside of London.

My parents knew I was there. They knew I was with people I knew. What they didn’t have was any proof of life, because I was too busy being in London to think about checking in. In my defense, this was before cellphones were fully transnational, before people posted photos of every meal. But I digress.

At some point, Juliette posted a photo of the two of us on Facebook. That was how my parents found out I was alive and well and apparently having a wonderful time in England without telling anyone.

I came home to a very loving, and very pointed, conversation about what it feels like not to know where your child is.

And here’s the thing — as a parent now, I get it. I understand that worry in my bones in a way I couldn’t have then. Their worry wasn’t ridiculous. But it also wasn’t the experience I was actually having.

The reality on the ground was this: I was fine.

More than fine.

I was a grown woman moving through one of the great cities of the world, paying attention the way women traveling alone know to pay attention, making good decisions, having an extraordinary time.

And over the course of that week, without realizing it, I had stopped managing everything and just started experiencing it.

I could arrive in Paris with a day and a half and decide what mattered to me.

I could skip something I was supposed to do because I didn’t have enough time to do it the way I wanted.

I could fall asleep in one country and wake up in another.

I could step into Barcelona without an itinerary, choose a direction, find lunch, take the subway, talk to strangers.

I could get something wrong and figure it out.

I could be alone without being lonely.

None of it was particularly heroic. I think that was the whole point.

We make predictions about ourselves all the time.

I’d hate that.

I couldn’t do that.

That sounds scary.

I’m not someone who travels alone.

I wouldn’t know what to do.

Sometimes we’re right. But sometimes we’ve been treating a prediction like a fact without ever giving ourselves a chance to find out.

That week gave me a chance to find out.

And what I learned wasn’t that I was Fearless Solo Traveler Carrie™.

It was much smaller than that. It was a quiet confidence that murmured, Oh. I can do this.

Twenty years later, I think that may be the most important thing I brought home.

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Something to wonder about:

Is there something you believe about yourself that you’ve never actually tested?

Not something you need to conquer. Not something you should do.

Just something you’re curious enough about to wonder:

Is that actually true?

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I also had the day off and approximately 562 things I needed to do.

Moving, I have discovered, is apparently a process without an actual end point. There are always boxes containing sixteen completely unrelated things, none of which have an obvious home. Then, there is the laundry that has successfully completed the washing-and-drying portion of its journey and then stalled indefinitely in a basket. There are piles that aren’t exactly messy so much as collections of decisions I haven’t made yet.

I could have spent all of Labor Day dealing with those things. Truly, I could have spent all of Labor Day dealing with those things and gone to bed with just as many—if not more—things that needed dealing with.

So I picked a few. I unpacked one of the miscellaneous boxes and mostly put away what was in it. I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher. I folded a load and a half of laundry. I put away some things that were in doom piles in my room. I made my bed.

And then I deemed it good enough.

Because I had heard about giant trolls.

There are seven of them scattered across North Carolina’s Piedmont, enormous sculptures made largely from reclaimed wood and other repurposed materials by Danish artist Thomas Dambo. Five are at Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, with the remaining two in High Point and Charlotte. Each one has a symbol, and if you find all seven, the symbols give you what you need to find something called the Grandmother Tree.

So, really, it wasn’t just giant trolls. It was a giant troll quest. And if you’ve known me for more than approximately 15 seconds, you know that I love a good puzzle.

I considered going to High Point. There was a troll there, it was close, and I could have a brief adventure and still be home and be productive for the rest of the day.

But High Point felt too close.

I looked around Winston-Salem at some reasonably fun and non-troll-related things. I went back and forth. But, really, what it came down to was that there were five trolls that were clustered together in Raleigh, in a park I’d heard about but never visited, and they were a key part to a larger puzzle.

Decision made.

I did have a brief visit from the guilt monster. This was exactly the kind of thing my family might really enjoy, while also being exactly the kind of thing my family might deeply resent being dragged along to. I considered for maybe two minutes whether I should invite everyone.

Then I decided that this portion of the quest could just be mine. If it turned out to be fantastic, I’d know. And there were still trolls in High Point and Charlotte. I could always drag everyone into it later. So, I silenced the little voice in my head and went to Raleigh.

I had never been to Dix Park, and almost immediately, I was annoyed with myself about that.

It was a beautiful day, especially for North Carolina at the beginning of September. Not beastly hot or humid, which felt like a gift. I walked past this enormous play area that was industrial and whimsical, full of kids and families climbing and running around, and immediately thought my kids would have loved it when they were younger.

Which was annoying, because I had JUST decided this outing did not need to involve my children. But there it was anyway.

I stopped at the visitors center, which was less visitors center and more food truck, minus the food, and discovered they had a map showing the approximate locations of all five trolls.

I was mildly disappointed.

I had come to hunt trolls. Apparently, I did not want finding them to be that easy.

Still, I took a picture of the map and headed down the road toward roughly where the first troll was supposed to be. Eventually I found a small crowd of people diligently taking turns photographing their children and families in front of a giant wooden creature.

Daddy Bird Eye. He was sitting and gazing out at the Raleigh skyline like he was just taking a moment to rest and take it all in.

There was a poem on a marker by him that hinted at the larger quest. At this point, I had no idea what information I was ultimately going to need to solve the larger puzzle, and I was not about to find all seven trolls only to discover that there had been a tiny mark on the back of Troll #1 that I’d failed to document. So I took pictures.

Lots of pictures.

The troll. The poem. The spear/birdhouse/walking stick thing he was holding. Details. Angles. Video. I was thorough.

The next trolls were a decent walk away, but there were some interesting sculpture-y things up a hill, so I wandered up there instead. One was made from what looked like old pipes, a huge structure that children and adults could sit and stand inside and climb around on.

I stepped backward to get far enough away to take in the whole thing.

And promptly fell on my ass.

Several very kind people rushed over to make sure I was okay. I sheepishly assured them that nothing was bruised except my ego and then got myself out of there before anyone could be concerned at me any longer.

I kept walking, and that’s when I started noticing the buildings. Old stone buildings. One marked DOCTOR’S HOUSE.

Huh.

My brain started working on something that should, in retrospect, have been completely obvious.

A little farther along I came across a basketball hoop inside a fenced courtyard. Something about it felt stark and institutional in contrast to the rest of the park. Then I looked up and saw a mural nearby that referenced mental health.

And went: Shit.

Dorothea Dix.

Not just the name of the park. That Dorothea Dix.

When I was in my doctoral program, I worked after hours doing mental-health assessments for local emergency departments. I sat with people who were in crisis and tried to figure out with them, any accompanying family members, and the other professionals involved what needed to happen next. Sometimes what they needed was more care and safety than could be provided in the ED at the moment, and there wasn’t space or availability locally, so they were admitted for inpatient psychiatric treatment at Dorothea Dix state hospital.

I had sent people to Dorothea Dix. This Dorothea Dix.

I stopped right there and Googled “history of Dix Park.” And then I stood around reading. I had known Dorothea Dix as a name in a mental-health system. I had never known it as a place. I didn’t know much of its history at all.

What I found was more complicated than the story I had automatically started constructing in my head. The hospital had opened in the 1850s as part of an effort to provide more humane care for people with mental illness. The beauty of the place wasn’t incidental. The grounds, the views, fresh air, sunlight, time outdoors and meaningful work were part of the thinking about what care could look like. Farming and gardening became part of that, too.

And the grounds really are beautiful.

But good intentions didn’t mean that everyone was treated equally, or guarantee that the people who lived there experienced the care the way its designers imagined it. The history of the place held both the effort to do better and the complicated reality of what that looked like in practice.

Standing there in the sun and digging a bit into the history did something strange to the version of Dorothea Dix I had carried in my head for more than twenty years. For me, it had been a destination at the end of an assessment. I worked with plenty of people who went from the emergency department to local inpatient facilities, too, but those places felt different. They were part of the local system I knew. Dorothea Dix was farther away, both literally and somehow in my head. Someone needed more help than we could provide, and sometimes that was where they went.

I don’t think I had ever really pictured where there was. Now I was standing in it.

I found myself looking differently at the buildings after that. People had arrived here. They had slept in these buildings and looked out these windows and walked these grounds. Some stayed for relatively short periods; for others, this place became a much larger part of their lives.

I didn’t know their stories. Standing there reading about the hospital didn’t suddenly give me access to what it had been like to be a patient there. But for the first time, I was thinking about the place from this end of the journey.

And then I kept walking.

I was still, after all, looking for trolls.

Or, more accurately, I continued wandering in the general direction of trolls while stopping whenever something else looked interesting.

There was a mural about incarcerated women. I stopped to look at that.

Then I found one of the troll brothers, somehow hiding in plain sight near a grove where twenty or so hammocks hung lazily between the trees. His brother was nearby, tucked much more convincingly into the woods.

I photographed them extensively. I was still being thorough.

The remaining trolls were on the other side of the campus, so I kept walking. Along the way I came to a café that was, of course, closed for Labor Day. But there were faux Adirondack chairs outside and a beautiful view of the Raleigh skyline that begged me to relax into them for a moment. So I sat down.

I wasn’t finished. I wasn’t waiting for anything. I didn’t have anywhere in particular I needed to be. I just sat there for a while. Then I got up and kept going.

The third sibling was standing at the edge of another wooded area, holding onto the end of an enormous wooden tail. That wooden tail is improbably long, and winds through the trees, eventually leading you to Mother Strong Tail, stretched out in the woods looking completely exhausted, one eye still open.

I took more pictures.

Five trolls. I had found all five Raleigh trolls.

It should have been satisfying. But, unfortunately, there were seven trolls. And somewhere beyond the seven trolls was the Grandmother Tree. So I started walking back toward my car while having a very serious internal conversation about whether I was done having fun for the day or whether I needed to FIND ALL THE TROLLS AND THE GRANDMOTHER TREE DAMMIT.

Charlotte was technically possible. High Point was practically in my backyard. I could do this.

I absolutely did not need to do this.

And while I was engaged in this highly reflective internal dialogue, I noticed what looked like a headstone off to the side.

I went to look. It was a cemetery. The hospital cemetery. I hadn’t known it was there, either. I walked among the markers and started reading. I remember feeling an odd little bit of relief when I realized the cemetery hadn’t been used in decades. People I had evaluated and sent to Dorothea Dix couldn’t be among the people buried there.

But it brought them immediately to mind anyway.

I thought about people I’d sat with in emergency departments twenty-something years ago. People who were frightened or suicidal or overwhelmed and simply in a place in that moment that they couldn’t be safe without more help. People whose lives intersected with mine for a few hours and then disappeared from my view.

I’ve wondered about many of those people from time to time over the years. But the people who went to Dorothea Dix had always felt a little more distant to me. I had known where I was sending them without ever really knowing the place I was sending them to. Standing there made that distance feel different. And I kept thinking about the history I’d been reading all afternoon.

Dorothea Dix had been built because people with mental illness needed care, and because many of the ways they were being treated at the time were appalling. The people who created the hospital believed they were building something better. In important ways, they were. The longer history is also more complicated than that, as the history of mental-health care tends to be.

I know enough about that history—and enough from my own years working in mental health—to know there isn’t a clear line from then, when people got it wrong to some time in the future, when we’ve figured it out.

People struggle. Sometimes they need more help than their families can give them, or an emergency department can give them, or a therapist can give them. That was true when Dorothea Dix opened. It was true when I was sending people there. It’s true now.

How do we take care of people well?

I didn’t have an answer standing in that cemetery. I don’t have one now. I stood there a long time and thought about the faces and the incredibly hard circumstances and the questions and all the ways that I wished I had a neat, tidy answer for how things should be.

Eventually I left and kept walking toward my car.

By then I had mostly let go of the idea of Charlotte and High Point and the Grandmother Tree. Mostly.

I could feel myself approaching the point where continuing would stop being I’m having fun and become I’M HAVING FUN, DAMMIT.

And I actually had been having fun. It just wasn’t the uncomplicated kind of fun I had imagined when I left my half-folded laundry and drove to Raleigh to hunt trolls. I’d solved things. I’d wandered around. I’d fallen on my ass and dusted myself off while reassuring a group of mildly concerned people that I was okay. I’d sat by myself and looked at the skyline. I’d discovered a place I didn’t know existed inside a place I thought I knew. I’d also spent part of the afternoon thinking about people I’d met more than twenty years ago and wondering how their lives turned out. And I’d found five enormous wooden trolls.

That was the day.

Also, I was hungry. So I Googled somewhere nearby with food options and headed over. When I pulled in, I saw a brewery.

Ooh, brewery.

It was one I’d heard of before, but never been to. I got a flight, because that’s what I do at breweries. I discovered several ridiculously expensive imperial stouts that I would happily have taken home with me, right up until I calculated that buying a single bottle of each one would cost more than a tank of gas.

I didn’t need the stouts that badly. I got food. I ate. I enjoyed my beer. And then I drove home.

I had not found all seven trolls. I still didn’t know where the Grandmother Tree was. And for a substantial portion of the drive home, some part of my brain continued making the case that I could probably swing through High Point and find just one more.

I didn’t.

Five trolls were enough trolls for one day.

A few thoughts for reflection:

Where in your life does something you’re enjoying start to become something you need to finish?

And what might you notice if you let the day be whatever it actually is instead?

I want to tell you about the floor.

It’s inside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul — a building that has been standing since 537 AD, which is a number that doesn’t mean anything until you’re inside it. Until you’re looking at the grooves worn into the stone floor at the Emperor’s Gate.

Deep grooves. Smooth and unmistakable.

Worn there by centuries of feet — emperors and centurions and everyone who came before and after — walking in and out of the same door you are standing in front of right now.

The floor remembers.

I stood there for a long time. Long enough that people probably wondered what I was doing.

I was feeling the full, slightly dizzying weight of being a small person inside a very long story. I was thinking about everyone who had stood in that same spot. What they were carrying. What the world looked like to them. How they could not have known that centuries later a woman from the United States with six words of Turkish would stand in their grooves and feel the floor shift under her understanding of what ancient actually means.

That’s what Turkey did to me.

Over and over again.

In the best possible way.

Why Turkey — and why now.

I’ve been to a handful of European countries. I’ve wandered through beautiful cities and eaten extraordinary food and stood in front of things that made me catch my breath.

But Turkey was different.

And I’ve spent some time trying to figure out why.

I think it’s this: in the United States, ancient things are often protected from us. Roped off. Behind glass. Supervised. You can look, but you can’t touch, can’t stand inside, can’t feel the weight of the thing against your own body.

Which makes sense. Preservation matters.

But it also creates a kind of distance between you and history that becomes, after a while, the only relationship you know how to have with it.

Turkey dissolved that distance entirely.

The Hagia Sophia did not feel like a museum, even though it was one when I visited. Today, it’s a mosque. But even as a museum, people walked in and out of it the way people walk in and out of living, breathing places — because that’s what it is. A living, breathing place that has simply been doing that for fifteen hundred years.

The Blue Mosque is the same. Topkapi Palace is the same.

You move through these spaces not as a tourist standing at a distance outside of history, but as a person inside it. And the difference is something you feel in your body before your brain catches up.

I was not prepared for that.

I don’t think you can be, entirely, until you’re there.

How I ended up wandering alone.

I didn’t go to Turkey looking for a solo adventure. I went for a conference, with a colleague, Ayşe, who is Turkish. She grew up there and took me first to Izmir to spend time with her mother and sister before we made our way to Istanbul.

Those days in Izmir were their own kind of gift — the kind you can only get when someone who loves a place shows it to you through their own eyes. We ate things I couldn’t name and sat in spaces that felt completely unhurried and walked streets that weren’t on any tourist map. And then we went to Istanbul or the conference.

We settled in, but then Ayşe had something to attend to. And I had an afternoon.

So I went alone.

With my half-dozen words of Turkish — merhaba, teşekkürler, lütfen, evet, hayır, and one phrase I’d memorized phonetically for asking where the bathroom was — I navigated my way through the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace and the streets in between.

I pointed at things. I smiled at people. I got slightly lost and then found again. I stood in the grooves at the Emperor’s Gate for longer than was necessary.

And I was completely fine. More than fine. I didn’t go out that afternoon intending to prove something to myself. I wasn’t conducting an experiment in independence or trying to Become A Solo Traveler™.

Ayşe had something to do, and I had an afternoon. So I went. And somewhere along the way, I learned something I hadn’t gone out there to learn:

I could do this.

Alone, in a city where I barely spoke the language, I had no choice but to be exactly where I was. To notice everything. To let it land. And in all of that, the question of whether I could navigate an unfamiliar city alone quietly stopped being a question.

Thinking can only tell us so much about what we might like, or tolerate, or be capable of. Eventually, you have to see what actually happens.

Ayşe did insist I not go to the Grand Bazaar without her — both because she wanted to come and because she knew the haggling, knew the pricing, knew I’d have paid three times what anything was worth and smiled the whole time.

She was right. We went together later, and the experience was better for it.

But that afternoon alone in the old city is one of the clearest travel memories I have. The light. The call to prayer rolling across the rooftops. The way the inside of the Hagia Sophia makes you feel simultaneously enormous and very, very small.

The thing I keep coming back to.

I’ve thought a lot about why the Hagia Sophia hit me the way it did. I think it’s because I wasn’t expecting to be moved. I was expecting to be impressed.

There’s a difference.

Impressed is what happens when something is bigger or older or more beautiful than you anticipated. Moved is harder to explain. Maybe that’s part of it, actually. You don’t always know ahead of time what’s going to get you.

For me, it was the grooves in the floor. They made fifteen hundred years briefly physical.

They reminded me that people have been walking through hard things and beautiful things and ordinary things for a very long time. That every one of them was living in what felt, to them, like the present.

And I was a part of that history now. And I couldn’t have planned that moment.

That’s something I’m coming to understand about the experiences that stay with me. I can choose where I go. I can buy the ticket and make the reservation and leave enough room for something unexpected to happen. But I can’t decide in advance what will find me there.

Maybe that’s part of the reason to go. Not because every trip needs to change us. That’s too much pressure to put on a vacation — or ourselves.

Sometimes a place is beautiful and the food is good and you’re glad you went.

That’s enough.

But every once in a while, you stand on a very old floor and something you thought you understood becomes something you can suddenly feel.

I went to Turkey almost twenty years ago. I still think about the grooves.

Wander with intention. See what finds you.

Something to wonder about:

Is there a place you’ve been — far away or ten minutes from home — where something landed before you quite understood why?

What stayed with you?

I’d swapped my last night in New Brunswick for one here since half the retreat group hadn’t made it in at all — weather had stranded them in Atlanta on the way, and by Tuesday night they’d given up and turned back for home rather than keep fighting it. Which meant the alternative for my last night was a nearly empty hotel by myself. The lure of Hell’s Kitchen won, easily.

I hopped the train and texted Lindsay, a former student who’s a professor in her own right now and lives in the city. I’d told her I’d reach out on Friday afternoon if I was going to make it in. I checked into the Civilian, admired the coziness of my room, and internally scoffed at the women who were being overly critical downstairs.

Dinner happened almost by accident — the restaurant in the hotel, the Carving Knife, was unexpectedly delicious, so rather than just grabbing a happy hour drink, I tried the Wagyu cheesesteak bites. And then the crispy rice. And then a drink the bartender built for me off the top of his head — two kinds of rum, rye, some dashes of things in small bottles that I never fully identified. Drinks like this are the reason that if I’m at a new place that is proud of its cocktails, I’ll opt for “bartender’s choice.” I told him I liked old fashioneds. He asked me three questions and then crafted this cocktail in front of my eyes that I will never be able to replicate, but that I was delighted to experience.

Lindsay and I had decided to see Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York. As per my usual, I had very little idea what the show was about (beyond the title), but I went with an open mind, because her friends had seen it and recommended it to her. I am so glad we went. It was the type of funny that makes you snort out loud and then giggle at the fact that you snorted. The New Yorkers in the audience loved it even more than I did, judging by the response to jokes aimed squarely at the personalities of each of the boroughs, which I had less working knowledge of. The male lead has clearly been living in his role since the show opened; the female lead’s comedic timing was hysterical. Both of them together made me forget I was watching a script and just enjoy what was unfolding in front of me.

After the show, she took me to Junior’s for a slice of cheesecake, because it’s a family tradition of Lindsay’s from her childhood. Stepping into someone’s tradition is always fun for me, and this particular one gifted Lindsay and me the time and space to catch up about any number of things while indulging in red velvet cheesecake. On the walk back, I ducked through a small pop-up market, because it was there and I was there, and with the city buzzing around me, I had too much energy to go to sleep yet.

When I made my way back to the hotel, there was a live singer in one of the lounges; I caught the last two songs of her set. After she finished, I went upstairs and poked my head into the rooftop bar out of curiosity, decided it was too crowded to bother with, and went back to my room instead to watch the lights out the window until I fell asleep. No regrets there either.

Saturday I had the whole day — my flight wasn’t until 9:57pm — and exactly one fixed point on my agenda: the standby line for Last Week Tonight. I needed to be in by 3:10pm to have a shot at the 5pm taping. Everything else was open.

I started with the hotel’s free breakfast, then signed up for a walking tour that I abandoned within the first few minutes because the guide was off-putting from his opening line. I listened to him rail on things and make assumptions about us for about 3.5 minutes until I realized nothing was making me stay except misplaced politeness, so I left. Instead, I wandered into the public library and found myself in front of a Winnie the Pooh exhibit I hadn’t known existed, which is its own kind of good luck. From there, Rockefeller Center for tacos from Puya Tacos de Puebla, a coffee, and a few photos I’ll probably never look at again but took anyway.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral was right there, so I went in, lit a candle, and said a prayer. When I came back outside, I noticed some people who looked suspiciously like groomsmen milling around. I realized that it was a Saturday in the summer, and deduced that a wedding was likely about to start. It was the kind of thing you can’t plan around, only stumble onto. So I stayed. I watched the bride pull up, watched her walk up the steps with an escort that I assume was her father, watched those enormous wooden doors swing open and close behind her. I didn’t know her. I still stood there and felt something. That’s most of what the day was: no itinerary, just staying present enough to notice when something worth watching was happening in front of me.

By mid-afternoon I made my way to CBS Studios and got in the standby line. They hold the first six spots for international visitors — you have to show a return ticket out of the country to claim one — which made me, as the first domestic person in line, seventh in line. I stood there doing the math on my odds and crossing my fingers and toes, but also not fully banking on my chances. By the time they did the final count, all twelve of us who were standing in line got in.

The show itself has a warm-up act of its own — someone working the crowd, reminding everyone that television needs you to laugh out loud, not just smile and nod the way most of us actually watch TV at home. And then John Oliver came out and did the same bit himself, half self-deprecating, half genuinely anxious about it, asking the room to please, please laugh with your outside voice so that the microphones catch it. By the fifth or sixth time he’d said it, it was charming more than anything else — the kind of detail that makes you like someone more, not less, for admitting the mechanics of the thing you’re watching and trusting you to carry your part of it. The show was as sharp and funny as I’d hoped. I hope the laugh track sounded good, because we gave it everything we had.

After the taping, I collected my bags from the hotel, took the subway down to Penn Station, and caught the NJ Transit train straight through to Newark — one ticket, no drama, the same kind of easy transit that made this whole trip work in the first place. Wheels up on time. Home in Greensboro before the night was fully over.

Three chapters, one trip: a work retreat that turned into a Mets game by accident, and a solo 24 hours I chose on purpose instead of a lonely hotel room. Nobody made me go to New York alone. I just decided it was the better option, and it was.

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Your prompt for this issue: When given the choice between the safe, familiar plan and the one that meant being alone somewhere unfamiliar — which did you pick, and are you glad?

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This is the last of a three-part series on New Brunswick and New York. Thanks for coming along.

The retreat itself runs Wednesday through Friday, and it’s not a conference or workshop so much as a working group — each of us taking a turn highlighting something we’re working on, then helping each other think through it, with dedicated time in both whole-group sessions and smaller breakouts. It’s the kind of format that, after the first year, resulted in a brand new journal (not just an issue — an entire journal), has spawned a textbook that a colleague and I are about to publish, and has launched more research studies across the group in attendance than I can count.

Our hosts this year built the days around a balance of hard, but rewarding thought work, shared meals, and camaraderie. The time is always productive, but this year, the group ran about half its usual size. We found out late Tuesday night that the folks routing through Atlanta had gotten stuck there all day, weighed their odds, and finally had to turn around for home instead of fighting through the still-ornery weather to try to make it. Which meant the retreat started Wednesday down half its usual headcount. While we missed those who couldn’t come, it created additional space to actually talk to everyone who was there. Add a couple of evenings of pool in the hotel bar — I mostly lost, though I won more games than I expected to — and it was the recipe for a small-but-mighty retreat.

Most of what we worked through those three days doesn’t belong in a Substack issue — hard, specific conversations about what’s broken in the field and what it would take to fix it. The kind of discussions that only make sense with the full context and don’t do anyone favors compressed into a paragraph. I’ll just say it was real, it mattered, and I came home with pages of notes and a renewed sense that the time spent with this group is one of the better uses of a summer work week that I have.

Every morning before our time together started, I went hunting for coffee, which is a hobby for me when I travel. Haraz Coffee and Hidden Grounds both delivered. At Haraz I ordered something I’d never had before — a Harazi Mufawar — and regretted nothing except how long it took me to finish it. On the walk there one day, tucked into an alcove I nearly missed entirely, I found a hand-painted wooden statue announcing, with total confidence, that New Brunswick had been voted Jersey’s Best Destination of the Year for 2025. I have no idea who makes that call or where you’d submit a nomination, but I took a picture and a video for posterity. The site host for the year, who works at Rutgers, had never noticed it either.

(Don’t mind the No Trespassing sign in the background. I wasn’t trespassing, I promise).

It was over a game of pool that J.D. mentioned that the Mets were playing Thursday night. My son wanted a Mets hat. The tickets were basically nothing — eight dollars, ten with fees. I was enthusiastically up for it. The Mets don’t play anywhere near New Brunswick, but we started mapping out train routes to Queens and vetted them with one of the New Yorkers in attendance. Then another colleague said, offhand, that we could just take her car. J.D. and I both checked multiple times to make sure she wasn’t joking. She wasn’t.

It wasn’t the only plan on the table for Thursday night — a chunk of the group went to see The Odyssey instead — but we were going to see the Mets. Tickets were bought, a parking spot was reserved that was walking distance from the stadium, and we set a plan to leave with plenty of room for a 7pm first pitch. J.D.’s style of travel includes going to any baseball game within reach of wherever he is. To document it for posterity, he will take a photo of the first pitch and a panoramic of the field, every single time, no exceptions. He volunteered to drive, which meant I was navigating. We left at four thirty for what the map insisted was a forty-five-minute drive.

It was not a forty-five-minute drive.

We pulled up to the address exactly on schedule, forty-five minutes later, to a spot that looked nothing like a parking deck near a stadium. Turns out there are two 129 Roosevelt Avenues — one in Flushing, a few blocks from the stadium, and one on Staten Island, nowhere near anything we needed. I’d clicked the link straight out of the confirmation email, and it had sent us to the wrong one with total confidence. No matter how many times I retyped the address myself, the map kept insisting on Staten Island, so I gave up and routed us straight to the stadium instead. J.D. rerouted a second way. Between the two of us we got pointed the right direction and discovered we now had another hour and twenty minutes of driving ahead of us. Still doable, we told ourselves. Famous last words.

(The full route we took. Note the matching address in Staten Island.)

Then came the traffic. An accident somewhere ahead that had technically cleared but left the Jackie Robinson Parkway at a dead stop, a downpour, stretches that were more traffic light than roadway, a detour that turned into a bathroom search, and long stretches of Brooklyn that neither of us had ever seen and probably wouldn’t have found any other way. Forty-five minutes became three hours. And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: neither of us panicked. We’d both quietly accepted we were going to be late, decided that was fine, and just kept going. At some point, I thanked him for not being disgruntled and upset about the navigational error. What it amounted to is that the trip going sideways stopped being a problem and started being the story.

We got to the parking spot at 7:36. First pitch had been at seven. We jumped out of the car for the half-mile walk to the stadium. We half-jogged the last stretch — past standing water on the sidewalks that had us both hoping, quietly, for a rain delay — under a flight path, over a highway, past a subway line, every mode of transportation we hadn’t used stacked on top of the ones we had. When we got close enough to see a sliver of the Jumbotron, it was still counting down to first pitch. We couldn’t read the number below the words, and that ambiguity somehow made us move faster than actual urgency would have. At that point, missing the first pitch by two innings would’ve been fine. Missing it by thirty seconds felt like it would have been so much worse.

We made it. The field was still being dried off from the rain. We got hot dogs and a beer. We found out our $8 tickets came with a $10 concession credit. J.D. got his first-pitch photo and his panorama — sent immediately to his wife and daughters — and thanked me more times than the situation really called for, given that I was the one who’d routed us to the wrong borough in the first place. We watched an engaging game, laughing periodically at the absolute absurdity of the trip there. We also suspected that we had much more fun than our colleagues were having at the Odyssey.

The Mets won.

The drive home took an hour and fifteen minutes, which was its own kind of insult— proof of exactly how far out of our way we’d gone for no reason beyond bad luck with the GPS and an accident we never even saw. My son got his hat. J.D.’s daughters got rubber ducks, because we wanted the kids to know they were there in spirit.

Back in New Brunswick, we returned the car exactly where it belonged, and I stayed up doing an unplanned work brain-dump before bed — the kind that makes you feel oddly productive at one in the morning. The retreat wrapped up Friday afternoon the way these things do — a little quieter than it started. Which meant Friday night, I had a choice: stay in a nearly empty hotel in New Brunswick, or go be in New York instead.

I went to New York instead.

This is the second in a three-part series on New Brunswick and New York. One more to come.

Your prompt for this issue: Think of the last time something went sideways that wasn’t fully your fault, but you still felt responsible for. Who was in it with you — and did having them there make it worse, or better?

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That's usually all it takes. When the retreat was in Baltimore, I found my way into DC and dragged a co-conspirator along for the adventure. When it was New Brunswick, the pull was New York — a city I've barely spent real time in, but every hour I've had there has been good. Before I'd even booked a flight, I'd already decided: work trip, yes, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-things-done trip, yes — but also, somehow, a day in New York first.

The dinner that kicked off the retreat was Tuesday night. That gave me a Tuesday. I booked the earliest direct flight I could find — Greensboro to Newark, wheels up at 6am — and built a six-hour window in the city before I needed to be on a train to New Jersey.

Six in the morning at PTI usually means a dead terminal. This time I was behind four people at security — the horrors. Four people made it feel like rush hour, which tells you everything about how spoiled I am by that airport.

I landed in Newark a little before 8am, unencumbered by any real plan beyond don’t schlep luggage around Manhattan all day. New York has places that will hold a bag for about six bucks a piece — I found one a couple of blocks off the train, paid twelve dollars to drop mine, and set off with six free hours. I’d never spent real time in Chelsea, but a plan had come together fast once I saw it on a map: Arte Museum at Chelsea Piers, a stretch of the High Line, and Chelsea Market, all close enough to string together without decision fatigue, with enough room to meander instead of rush.

I didn’t know what to expect walking into Arte Museum — which, if you’ve read anything I’ve written, you know is basically my standard operating procedure. I’d seen it pop up on social media as an immersive art exhibit, found a coupon code, and figured that was enough due diligence. You enter through a relatively unobtrusive door with someone checking time slots; I showed up early, so I killed ten minutes wandering the plantings by the harbor first.

Then I was in.

The first room is the waterfall room — mirrored floor and walls, the sound and sight of water building until it’s cascading across the whole space, then stopping cold for a few beats, silence held just long enough that you notice it, before it rebuilds from nothing.

Next is what I’ve decided to call the rose room: fragrant, floor scattered with small leaves that scatter further under your feet, walls you’re meant to touch. Run your hand along one and fireflies or butterflies emerge from wherever you touched, following your fingers like they’d been waiting for you specifically. A side room walks a hibiscus through its entire life cycle, bud to bloom to slow twisting unfurl. Another has translucent roses in different colors, and a third has a synthesizer someone had clearly claimed as their own, playing with no audience.

Once I tore myself away from the flowers, I made my way to the wave room. It looked and sounded like a tsunami hurling itself into a glass wall, surging in front of you — not gentle, not lapping, a genuine force-of-nature crash and rebuild that got a visceral reaction out of me even though I knew perfectly well it was projected light.

The next room was quieter: a nighttime beach where the floor lights bioluminescent under your steps and a whale and a sea turtle, made of something like starlight, glide through the walls around you, mirrored on both sides so you’re surrounded no matter which way you turn.

Past the beach, a room of lanterns hung overhead like suspended stars, shifting color with the music, then a larger space built around the sun — a huge glowing sphere people were lining up to photograph themselves in front of. Around the corner was a tornado, composed of smoke and spinning harmlessly in the center of a small room as you walk around it. In the larger space between these small rooms, there were tables with blank coloring pages, containing both real and mythical animals. If you wished, your finished page could be projected onto the wall a minute later. I did not expect to spend part of my morning coloring inside an immersive art exhibit in Chelsea. I did it anyway. My phoenix took over part of the screen next to a tiger and a dragon that two of the dozen or so people in the room had contributed. A final room ran on a BTS theme — not remotely my thing, and still engaging, if not as powerful as what came before it.

I spent longer in Arte Museum than I expected to. It was worth every moment.

From Arte Museum, I walked the High Line for the first time — elevated, no cars, small gardens tucked in that felt more found than planned, a few vendors selling art between the plantings, murals on the sides of buildings that back right up to the old tracks, the skyline from an angle I’d never gotten before. No horns. No traffic. Just people walking at the same unhurried pace I was. I only covered the stretch down to Chelsea Market — nowhere near its full length, but enough of a shift from street level to notice, and enough to make a mental note to come back and walk the rest another time.

Chelsea Market at 1pm was overwhelming in the good way — every stall looked like the right choice, and judging by the lines, everyone who’d walked in at that hour had landed on the same conclusion I had. I floated between restaurants and counters, ducked into a bookstore, wandered a goods market stacked with jewelry, candles, and aromatherapy oils. A few times I stood in front of a food counter, uselessly watching other people’s trays go by, before landing on Filaga. Their Sicilian-style pizza looked like the right bite — I went with something that was brie and apple and something else I can’t remember, plus a five-dollar paloma. I pulled up a just-vacated seat at the counter and savored every bite.

With a little time left, I crossed the street for a bourbon-aged coffee at one of the flagship Starbucks reserve locations, then started the walk back to my bags — noisy, good for people-watching, ending at Penn Station, which sits directly beneath Madison Square Garden, I crossed through the linked underground to Moynihan Station.

A seventeen-dollar ticket and a latte later, I was on a forty-minute train to New Brunswick, chatting the whole way with a woman heading on to Pennsylvania who’d noticed my handbag — one of my sister Amy’s designs — and wanted the whole story, plus details on where to get one of her own. We talked about family and handbags the rest of the ride. It went fast.

New Brunswick greeted me with the sky opening up the second we unloaded, so the walk to the hotel became a Lyft instead. I got in, unpacked, and had big plans to unwind in the hot tub before dinner. It was being repaired. Of course it was. I settled for just sitting still for a few minutes instead, which — after a 6am flight and a full day of trains and tsunamis — turned out to be exactly right.

The retreat started the next morning. That’s its own story.

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Your prompt for this issue: When was the last time you built an entire adventure into the gaps of something you were already committed to — a work trip, an errand, an obligation you couldn’t get out of? What did you find in those found hours?

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This is the first in a three-part series on New Brunswick and New York that will unfold over the next three weeks. Come back for the next one.

Then Charlotte shut down. Then Greensboro. Then Raleigh. Then everything else, one by one, like dominoes, in that specific order your gut recognizes before your brain admits defeat.

I sat at the gate for a few hours in vague denial. Flicker of hope every time a new flight option popped up, followed by the slow realization, again and again, that none of them were going anywhere either. My flight app kept cheerfully suggesting a red-eye through Chicago, like that was a plan and not a threat. I stopped checking it after the fourth nonsensical routing. At some point the math became undeniable. I wasn’t getting home. The kids were at their dad’s until the next afternoon, so that layer of worry wasn’t on the table. There was nothing to do except decide what kind of night this was going to be.

I could sit in an airport hotel and stew about everything that was going awry. Or I could do what I have learned to do when a trip gets derailed — go find one thing good enough to offset the disruption.

I’d heard about the Gulch. Never been — Nashville for me had always been conference hotels and work dinners and the tunnel vision of a trip with a purpose. The Gulch was one of those neighborhoods I’d never quite made it to. So out I went on an unexpected Saturday in January, a beautiful brisk day that was a direct contrast to the still-visible aftermath of the ice storm that had knocked out power across half the city.

I rebooked somewhere walking distance from the Gulch — a walk that was longer and colder than I’d anticipated, but still walkable. It hadn’t warmed up much after the storm, and the city was adorned like Elsa had decided to personally decorate each tree. The wind had that late-January bite that made me wonder why I hadn’t packed a heavier coat. There was ice over an inch thick in some parts of the sidewalk, where the traction of the snow covering had worn away. I put my head down and went, carefully navigating between the sidewalk and the street, depending on which seemed less likely to land me in the emergency room.

Marble Fox Brewery was the first stop. I sat at the bar, ordered a flight, and let the bartender and a couple of regulars talk me through their strongly held opinions about which beers (and combinations thereof!) were worth my attention. One guy had Opinions, capital O, about a saison I hadn’t asked about and will now never forget. No agenda, just the comfort and camaraderie of being a person in a place where people like to be.

Then I walked a block to Rudy’s Jazz Room, because a quick search for dinner and entertainment announced jazz and New Orleans food and prohibition-era cocktails, and that combination seemed like exactly the right answer to a day that had gone sideways.

It was dark in the way good jazz clubs are dark — smoldering, the kind of light that makes everything feel a little sultry. I ordered the jambalaya. I had an old fashioned, which is my default when I want one good drink I can savor instead of making decisions across an unfamiliar cocktail list. A woman was singing — smoky voice, the kind that somehow blends into a room and sets its whole tone at the same time. She upped the ante on everything happening at that bar without anyone quite noticing she’d done it. I set my mental rolodex aside and just listened.

I wasn’t thinking about home. Wasn’t thinking about the canceled flights or the rerouted itinerary or the list of all the things that weren’t getting done. I was just there. On that stool, on a night away that wasn’t supposed to exist, listening to good music in a room I never would have found if everything had gone according to plan.

Eventually the evening had to end.

I grabbed a Lyft back to the hotel when the first set ended. Slept well. Got up the next morning and started the whole adventure of getting home again — Charlotte still closed, a reroute through LaGuardia so illogical that every time I’ve told someone about it, they looked at me quizzically. My children thought I was nuts, until I pulled out the I ❤️ New York t-shirts I had bought for them there, because it seemed like the thing to do.

I got home about twenty-four hours later than planned. None the worse for wear. And quietly glad the weather had made me stay.

Your prompt for this issue:

Has a wrecked plan ever given you something unexpected? A canceled flight, a schedule that fell apart, a day that didn’t go the way you intended — and somewhere in the middle of it, one good thing that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

What was your one thing?

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This is the first in an occasional series about finding the one thing — wherever you are.

What I was, instead, was free. Which meant I could do the thing I’d been quietly intrigued by since my flight up: The 15-Ton Sound Bath: A Fluffy Cloud Experience.

I want to be clear that I did not know what this meant. I still don’t, not entirely. But I’d read about it on the plane when googling “Fun Things to Do In DC This Week,” the reviews were glowing, the price tag was a hundred dollars, and something in me said this might be worth checking out — so I held onto it, hoping, without any real evidence, that I’d find a way to make it work around a very full meeting schedule.

Meeting wrapped at 5:05. Back at the hotel, I bought the nonrefundable ticket for 7:30pm before I could talk myself out of it. Then I peeled off my official board-member polo — we’d had headshots that morning — and did the responsible-adult math: two metro lines, a fair amount of walking, versus a Lyft. It was 102 degrees. In the shade. There was no math. I called the Lyft.

My driver, Abdy, was from Morocco and kept me thoroughly entertained for the forty-plus minutes it took to get to a place called Berhta, spelled like that on purpose, tucked into an industrial stretch of warehouses. I’d done my homework, so I knew this part was coming. That was a good thing, because when we pulled up, Abdy and I sat there squinting at buildings that did not look like they contained fifteen tons of anything except possibly forklifts or broken dreams.

What confirmed we were in the right place: hand-stenciled spray-paint signs, scattered along an industrial roadside and driveway, leading through a parking lot like breadcrumbs toward a big black warehouse. Very upscale. Very what did I get myself into. The ticket was nonrefundable, nothing screamed immediate danger, so I ignored the voice and followed the trail, Hansel-and-Gretel style, toward a warehouse that also apparently hosts raves.

At check-in, a woman walked me through the basics — here’s the tour, here’s the bathroom, and, casually, like she was pointing out the coat check: some people experience an involuntary peeing response during the experience, so she highly recommended I use the bathroom before I went in. Not the opener I would’ve led with. But duly noted.

I had forty-five minutes to kill, and it was somewhere in that stretch of standing around with nothing to do that I realized I was starving. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I walked two-tenths of a mile to the nearest 7-Eleven and grabbed a slice of gas station pizza to bring back to the warehouse before my sound bath.

When I got back inside, two more people had arrived — a woman and her friend, both getting the same rundown, both warned about the peeing — looking exactly as flummoxed as I felt. The woman asked if I’d done this before. I said no, I’d just read about it and it sounded neat. She laughed and said me too — she was in town visiting her friend, her ex had the kids for the week, and she had needed to get out of the house. I mentioned I’d recently gotten divorced as well, and I had a board meeting in town, so I figured I’d make the most of it. Neither of us said much else about it. We didn’t have to. Two strangers, one visit, both here because someone else had the kids this week and we each needed somewhere to put ourselves. We wondered, half-joking, whether some marketing algorithm out there is specifically targeting newly divorced women for the Fluffy Cloud. It is working.

A group of five showed up next, buzzing, equally clueless, equally warned about the peeing. Apparently that’s just standard now. No exceptions. Then a handful of other folks, similarly informed.

Once we were all checked in and had made the requisite bathroom runs, we were led into the room by a man who introduced himself as our guide for the evening. He told us in a warm and calm voice to select a seat at the table to our left — and to make sure we chose one with a drink in front of it.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, on the left, there was one long table, lit with candles and an aromatherapy mister. My first look at what was hanging over the other half of the room stopped me for a second: it looked exactly like a brain and a cloud had a neon-lit baby, and not a cute one. A menacing one. We each got an EEG headset paired to a phone, so we could see our own brainwaves afterward, if we opted in.

We sat down at our chosen spots at the table, and looked at the place setting in front of us. Each of us had a drink, a small container holding what looked like a pill, and a container of earplugs, and I leaned over to my new friend: drink me, eat me. Tim Burton could have taken a note or two from the staging.

There we were, fifteen strangers, wondering whether we were each about to willingly take an unlabeled pill and drink on the direction of a man we’d met six and a half minutes ago in a warehouse with hand-painted signage outside. Odds felt decent that we’d all be fine — fifteen witnesses is a good deterrent. But I’m not going to pretend the am I going to wake up in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney thought didn’t cross my mind. Just the once. Just enough.

Here’s the thing, though: for all the hand-painted signage and warehouse-in-the-middle-of-nowhere energy, everything our guide told us was delivered like he was performing for a very specific, very demanding IRB. Nothing was mandatory. The pill was L-theanine — the calming compound in green tea. The drink was kava. The earplugs were for the sound-sensitive, though apparently most people skip them. All over-the-counter, all our choice, all — we were told, repeatedly, in the exact cadence of an informed consent script — completely science-backed, as if enough repetitions of “science-backed” would offset the spray paint outside and the Mad Tea Party atmosphere. If we wanted, we could also consent to donating our EEG data to research, which I did, because at that point I’d already committed to trusting strangers with my nervous system — I might as well trust them with my brainwaves too.

Then, we were ushered to the other half of the room, under the thing itself, up close now — looking like a huge segmented orb, seams like the petals of a flower turned inside out, lit with deep varying colors from within and rigged to steel trusses like it might, at any moment, decide to come down.

Fifteen gravity chairs waited beneath it. Phones silenced. We sat down, tilted back, and looked up into the heart of the brain-cloud. We were told we could close our eyes or not — the visuals were designed to work through closed eyelids — and if we got distressed, raise a hand.

The fifteen tons, it turns out, is the equipment suspended above you — sound systems at a scale almost nothing else on earth can replicate, which explains the price tag. I’d imagine the cost of the insurance might explain the hand-painted signs outside. We settled in, relaxed into our seats, and listened to the neon brain-cloud give us a few last directions before the experience started.

Once it started, it was captivating.

Heartbeat-adjacent rhythms, water, birdsong — all engineered so your body reads it as safe, because evolutionarily, a forest full of birdsong means no predators nearby. Silence, on the other hand, means run. The bass was strong enough to feel in my chest, my hands, everywhere, like being inside a drum in the gentlest possible way — not a Magic Fingers hotel bed, but a distant, tasteful cousin of one. My earplugs sat untouched in my lap the whole time. I felt warm, a little flushed, calm. Every so often I’d get an itch, scratch it, and immediately wonder if that registered on my EEG as not fully relaxed — and then wonder if wondering about the wondering was also showing up on the readout. Then I’d drop back in and let the brain-cloud handle it.

This phase lasted forty-five minutes, near as I can figure. It didn’t feel long. I could have stayed longer.

We surfaced slowly, sat up in the gravity chairs, and were guided to a side room full of small sofas slipcovered in cream faux fur blankets — like Pier One had a fire sale and the warehouse design team got there first — with dim aromatherapy lighting and a warm chamomile tea waiting at each seat, because apparently people get cold coming down from this. At the center of the table sat a literal small cloud, glowing softly on a stand, presiding over our tea like a cotton candy-shaped nightlight that had opinions.

This was Baby Fluff, and Baby Fluff narrated the science behind the brain-cloud — which the staff, charmingly, called Mother Fluffer — while we sat there looking, collectively, like we’d been debriefed by a lamp that belonged in a nursery.

Walking back out into the same warehouse, past the same ridiculous spray-painted signs, felt strange in a new way — because now I knew what was actually behind them. Real research. Real equipment. Real money. Hand-stenciled like a garage sale.

I don’t have my EEG readout yet. It’s supposed to land in my inbox. I have no idea what my brain was doing in there, or what it’ll tell me about how much of that hour I actually spent relaxing versus narrating my own relaxation to myself — the itch, the scratch, the wondering whether the wondering was showing up on the readout too. If you know me, that tracks.

I also have no idea how I’m going to sleep tonight, or how on earth I answer a colleague tomorrow when they ask what I did last night. But regardless, I’m glad I was there.

Update: I slept well. Not the most amazing night of sleep I’ve ever had, but also better than my baseline.

Also, the EEG results came in. My alpha climbed 2.3x past my own baseline — something only about one in four guests apparently manage. Heart rate eased from 63 to 56. Five minutes in theta, the slow wave meditators reportedly train years to reach reliably. My deepest point on the whole chart landed right as they started bringing us back to the room.

So: I spent forty-five minutes fairly convinced I was doing it wrong, and my nervous system was, by every number they were willing to print, doing exactly what it was supposed to. I’ll take it.

A few thoughts for reflection:

When’s the last time you did something purely because it was strange and slightly out of reach — no plan for how to explain it afterward?

What would it take for you to trust an experience before you trusted the packaging it came in?

Jessica’s been doing my hair for about six months now, at a salon called Rooted in Color. During an appointment a month or two ago, when we were plotting my first attempt at doing something fun with hair color, I told her about Go Anyway — the journal I made for women who keep saying someday. On Saturday, when I was in, I asked if I could leave a copy with her. She said yes before I finished the sentence, then told me something I didn’t know: she runs a community lending library out of her salon. Books live on her shelves. Clients borrow them, take them home, maybe bring them back, maybe don’t. Nobody’s keeping score. That’s just who she is — the kind of person who does something quietly generous and mentions it like it’s nothing.

Jessica does something to hair that I can only describe as magic. But the real thing she does — the thing I actually go back for — is pay attention to people. She remembers what you said three appointments ago. She notices what you didn’t say.

As I was finishing up, I asked Jessica where to put the book. There was a woman in the chair a few feet away — we’d been trading spaces all afternoon, her hair processing while mine got cut, back and forth. Jessica looked at her instead of me. “Tell her about it.”

I don’t think I’d fully processed what was happening before I was already talking. I told this woman, whose name I didn’t yet know, about this journal for people who keep putting off the thing they actually want to do. And she didn’t just listen — she started telling me bits of her own version of the same thing. The same someday, the same feeling of pushing things aside, just dressed a little differently. I suspect there are a lot of us walking around holding some version of that, who may be, it turns out, waiting for a reason to say it out loud to a stranger in a salon chair.

I hope she left there feeling as seen as she made me feel, sitting there listening to her.

Before I’d even made it to the door, the book was in her bag. Not on the shelf. Not waiting for the right person to find it eventually. Already gone, already hers, inside of maybe four minutes.

I keep turning over what actually happened there. It wasn’t the book that found her. It was Jessica, noticing, in the middle of a normal Saturday afternoon that there were two people in the room who both needed to hear their own someday said out loud. I was just the one holding the thing that gave her a reason to say “tell her about it.”

That’s not something you can plan for. It’s not a system. It’s just a person who pays close enough attention to catch a moment most of us would let pass by, and who cared enough to use it.

So here’s what I’m sitting with today: how many of the right moments happen around us, quietly, because someone paid attention at the right second — and then showed us a door we didn’t realize was even there? What would happen if more of us actively looked for those connection points—and then took the small risk of highlighting one that we saw?

What are some moments where has that happened to you? Not with a book, necessarily. Just — someone noticing, and saying something, right when it mattered.

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I love the newness of somewhere I haven’t been. I love learning and moving and doing and seeing. I will also freely admit that a healthy dose of escapism lives somewhere in this love of travel — the way a trip creates a container for your life that is separate from your regular one, where the usual noise gets quieter and you get to just be a person moving through the world.

I embrace that. I use it as a motivator. If I can reward myself with something fueling and fun, I will move heaven and earth to get things done first.

But there are weeks when the trip doesn’t happen. When life does what life does — fills the space, shifts the schedule, hands you something more pressing — and the thing you were so looking forward to gets quietly tabled. Again.

Charleston got derailed for me twice in two weeks. I was genuinely annoyed about it. I’m still a little miffed about it. And I also know that neither of those particular weeks were the week to go, because it was really important that I stayed. And adulted. Even when I really really wanted to run away to Charleston.

So. What do you do with that?

Not in the aspirational sense — not the version where you bravely reframe it and find the silver lining. In the real sense. When the window closes and you’re still sitting in your regular life feeling the absence of the thing you wanted, what do you actually do?

Here’s what I’ve learned: I try to find at least one thing each day that is genuinely about me. Not productive. Not responsible. Not for anyone else. Something that will bring me either joy or peace — ideally a small sliver of both.

And the key, I’ve found, is that it has to be just novel enough to put my brain somewhere different. My porch doesn’t do it. My usual routes don’t do it. I need something that creates the sensation of somewhere else even if I’m ten minutes from home.

A few weeks ago, Charleston fell through. Again. And I found myself in that particular low-grade misery of wanting to go somewhere and not being able to. I needed to be by water — I almost always need to be close to water when I’m depleted — I needed to move my body, and I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t a place I go on the regular.

And then I remembered the Bog Garden.

If you live near Greensboro and you haven’t been there, I want you to stop reading this right now and jot yourself a reminder note or whatever you do to remember things that might fall out of your head. It’s tucked right next to a large outdoor shopping center — the kind with a grocery store and at least eight restaurants — and you would never know it was there. Walking paths. A little waterfall. A creek. The day I went, there was a heron.

I parked, walked for maybe twenty minutes, and sat on a bench next to the waterfall. Just sat there. Listening to the water. Watching the light. Thinking about how completely strange and wonderful it was that I was 500 yards from a grocery store and nobody knew I was there.

(One honest note: the Bog Garden's boardwalk is currently closed for a renovation — new Trex decking, badly needed — so if you're local, double-check that it’s open before you head over there. Which, fittingly, is sort of the whole point. Find your own version. It doesn't have to be this one.)

It wasn’t Charleston. It wasn’t two nights with my people in a city I love. It didn’t scratch the same itch, and I’m not going to pretend that it did. But it gave me something I genuinely needed — a few minutes of being a person with an interior life instead of just a schedule. A small, quiet proof that restoration doesn’t always require a trip.

The Bog Garden was my thing that day. Yours might be a coffee shop you’ve been meaning to try — somewhere just different enough that your brain shifts gears and you get to sit and people-watch and drink something warm with nowhere to be for an hour. It might be a trail you’ve driven past a hundred times and never taken. A bookstore in a neighborhood you don’t usually go to. A drive with no destination and good music — or just the stillness of your thoughts.

The place matters less than the decision — that today, even in the middle of everything, there will be something just novel enough to put your brain somewhere different. Something that is yours.

Until then — I’ll be paying attention to what I need, and going just far enough to find it.

Your prompt for this issue:

What’s your Bog Garden? The place close to home that gives you something real when you can’t get away. The oasis you keep forgetting about until you need it.

And if you don’t have one yet — go find it this week. You probably already know where it is.

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There is a place I have been trying to get to for years.

Not Iceland. Not Turkey. Not anywhere that requires a passport or a connecting flight or six months of planning.

Charleston, South Carolina. Four and a half hours away.

I have family there. Friends from college I have been dying to hang out with as for-real adults for years and years— the kind you don’t see nearly enough and then pick up exactly where you left off when you finally do. One of them posted on my Facebook page recently — the beach is waiting for you — and I wrote back that I was coming the second life stopped life-ing for a few minutes.

Her response: you’re preaching to the overscheduled choir.

Charleston is interesting because it’s just adjacent to convenient. Far enough that I actually have to think about it — four and a half hours is a commitment, not an afternoon. But close enough that it should not be nearly as hard as it is. No plane ticket. No six-month lead time. I can stay with family or friends or find a hotel in ten minutes. The logistics are almost insultingly simple. I was actually there this spring — eighteen hours for my sister's grand closing. It was exactly what it needed to be. It just wasn't the trip.

And yet.

I think that’s actually the problem. The trips that require plane tickets get booked because you have to commit. You put money down. You put it in the calendar. It becomes a thing with gravity. But the trip that’s always available — the one that’s just there, waiting, no tickets required — is easy to defer. It’ll still be there next month. It’ll still be there after this busy stretch. It’ll still be there when things settle down a little.

Except things don’t settle down. That’s the part I keep forgetting.

This past spring break I thought I had a window. Then the schedule shifted — the way schedules do when you’re navigating a full life — and the window closed. A few weeks later looked possible too. A few days of open calendar, just enough room for two nights and a real exhale. And then something else moved, and something else came up, and just like that the window closed again.

This is how it keeps happening. Not dramatically. Just quietly, over and over, the way water finds the path of least resistance and the path of least resistance is always not yet.

Life doesn’t do this maliciously. It just does what life does — fills space, shifts plans, hands you something more pressing. And the trip that’s always available becomes the trip that’s always almost happening.

I have been to Charleston before — as part of a group, managing the logistics of other people’s needs alongside my own, taking the trip that works for everyone. But I have not been there on my own terms, with my own people, with nowhere to be except wherever we feel like going.

That’s the trip I want. Two nights. Two and a half days. Family, friends, the city that has been sitting there waiting for me like a patient, slightly exasperated friend.

It is the next real trip on my list — not an afternoon somewhere close, not a work obligation, not a group logistics exercise. The next trip that is mine. And I am going to stop letting it be the thing that keeps almost happening.

I don’t know exactly when. But I know it’s soon. Because the beach is waiting. And so are my people. And so, probably, are yours, somewhere.

Here’s what I want to ask you:

What is your Charleston?

Not the big someday trip — that one’s different. I mean the close one. The one that’s been almost-happening for years. The one that’s just adjacent to convenient, just easy enough to defer, just there enough that you keep telling yourself you’ll get to it.

What would it take to actually go?

It’s called Go Anyway, and it’s a journal for women who keep saying someday. It went live on Amazon a few weeks ago, quietly. This is the wider announcement.

Founding members got the news first — they’re already getting their copies in the mail.

It’s 100 pages, soft cover, the same forest green as the brand. It’s a place to put down the trip you keep almost taking, the someday you keep almost naming, the want that won’t let your brain rest at 2 a.m.

I wrote it for a specific person. She has a list. Italy, Iceland, the villa she’s been saving photos of, the writing retreat, the solo weekend somewhere with nobody asking her where their shoes are. The list does not move. She tells herself she’ll get to it when the kids are older, when work calms down, when she has more money, when she feels ready. Between us, none of those is the actual problem.

Go Anyway does not tell her where to go. It helps her figure out why she hasn’t gone yet, and what the three-day version of her someday trip might look like. Because someday gets a lot less abstract when you let it shrink down to a Tuesday.

A few things about how it came together.

I built this on nights and weekends, laptop perched on the kitchen counter, while everything else in my life was rearranging itself without consulting me. The cover printed gray on the first proof and I had to learn what CMYK actually means, which is information I will now never be free of. The interior went through about 70 versions — I’m rounding down — to land at the one that finally felt right. Somewhere around revision 40 I considered scrapping it and writing a different book entirely. I did not. My mom got the first copy two weeks ago and called me immediately, which is how I know it landed.

It’s not a perfect book. It’s a real one. Those are different things, and I’ll take real every time.

Roam & Reason is what I’m building now, and this journal is where it starts. You can now hold it in your hands — the first thing I’ve written that sounds like me out loud.

It’s on Amazon now.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to give you permission to want it, here it is.

If there’s a woman in your life you’d mail it to without explanation — do that. The whole point is that someone has to be the first to say go.

If you want to grab two — one for you, one for her — I would not stop you.

To everyone reading this: I’m glad you’re here. It’s still small enough that I know roughly who you all are. That matters to me, more than I quite know how to say. The journal exists because you keep opening these on Tuesdays. Don’t underestimate what that does.

— Carrie

Go Anyway on Amazon. Two copies if you have someone in mind. :)

So, I said yes to something. I had no idea what I was signing up for, except that it seemed to have worked for someone I knew. BOLD is curated and purposeful in all of its pieces, so I trusted in it to do what I needed it to.

Going to Canyon Ranch in Tucson is part of it.

I didn’t pick the destination. I knew very little about it. I knew that it was a wellness resort and I knew it was in Arizona and that was the extent of my prior context. In the weeks before the trip I Googled a lot. I asked questions. I read other people’s reviews. What I figured out was that the property runs a multi-page daily schedule — hikes, sound baths, acupuncture, personal training, cooking classes, yoga, meditation, astrology readings — and that there’s a wellness coordinator you can reach out to if you want help building your days.

I did not reach out. It felt silly to. I’m glad I didn’t, because it forced me to do it on my own, and I think I would have leaned too hard on someone else to tell me what to want.

That ended up being the whole trip — me, figuring out what I wanted, one yes at a time.

When I arrived at the property, the woman at the front desk asked if I wanted water or a prickly pear limeade. I had never had a prickly pear limeade. I said yes. It was pink and tart and I drank it on a bench in the sun while someone took my bags somewhere, and I thought — okay. I can just do this. I can just say yes to things.

I said yes to a 5:45 a.m. hike in Sabino Canyon. I’d been interested in it but I wouldn’t normally have signed up for something that left at 5:45 in the morning — I left it up to the universe. I figured East Coast time would either wake me up or it wouldn’t. It did. So I went.

The guide was named Jade and she walked us through the desert at the hour when the light is still gold and the saguaros throw long shadows, and towards the end of our 4 mile walk, she told us, conversationally, that saguaros don’t bloom until they’re 40 or 50 years old.

I have already written about this, in a note, because I needed to put it somewhere immediately. But I’ll say it again because it’s the thing I keep coming back to: I am 47. I’ve been waking up to some things lately — what I want, what I don’t, what I’ve been carrying that isn’t mine. And it’s reassuring, in a way I didn’t expect, to find out I’m not the only thing on the planet that takes its time getting where it’s going.

The saguaros aren’t late. They’re just doing it on saguaro time.

I’m doing it on Carrie time.

I said yes to the cooking class even though I almost skipped it for something else that I cannot even remember. The chef made orange chicken with a faro salad that was delicious. The breakfasts that week were also extraordinary — cornmeal pancakes with hot honey, miso oatmeal with wild mushrooms — and after one of them I asked for a recipe card and asked if I could have the recipes for those. They emailed them to me. I haven’t made any of them yet, but I have the recipes, and that feels like a small infrastructure of intent.

The orange chicken class was what Canyon Ranch calls a lunch-and-learn. You don’t cook. You just watch the chef walk through a recipe, while giving you tips and tricks, and then you eat what they’ve made. I was sitting at a small table by myself when Veronica and Candice walked in a few minutes late, with what I can only describe as vibrant energy, and asked if they could sit with me. I said yes. Of course.

They have been friends since elementary school. They live in different places now. This was their first time coming to Canyon Ranch together — Candice had been before and insisted that Veronica join her on a trip. And in the span of about 45 minutes, the three of us became endlessly amused by each other, by the chef — who was a little salty about something neither we nor he could fully name — and by the people at the table next to us, in a way that I will not be able to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. I chuckle every time I think of it. You will have to take my word for it.

I ran into them again the next day, and the day after that. It turns out one of the quiet gifts of Canyon Ranch is that the property is small enough that you can keep colliding with the same handful of people, and a few of them become — for three days — yours. Veronica and Candice were mine. I should text them. I miss them.

I saw them again at the next day’s lunch-and-learn — za’atar steak, also fantastic — and we compared notes on what we were doing that night. I mentioned that I’d seen bingo on the schedule and that I wanted to go. I am not really a bingo person. For whatever reason, it had gotten lodged in my brain that because they have bingo at Canyon Ranch, I needed to go play bingo at Canyon Ranch. So I was going.

Our BOLD group had dinner that night and most of the group was headed afterward to a candlelight meditation that sounded lovely. I wanted to play bingo with Veronica and Candice. I screwed up the small amount of courage required to peel off from a group of women I genuinely like. Everyone was completely gracious because, it turns out, I’m an adult and can make my own choices. A couple of other women asked what I was doing, and when they heard the word bingo they peeled off with me.

We got there early because we’d been told this thing was popular — that members of the surrounding Tucson community come in to play. Sara wanted to sit up front, so we sat right next to the caller’s table. The room filled up before the start time. Then we waited.

One thing to know about Canyon Ranch is that everything is so well-planned it’s almost suspicious. Things happen on time. Staff appear before you need them. It is, on the whole, alarmingly seamless. So when bingo did not start on time, an evening that I will treasure forever began to unfold.

A few minutes past the hour, two staff in Canyon Ranch polos walked in, surveyed the room, conferred briefly, and walked out. They’re going to get the person, we said. We waited. They did not return. Five more minutes passed. Ten. The room got a little restless and we, at our front-row table, got happier and happier, because watching Canyon Ranch fail to produce a bingo caller turned out to be its own kind of entertainment.

Eventually a woman at the table behind us stood up, walked to the front, and said: do you guys mind if I do this? We applauded. Someone who was clearly a regular helped her turn on the bingo machine. She called the first game. She handed out a prize from the table of gift certificates laid out next to the bingo machine, untouched.

Midway through the second game, another woman in a Canyon Ranch polo walked in, noticed bingo was happening, and sat down at a nearby table. At the end of the round, one of the guests said to her: you do realize she’s a guest, right? The woman in the polo said, oh, no, I didn’t, and left.

We carried on.

A few minutes later, a man with a beard and hearing aids walked in, came to the front, and introduced himself as Doug. He said he had not called bingo since before COVID but that he was here to call bingo. We applauded him too. We were, by this point, applauding generously and often.

Doug was getting set up when he abruptly said, into the air: Margaret, I can’t talk to you right now. I’m calling bingo at Canyon Ranch.

The room went still. We all looked at him.

Oh — he said, gesturing at his ear. My hearing aids are Bluetooth. I was telling my wife I couldn’t talk.

He then proceeded to call games for the rest of the evening. I will leave it to your own judgment whether the fearless guest or Doug did a better job, but it was memorable, and I won the big prize — a hundred-dollar gift certificate, which I spent the next day on a few things for the kids and me.

I did not go to the candlelight meditation — I said yes to bingo. I think I made the right call.

I said yes to a tie-dye class taught by a woman named LuAnn, who used to be a partner at a law firm in the Northeast and is now a judge in Arizona — she moved to Tucson because she decided that she would rather do her thing out here than be a partner in a law firm—and doing her thing now includes a scarf dyeing class every other week at Canyon Ranch. She is delightful.

The class itself was completely unexpected—not that I had any expectations to begin with. We were each given a length of PVC pipe that was probably 6 inches in diameter and a spool of dental floss each. We held our white silk scarves flat against the pipe and wrapped dental floss around them, scrunched, wrapped more floss, scrunched again. Over and over. Then we chose dyes, hand painted the scarves, waited, blew dry the scarves, steamed the scarves, washed the scarves, blew the scarves dry again, ironed the scarves. Trust me in that is was an extensive—but therapeutic—production. By the end of it I had a scarf I had actually made.

The thing I keep returning to, though, is the art journal.

In some ways, Canyon Ranch is almost like a summer camp for adults. There is even archery and arts and crafts — if you are interested. On my first afternoon I went with a few other BOLD women to an art journal class. I wandered in not knowing what I was getting into — a recurring theme. The instructor, a woman named Jennifer who is very woo in the way the desert seems to attract, ran the class as woo-adjacent. The first thing she told us was: don’t try to make this perfect. Don’t even try. It’s not going to happen. Let it go.

Then she wandered around the room with a box of folded papers that she called Soul Snacks. Pick one, she said to each of us.

I reached in. I pulled out a folded square. I unfolded it.

I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.

— Carl Jung.

Of all the things in that box. On the year I’ve had. On top of the breath I’ve been holding for both the hard things that I knew were coming and for the good things that I was trusting would be around the corner.

It didn’t make me cry, but it did knock the wind out of me a little — in the best way. Whoo. I didn’t do anything elaborate with it. I glued it into the center of the journal, plain, and let it sit there.

I’m not going to tell you what I made of the quote. That’s not the point. The point is that I walked into a room I didn’t plan to be in, listened to a woman tell me not to bother trying to control the outcome, reached into a box I didn’t curate, and pulled out exactly the sentence I needed.

What I keep trying to explain to people, and mostly failing at, is that it wasn’t any one of these things. It wasn’t the saguaros or the orange chicken or the Soul Snack quote or bingo with Doug. It was all of them, and it was none of them, and it was the cumulative effect of three days in a place that is somehow both small and enormous — small enough that you keep running into Veronica and Candice, big enough that it never feels crowded. You are taken care of in a way that frees up the part of your brain that is usually managing things, and what gets to surface in that vacated space is what you want. Or even what you actually need, which is not always the same thing as what you want, and which you may not have even known you needed until it showed up.

The food was better than healthy food has any right to be. The spa was extraordinary. But the real thing is the feeling that I came home with, which I am still figuring out how to describe. Grounded. Seen. Powerful, in a quiet way. Connected to myself in a way I haven’t been in longer than I’m prepared to admit.

I went expecting to be tired and rested. I came home reorganized.

I just had to keep saying yes to the next thing. The limeade. The hike. The orange chicken. Veronica and Candice. Bingo. Doug. The scarf. The folded paper.

Whatever I needed was already there.

I’m speaking from the experience of landing in Honolulu alone, driving to Walmart, buying a kids’ pup tent for thirty dollars, and camping at a state park for seven dollars a night for two nights before my friend, Casey, arrived.

There were feral roosters. They woke me up both mornings. The tent was approximately the size of a large dog bed. I donated it on the way out because I had no use for it and someone else might.

It was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

These are five places I’ve been that I’d send you to tomorrow. Different budget tiers, different kinds of experience, all of them worth every dollar you spend to get there.

Hawaii — but not the version you’re picturing.

Before Casey arrived, I had two days alone on Oahu — just me, the roosters, and a rental car. I drove roads that weren’t on the tourist map, popped into shops and spots that looked intriguing, and just … explored.

When Casey arrived we kept that energy going — we found tide pools below the Makapu’u Lighthouse that required scrambling down an unmarked trail along some cliffs — which is exactly the kind of thing that sounds mildly reckless in retrospect and felt completely right in the moment. We spent time wandering — finding things rather than booking them. Hawaii has a version that is genuinely accessible if you’re willing to release the resort fantasy and replace it with something that is more real and more interesting.

The landscape is extraordinary. The water is extraordinary. The food, eaten at the right places is extraordinary (the shrimp scampi at Giordano’s food truck is better than any other I’ve ever had, as is the pineapple and sugar cane at roadside stands). And the feeling of being somewhere that beautiful, moving through it on your own terms — that’s not a luxury. That’s just a decision.

Best for: The woman who wants natural beauty and adventure without a scripted experience. Solo or with a travel companion who shares your sense of direction.

Budget range: $ to $$$ — the range is enormous depending on how you approach it. Flights are the biggest variable. Once you’re there, Hawaii can be done on almost any budget if you’re willing to be creative.

The thing nobody tells you: The state parks are gorgeous, the local plate lunch spots are incredible, and the best experiences are usually the ones you stumble into rather than book in advance.

Asheville, North Carolina — the city that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Once, on a Saturday afternoon in downtown Asheville, I walked past a drum circle of spectacularly unbothered people doing their thing in a public square. A man in a tie-dyed shirt nodded at me. Two women were dancing barefoot. Nobody was performing. Everyone was just there. That's the city in one frame.

What Asheville actually is, is eclectic in the best possible sense. You can spend a morning at the Biltmore — America’s largest privately owned home, sitting improbably in the Blue Ridge Mountains — and an afternoon in the River Arts District watching a glassblowing demonstration and coming home with something beautiful you made yourself. You can eat well, drink your way through some of the best breweries in the Southeast.

Ten minutes later you can sit above a river and watch the light change and feel the particular peace of mountains.

There’s a pinball museum. There’s a grove of massive old trees. There’s the Grove Park Inn, which I haven’t stayed at (yet)—but I have sat on that enormous terrace and watched the sun go down over the mountains with a drink in my hand, and I can tell you that it belongs on your someday list even if you’re not staying there.

Asheville doesn’t demand anything from you. It just offers things, at every price point, for every mood. You can make of it whatever you need it to be.

Best for: A girls trip, a solo long weekend, a reset. Anyone who needs art and food and mountains and a city that feels genuinely alive without being exhausting.

Budget range: $ to $$ — very drive-able from much of the Southeast, reasonable costs once you’re there. You can do Asheville beautifully on a tight budget or splurge at the Grove Park and not regret a dollar of it.

The thing nobody tells you: Go on a weekday if you can. Weekends in peak season get crowded. A Tuesday in Asheville is an entirely different and better experience than a Saturday.

Barcelona — take the overnight train.

I took an overnight train from Paris to Barcelona because I was going to both cities and flights felt wasteful when a train could do two things at once. I arrived in Barcelona early in the morning, slightly rumpled, already charmed.

I kicked around the streets and stumbled into the context of the 1992 Summer Olympics — the sites still there, decades later, casually woven into the urban fabric. I stood in front of La Sagrada Família and learned about Gaudí and felt the particular disorientation of being in front of something so strange and so beautiful that your brain keeps trying to categorize it and keeps failing.

I took a paella class. A group of tourists from various corners of the world, none of us entirely sure what we were doing, all of us laughing by the end. I cannot tell you I remember the recipe. I can tell you I remember the feeling — the particular warmth of learning something alongside strangers who are all equally willing to look foolish in pursuit of something delicious.

Barcelona is endlessly alive. The food markets are incredible. The architecture is unlike anything else on earth. The city operates on a schedule that makes no sense to an American — lunch at 2pm, dinner at 10pm, life happening in the streets at midnight — and once you surrender to it, it’s completely intoxicating.

Best for: The woman who wants culture, food, architecture, and a city that pulls her out of her own rhythms and into something more alive.

Budget range: $$ — more affordable than Paris or London, especially if you’re willing to eat where the locals eat rather than where the tourists are steered. The overnight train from Paris, if you’re combining cities, is both cheaper and more fun than flying.

The thing nobody tells you: Book La Sagrada Família tickets in advance. The line without a reservation is punishing. Everything else you can figure out when you get there.

London — go see something at the Globe.

I went to London after a work trip that already had me in Europe. I had a few days free and a free place to stay, so it seemed to be the thing to do. My colleague Melanie was mostly occupied during the week, so I alternated exploring with her and entertaining myself.

I wandered. I got lost in what I can only describe as a labyrinth — a maze of streets and passages that seemed designed to make you lose your bearings entirely and find something unexpected instead. I ate well. I sat in pubs and watched people. I did the things that happen when you have no agenda except being somewhere.

But the thing that stays with me — the thing I’d tell you to do before anything else in London — is go see a play at the Globe Theatre.

I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Performed in the reconstruction of the theater where Shakespeare’s company actually staged it, open to the sky, the audience standing in the yard the way they stood in the yard four hundred years ago. It was one of those experiences that hits you somewhere below the brain — in the place where history becomes real rather than described.

I also saw Avenue Q on the West End, which is a completely different kind of extraordinary. London’s theater scene is one of the great underrated reasons to go — world-class productions at prices that are genuinely reasonable compared to Broadway.

London is expensive. I won’t pretend otherwise. But it is walkable in a way that saves money, and the free museums — the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Modern — are among the best in the world. You can have a magnificent day in London without spending a dollar beyond your morning coffee.

Best for: The woman who wants culture, history, world-class theater, and the experience of a city that has been doing this for a very long time and knows exactly how.

Budget range: —$ the flights and the accommodation are the costs. Build in the theater budget. It’s worth it.

The thing nobody tells you: The Oyster card is your best friend. Buy one the moment you land and use the Tube fearlessly. London is much less intimidating once you understand the transit system.

Finland — the surprise entry.

Finland was never on my list.

I went for work — part of an educational delegation, there to study the Finnish school system, visit the university, understand why Finland keeps showing up at the top of every global education ranking. We were based in Jyväskylä. Go ahead and Google the pronunciation. I’ll wait.

What I found was a country that seemed to have quietly figured out something the rest of us are still working on.

Everyone was outside. This is the detail that stays with me most — it was October, which is not a warm month in Finland, and people were simply outside anyway. Walking, cycling, sitting by the water. Not performing outdoorsy wellness for an audience. Just living their lives in the open air as if being outside were the obvious default rather than the exception. The research on Finnish well-being makes a lot more sense when you’re standing in the middle of it.

The food surprised me. I ate reindeer. I would eat it again. The particular pleasure of eating something completely outside your normal frame of reference — something that says you are genuinely somewhere else now — is one of my favorite things about travel, and reindeer in central Finland delivered that completely.

One evening my colleague Bill and I ended up in an Irish bar. Because of course there was an Irish bar. There are Irish bars everywhere on earth, and I have now been to one in Jyväskylä, Finland, where a handful of Finnish men decided to make conversation with me, which I found both unexpected and completely delightful.

That’s the thing about Finland that I couldn’t have predicted. It was warm in a quiet, unhurried way that felt completely genuine. The light was extraordinary — that particular Nordic quality where the sun stays low and everything is golden and slightly dreamlike. The design sensibility is beautiful. The pace of life is different in a way that gets under your skin.

I didn’t make it to the Arctic Circle, which I wanted to do and ran out of time for. That’s a reason to go back. Finland was never on my someday list. Now it’s on my go-back list. That’s the best kind of surprise a trip can give you.

The through-line.

Every single one of them gave me something I wasn’t entirely expecting. A trail I wasn’t supposed to know about. A theater experience that reached through four centuries and grabbed me by the chest. A city that operates on its own time and pulls you into it. A drum circle next to a river next to a pinball museum. A country that was never on my list and is now on my go-back list.

The best travel rarely delivers exactly what you planned for. It delivers something better — something you couldn’t have scripted because you didn’t know to want it yet.

That’s what I want for you. Not the trip you imagined. The trip that surprises you.

Go somewhere. The one that's been on the list longest. The one you keep almost booking.

Just go. See what finds you.

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Your prompt for this issue:

Of these five — or any destination that's been living on your someday list — which one feels most possible right now? Not most impressive, not most dramatic. Most possible.

What would it take to make it happen in the next six months? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

Next issue: The Canyon Ranch Experience. What happens when you say yes and give yourself full permission for three days.

The labyrinth was at the edge of the property, past the casitas, where the desert started to take over again. Just stones laid into the dirt, a single winding path that doubled back on itself as it worked toward the center. You could walk it in five minutes if you were hurrying. I wasn’t hurrying.

I followed it slowly. In, around, back out toward the edge, in again, all the way to the center. Stood there a while. Then started back out the way I’d come. The light was that particular kind of gold the desert does in the last hour before sunset. I could hear my own breathing. There was nothing required of me.

About two-thirds of the way back, I noticed a room key leaning against one of the larger stones at the edge of the path. Not lost. Placed. Tucked there on purpose by whoever had walked it before me. I had passed it on the way in and not seen it. I bent down and read the line printed on the little envelope. Every arrival is a chance to begin again.

I reached into my own pocket. The same line was on mine. I had been carrying it around for two days without ever looking at it.

I have been carrying that ten minutes around with me for a week and a half now.

That’s what my someday list has been trying to tell me.

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The list is not a wish list. It’s a diagnosis.

When I picture Iceland — and I have pictured Iceland for years — I’m not hiking, not driving the Ring Road, not chasing the lights. I’m floating. Warm water, cold air on my face, steam coming up around me, and absolutely nothing required of me for the next two hours.

It’s the labyrinth, basically. Just colder, and farther away, and with better photographs.

For a long time I thought my someday list was a list of trips. It is not. It’s a list of clues. The places on it are pointing at something my regular life isn’t giving me, and once I figured that out, the list got a lot more useful.

I added the Galapagos to mine on a Tuesday in February in the middle of a meeting that could have been an email. I haven’t thought about it since.

But look at the list as a whole. Not at the destinations — at what they have in common. What feeling are they all pointing at? What does the list have that your regular life doesn’t?

Iceland, for me, is stillness. The South Pacific is warmth and slowness and being completely off the grid. New Zealand is wildness — big sky, open road, the feeling of being small inside something enormous.

All three are the opposite of my regular life in some specific way.

That’s not random. That’s data.

Read it in two directions.

The list doesn’t just tell you what you want. It tells you what you’re not currently getting.

So read it twice.

First, what you’re longing for. Look at the list as a whole. Are these places remote? Warm? Ancient? Wild? Slow? Are they places where no one knows you, places where the food would be the point, places where you’d have to be present because everything would be unfamiliar?

Whatever the answer is — that’s what you’re after. A feeling, not a flight.

Now flip it. If your list is pointing toward stillness, where in your regular life are you systematically starved of stillness? If it’s pointing toward wildness, where have you gotten too domesticated, too contained, too careful? If it’s pointing toward slowness, where has your life gotten too fast for you to actually be in it?

The list isn’t only telling you where to go. It’s telling you what’s missing from where you already are.

That’s the real map.

The ones that have stayed the longest.

Here’s the question I want to leave you with.

Is there something on your list that’s been there a long time? Not something you added last month after seeing a photo. Something older. Something that has survived every season of life you’ve moved through — the busy ones, the broke ones, the ones where you couldn’t imagine carving out time for anything that was just yours.

That one is worth paying attention to.

The things that stay despite everything — despite practicality, timing, the voice that says not yet, not now, maybe someday — those are the ones that mean something. Don’t let that one keep waiting forever.

One more thing.

I’m still going to Iceland. I don’t have a date. But I’ve stopped pretending the trip is the thing.

The labyrinth wasn’t Iceland. It was ten minutes in the dirt in Arizona. But it was pointed in the same direction, and I felt it the same way, and that’s the part I had wrong for a long time. I thought I had to wait for the big trip to feel the big thing. I didn’t. I just had to stop walking past the small versions of it.

A hot bath with the lights off on a Sunday night. An hour in a quiet room with nothing coming at me. A weekend where I say no to every invitation on purpose. A labyrinth or winding trail at a botanical garden twenty minutes from your house — there’s almost certainly one that’s an easy drive from where you live. Look it up.

None of those are Iceland. All of them are pointed at Iceland.

That’s what the map is for. Not to tell you to drop everything and book a flight. To tell you which direction to face while you’re still here.

Yours is trying to tell you the same thing.

Your prompts:

Look at your someday list — the real one. What do the places on it have in common? What feeling are they all pointing at?

Now flip it: where are you systematically starved of that feeling in your regular life?

Which one has been on the list the longest? What do you think it’s been trying to tell you?

Next issue: Five Places Worth Going That Won’t Break You. Specific destinations, real budget ranges, why each one is worth it.

I want to tell you something that took me longer than it should have to learn.

Restoration doesn’t require a runway. It doesn’t require a passport, a hotel room, a week off work, or a savings account with a number in it that feels far away. It requires one thing: a decision that you are worth some time.

Not a week. Not even a day, necessarily.

Just — some time. A little more than you’d normally give yourself. A little more than feels completely comfortable.

That’s the whole entry point.

This issue is about building that time — intentionally, on a real budget, in a way that fills something up rather than just killing time. Because there’s a difference between a day off and a restoration day. A day off is what happens when your calendar clears unexpectedly and you spend it catching up on laundry and feeling vaguely guilty. A restoration day is what happens when you decide, in advance, that the time belongs to you.

Here’s how to build one — at whatever size actually fits your life right now.

First: start where you actually are.

Before we talk about what to do, I want to say something directly to the woman who read that headline and thought a full day? I can’t do a full day.

You don’t have to.

If five minutes is what you can give yourself right now — five minutes outside, five minutes with a cup of something warm and no phone — start there. Five intentional minutes is not nothing. It’s practice. The goal isn’t a perfect restoration day. The goal is one small step further than you’d normally go for yourself.

Know what restores you.

This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most of us are so practiced at taking care of other people that we’ve gotten genuinely fuzzy on what fills us up versus what just feels responsible.

So ask yourself this: when was the last time you lost track of time in a good way? Not scrolling, not managing, not working — actually lost track of time because you were absorbed in something that felt good?

What were you doing?

That’s your starting point.

For some women it’s movement — hiking, swimming, wandering on foot through somewhere new. For others it’s stillness — sitting somewhere beautiful with a book and no agenda. For others it’s sensory — good food, beautiful spaces, the particular pleasure of being somewhere that isn’t home. Most of us are some combination of all three.

You don’t have to do the thing that looks most impressive. You have to do the thing that works for you.

Come along — it's free.

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Pick a direction, not a destination.

One of the things that kills a restoration day before it starts is over-planning. You spend so much energy researching the perfect place that by the time you get there you’re exhausted and the bar is impossibly high.

Instead, pick a direction. Literally.

I’m going toward water. I’m going toward mountains. I’m going toward a town I’ve never been to. I’m going somewhere green.

That’s enough. The rest you can figure out when you get there — or look up the night before with twenty minutes and your phone.

Build the day around one anchor.

Every good restoration day has one thing at the center of it. One experience you’re going toward. Everything else is gravy.

Here are some anchors that cost $50 or less:

• A state or national park day pass — Many are free. Some run $5–15, with the most popular national parks closer to $35 for a 7-day vehicle pass. Pack a lunch. Walk until your brain goes quiet.

• A float trip or kayak rental — usually $20–40 for a half day. Water does something to the nervous system that nothing else replicates.

• A small town you’ve never explored — gas money and maybe $20 for lunch. The goal is wandering. No agenda. In and out of whatever looks interesting.

• A matinee and a long lunch alone — a movie by yourself in the middle of the day feels decadent in the best way. Add a sit-down lunch where you order whatever you want and eat slowly. Under $40.

Notice what these have in common: they involve being somewhere that isn’t your regular life, with no one to take care of, doing something that engages your senses. That’s the whole formula.

What if $50 is still too much right now?

That’s okay. Restoration doesn’t have a minimum spend.

If money is genuinely tight, the framework still works. You just find the anchor that fits where you are. There’s no lesser version here — just your version.

Some anchors that cost nothing or nearly nothing:

• A park you’ve never been to — look up green spaces in your city or a nearby town. Bring water and something to sit on. Walk or sit for as long as you can give yourself, with your phone face-down.

• A library you don’t usually use — pick one in a neighborhood you don’t normally go to. Spend an hour browsing with no agenda.

• A long wandering walk with headphones — not a workout walk. A wandering walk. Different route than usual. A podcast or playlist you love. No destination.

• Your own backyard, or a friend’s — a blanket, a book, and a firm decision not to go back inside and do something productive for at least two hours.

No car? No problem. Public transit opens up more than you think. Pick a stop you’ve never gotten off at. Walk around. Find somewhere to sit. Buy something small from a local shop. Spend a few hours being a tourist in your own city.

The point was never the distance. It was the decision.

Protect it like an appointment.

This is the part that undoes most people.

You plan the time. You’re excited. And then the morning arrives and the list of things you should be doing instead gets very loud, and you start negotiating with yourself, and by 11am you’re doing laundry again.

So before the day arrives: tell someone you’re going. Put it in your calendar. Set an alarm. Do whatever you need to do to make it as hard to cancel as a dentist appointment.

You would not cancel a dentist appointment because you felt guilty about leaving the house. Give this the same weight.

One more thing.

The first restoration day — or hour, or twenty minutes — is the hardest. Not because it’s difficult. Because you’re not used to it. You might feel guilty for the first stretch. Restless. The voice that catalogs everything you’re not doing will be loud.

Stay anyway.

Something usually shifts when you do. You remember what it feels like to be a person who has an interior life, not just a schedule. You remember that you are someone worth showing up for.

That’s worth five minutes. That’s worth protecting. That’s worth more than whatever’s on the list you keep meaning to get to.

Your prompt for this issue:

What would your restoration time look like — the version that’s available to you in the next 30 days? Not the ideal version. The real one, at the size that actually fits right now. Where would you go? What would your anchor be? What would you need to put in place to actually do it?

Write it down. Then put it in your calendar.

Tell me what yours looks like.

Leave a comment

Next issue: The Someday List — what yours is really telling you, and how to make it stop being theoretical.

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Send this to the woman you’re thinking of right now.

This one started falling apart on Thursday.

The kids had been with me for a long stretch. It is April in academia, which, if you’ve never experienced it, is its own particular flavor of unforgiving. There were a lot of feelings moving through my house that weren’t mine to fix but were mine to hold — and I held them, because that’s what you do. But somewhere in that stretch, I had started to quietly disappear from my own life again.

So when a last-minute schedule change opened up a whole weekend, I made a plan. A real one. Where I’d stay, what I’d do, who I wanted to talk to. I had it all mapped out.

And then there was this little voice.

Don’t leave until you know everyone is settled.

I’ve learned that I ignore that voice at my own peril. So I waited. And it turned out people needed me to hold a little space — for feelings that were brave to say out loud, for a different lens to look through. I didn’t manage anyone’s emotions. I just helped them find some words and then go do their thing.

By the time everyone left, it was 5 PM. I was tired. The drive I’d been planning felt tiring, rather than fueling. The whole weekend I’d mapped out suddenly felt very far away.

So I let it go.

And then I thought: but I need to do something. If I don’t get out of this house, I am going to lose my mind.

I opened Facebook events — which, look, every once in a while it delivers — and there it was. A pottery wheel class at an art gallery in High Point. I’ve been wanting to try pottery for months. And here was a class that was starting at 5:30. Fifteen minutes away.

It was 5:07.

Ticket sales had closed.

I called the gallery anyway.

They had one spot.

I changed shirts, left my jeans on, grabbed the first shoes I saw — my son’s old camouflage Crocs that he’s outgrown but that I sometimes borrow for the backyard — threw my hair in a messy bun, and drove to High Point in my Pimento Cheese Festival t-shirt feeling like a person who had absolutely nothing to lose.

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Here is what I can tell you about pottery: I have zero talent for it.

I centered the clay wrong. I added too much water, then too little. I pressed too hard, then not hard enough. Every time I thought I had something, it would warp or tear or collapse in on itself, and I would pull off the ruined part and start again with what was left until there was nothing left, and I’d have to get another hunk of clay entirely.

The other seven people around me were making things. Imperfect, lumpy, beginner things — but things. I was making a case for why some people should never be allowed near a wheel.

The instructor, who was teaching only her second class and did a wonderful job, kept reassuring us — mostly me, I think — that the first time she threw pottery, she didn’t leave with anything either. I suspect she was lying. It was very kind of her.

But something happened with the fifth piece of clay. I asked her to help me get it centered, and then I asked her to just sit there and tell me what to do. And she did. And slowly, something emerged that looked — objectively, I think — pretty good. A bowl. An actual bowl, with a rim and walls and everything. The people around me fawned over it a little. The instructor did too.

Fifth time’s a charm. Or really, if you count every attempt within each lump of clay, more like the twelfth.

I picked my glaze. I cleaned my station.

I wasn’t ready to go home yet, so I drove to Winston-Salem.

The plan at this point was Incendiary Brewing, pizza from the Neapolitan place next door, and an outdoor movie in Bailey Park — Top Gun was playing, and listen, I have opinions about the volleyball scene that I’ve held since I was a tween, and I was ready to revisit them. It was going to be lovely.

I went to grab my jacket out of the back seat. My jacket wasn’t in the car.

The pizza place only does 16-inch pies at night.

It was too cold to sit outside without a jacket.

Plan C evaporated. Or maybe it was Plan D by then. I’d lost count.

I sat with my flight of Incendiary beers and I thought: what do I actually want?

A burger. I wanted a burger.

I googled, did a quick Reddit cross-check, and found a place called Small Batch — a nano brewery, which I think means smaller than a microbrewery, though honestly I don’t know and also don’t really care. It was less than a third of a mile away. Uphill. On a chilly April night. In camoflauge Crocs and jeans that had splotches of dried clay in the places not covered by the apron.

It’s a beautiful night for a walk, I told myself. And it was.

I sat at the bar at Small Batch and told the bartender that I wanted a flight—bartender’s choice. Here’s what I like. You know the beer better than I do. Pick four.

He did. They were delightful.

I ordered something called the Figgy Piggy — a burger with goat cheese, fig jam, bacon, and sautéed onions — and asked if I could swap the fries for brussels sprouts, which I did for a small upcharge and zero regrets. I have yet to go to a place that has brussels sprouts on the menu and had them be anything less than really good. This was not the exception.

Fig jam on a burger. I would not have thought of it. I would now put it on everything.

I watched a tournament of some sort of racquet sport out of Guadalajara on the TV above the bar. I people-watched. I ate every bite of that burger and felt the specific pleasure of a meal that was exactly right.

When I was ready to leave, I paid my check and went to the restroom. I was washing my hands, looking at myself in the mirror — messy bun, speckles of clay on my shirt — when I noticed words above my head. Written in reverse on the back wall, so that the mirror is the only way to read them:

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

I stood there for a second.

I took a picture to remember the feeling of it.

Then I walked back to my car feeling pleasantly full and happy and like myself again. Not because the night had gone as planned. It hadn’t gone as planned at all. It wasn’t even the backup plan. It was just what I chose to do in the moment, one pivot at a time, and it was exactly what I needed.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The best nights — the best trips, the best moments — almost never go according to plan. They happen in the pivot. In the well, that fell through, so now what?

I made a bowl on my twelfth try. My plans for the volleyball scene went awry, so I walked uphill in Crocs to find a burger. I ended up somewhere I didn’t know I needed to be.

In two weeks I'm going to Canyon Ranch in Tucson — which, full disclosure, is not something I do. It came together the way good things sometimes do: one thing led to another, an opportunity appeared, and I said yes before I could talk myself out of it. It's very much a plan now. But it started the same way this Friday night did — with a pivot, and a little voice saying go anyway.

I'm curious what it's going to teach me.

But I think I’ll be carrying this Friday night with me when I get there — the reminder that the container doesn’t have to be perfect for something good to happen inside it.

Go anyway. Even when it’s just a Friday night. Even when it’s just you.

Especially then.

Tell me about a night that fell apart and turned into something better. I want to hear it.

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I didn’t.

It was mid-summer. My kids were at their dad’s. The house was quiet in that particular way that isn’t peaceful — it’s just empty. I had a pile of laundry that only two teenagers can produce, a mountain of things I was supposed to be doing, and zero energy for any of it. Tired and burned out and overwhelmed and sad and also, underneath all of that, deeply numb.

But something kept pulling at me. Like a whisper I couldn’t quite ignore: just go. Somewhere. Anywhere. Just not here.

I didn’t have a travel fund. My car had 250,000 miles on it. I had maybe fifty dollars to spare.

So I gave myself one hour and one directive: figure out somewhere to go tomorrow. A day trip. Somewhere within driving distance. Somewhere near water, because water is what restores me. An hour later I had a plan — a tubing company in the mountains, $25 for the tube and the shuttle, good reviews, beautiful scenery promised.

I got up the next morning, threw a change of clothes in a backpack, and drove.

And it was glorious.

I had nowhere else to be. I floated down a river for three hours and watched the light move through the trees and noticed a bird of prey circling lazily overhead and the way a sunbeam hits water and makes it sparkle. I stood on a little beach at a riverbend and picked up two stones — one for each of my kids — to carry home.

After I emerged from the river, I wasn’t quite ready to leave yet, so I explored a little bit. I ate sweet potato fries at a place I’d never heard of and a burger with toppings I never would have ordered that turned out to be extraordinary. When the check was paid, I walked back to my car, still soaking in the feeling of the town around me.

I drove home slowly. I savored that too.

My total investment: one day. A tank of gas. Fifty dollars.

That trip didn’t fix anything. The laundry was still there when I got home. The hard season I was in didn’t end because I floated down a river.

But something shifted. I felt more like myself than I had in months. More alive. More like a person who deserved to take up space in the world, not just manage it for everyone else.

That’s what this newsletter is about.

Not perfect trips. Not expensive ones. Not the kind that require a passport and six months of planning — though we’ll talk about those too, because dreaming matters.

This is about the trip you can take right now. The one that costs fifty dollars or five hundred or five thousand. The one that’s yours — not planned around anyone else’s needs, not justified to anyone else’s satisfaction.

Just yours.

I started Roam & Reason because I kept meeting women who were doing what I was doing — filing their dreams away under someday, waiting for the right moment, convinced that wanting something for themselves was somehow indulgent. Women who were capable and generous and completely depleted. Women who needed permission more than they needed a travel itinerary.

So here’s yours.

You don’t have to plan Iceland. You don’t have to wait until the kids are grown or the debt is paid or the calendar clears. You just have to start somewhere.

Every other issue of this newsletter is going to give you something practical — a destination, a budget, a planning tool, an idea. This one just gives you the thing that has to come first.

You are allowed to want this. You are allowed to go.

Welcome to Wander with Intention. I’m really glad you’re here.

— Carrie

When’s the last time you did something just for you? Tell me in the comments.

Next issue: The $50 Restoration Day — how to give yourself something real, restorative, and entirely yours without a passport or a savings account.