Maybe it’s because travel feels new again. The thing that drove me — that desire to solve the puzzle we call the world — was forcibly put on hold by COVID. And, now, like a kid who is given back his toy after being punished, all I want to do is play with Travel as much as possible.
When your passion and career are taken away from you, the chance to do it again reinvigorates you. You can’t even imagine that one day you will get tired and want to rest.
Reading Mad Travelers engendered a lot of introspection. I think my true struggle has been a lack of balance. Balance between the life I live in my mind and the one I live in real life, between my twin desires to own a house and be on the road. (Someone invent cloning, please!)
In the life I imagine, I have work/life/travel all balanced. Everything gets the time it deserves and nothing suffers.
Over the last month, I’ve made real progress in creating a work-life balance (including by hiring new people). A big revelation for me was that I always balance as a sort of separateness. Travel and home. There was a life in Austin and a life on the road and each part deserved 50% of my time.
But that’s not the case when travel is work. Home, work, travel – they are all inexplicitly intertwined in my life. I can’t separate them. You can’t compartmentalize who you are. What I need to work towards is balancing all three each day. Every day, I need to find the balance between the three in a way that allows them all to thrive. There’s no “travel matt” and “home matt” — there’s just Matt.
