Original Publish Date : October 7, 2025ON : JOURNEYINGTHE SOUNDTRACK: Eau Rouge, Pt. 1 - GelkaThis is a story about how what started as a one-way flight out of New York became a lived discovery of what it means to follow what’s next without knowing where it leads.
On : JOURNEYING
I sat at my desk on a Tuesday morning in late June, looking out at midtown Manhattan and tried to diagnose the overwhelming feeling of boredom that was coursing through my veins. It was one of the hottest days of the year and the city was more quiet than usual, not just because of the heat but because as New Yorkers do when summer settles in, they escape.
I sat sipping my iced green tea, feeling jealous — not of anyone in particular, just all of them. Out there, elsewhere. Kicking sand in the mediterranean, eating anchovies on perfectly toasted bread, sipping cold white wine after a long afternoon swim. I closed my eyes and thought about the feeling of strolling a street you’ve never been on before, then quickly shooed the thought away trying to muster up the motivation to finish an email I had started.
It didn’t work, the feeling returned.
And when, after brainstorming places I could go, people I could see, anything to shake the summer greys, I couldn’t find a thing - - - I realized it wasn’t just boredom.
I felt - - - out of place. Like there was nothing for me here, at least at that moment. I can’t fully explain the feeling of not being where you’re supposed to be if you’ve never experienced it, but it leaves you with no choice but to look for a new door because you know all of the old ones just won’t do.
I left with a medium suitcase, a carryon and a duffle for my laptop and tech. A little less than midway through I paired down to a single carryon and said duffle, which if you know me as the overpacker I’ve always been, would have been unthinkable a year ago. But that was the point.
In so many ways this is reflective of what this entire pivot year has been about for me: simplifying, clearing out, dropping the weight, the old habits, the old mindsets. The learned and (now) unlivable rhythms of a previously-non-stop career and life, and yes even some people who no longer have a place in what’s next. It’s been an unhooking, untethering, a return to what matters to me and only me, far outside of the agendas, needs, wants, and demands of others—sometimes well meaning, sometimes not. What I’ve also realized in this time is that the demands I placed on myself have been the heaviest of all.
The next thing I did was something I’ve never done before: I booked a one-way flight from New York to Barcelona.
This was the starting point for what became an experience that taught me more about what it means to journey versus travel than any other trip I’ve ever taken.
The flight took off two days later, and while I had a general direction I had no actual plan, schedule, or anything other than an initial 2 nights booked at a hotel on the beach. Little did I know that my planned two-ish weeks away would turn into a summer sidequest spanning 4 countries, 17 cities and towns, and 8 weeks on the road.
Of all of the parallels that have revealed themselves over 8 weeks of living with no plan, this one has been the most important:
learning in real time that the next step often doesn’t reveal itself until you take the one before it, and that allowing the person you become along the way to choose the next destination is so much more aligned than letting old versions of us make all of our future decisions.
The difference between traveling and journeying is this:
Traveling asks, “what can I get”?
Journeying asks, “what can I learn”?
Traveling consumes.
Journeying receives.
Journeying means seeing a place as it is, caring as much about how it truly feels as how it looks, and opening to how that can shift you.
Journeying teaches you the difference between the authentic essence and energy of a place, the packaged experience of it, and what remains true despite this inevitability.
Journeying is slow.
It makes room for overheard café conversations that rearrange your inner world, for the confidence earned that comes from surviving the chaos of a Greek ferry boarding solo, for learning the way the angle of sunlight can tilt your entire mood and how understanding the history of a neighborhood can change your experience of its people.
It is a transformative experience because it makes you more accessible to yourself.
Not in some grand, cinematic way, but the opening that happens in the quiet, honest, inconvenient places.
The softening of control.
The burn of unprocessed emotion in a new timezone.
he sudden reawakening of your creativity in the most unlikely of moments.
The days you find yourself in-between destinations and you realize you’re no longer living from the old story, but not yet fluent in a new one.
Today, traveling is rarely conscious — neither toward ourselves nor toward the places we move through. A constant stream of #travelinspo and the irrational need for new “content” has made movement almost mindless. Hot spots over destinations. Photo opps over presence. Herding ourselves toward the same doorways, the same cafés, the same beaches without ever asking why. We’ve all done it, I know I have, and there’s evidence of this currently in my own feed.
And on the other side, travel and hospitality have bent to the demand. The industry packages and supplies consumers with polished versions of what once was: the perfect spritz, the perfect-colored door, the perfectly merchandised “experience.” Sometimes the essence is real, just turned up. Other times, it’s hollow packaging designed to perform as culture, rather than arise from it. And once you learn to spot the latter, it’s unbearable.
But this isn’t the true purpose of leaving home. Traveling at its core was never about collecting proof that we’d been somewhere, it was about being changed by it.
I didn’t know what this experience would become at the time, and as I’m still reflecting on so many special places, people, and moments I still, perhaps, don’t fully. But here is what I do see more clearly than ever:
There is a difference between getting away to escape and getting away to expand, between journeying to learn from places and their people and traveling to take from them.
I learned so much about presence, about slowing down, and about listening. About what happens when you do, and how you can be changed by a new place or person while remaining more yourself than ever.
To love the feeling of surrendering to the unknown — of trusting that your body, your rhythm, your spirit will guide you better than any itinerary and perfectly polished route ever could.
There’s also a kind of beauty to becoming unrecognizable to your past self in a place where no one knows your name. You learn what’s yours and what was just habit. What you truly desire, and what you packed out of guilt or fear. How much energy was spent upholding versions of yourself that no longer feel true.
Slowing down and being more focused on where I am instead of where I’m going next reminded me how alive I feel when I’m listening and learning from the world around me, not just moving through it.
It changed how I experience the world around me, and how I approach my work and my life.
It has shown me how the process is the work, how the journey truly is the point, and what happens when I focus on where I am instead of where I’m going next.
xT
NEXT
a note on creative integrity
This work was made to be shared in essence, not extracted in form.These words, ideas, images are shared to inspire, not to be copied, lifted, swiped, repackaged, or borrowed otherwise without care. If they resonate, let them spark something original in you.