And we’re off..
Our good-bye party at The Standard!
It’s been a whirlwind last week in NYC. Alice spent the first half of the week in Boston for a campus recruiting trip, I gave a talk on Thursday at Brown to the finance class that a friend is teaching, and all the while, work stuff was surprisingly intense all the way up until dinnertime on Friday.
After I sent my last work email, I deleted Bloomberg from my phone, and that’s when the sabbatical first started to seem real. Walking on the streets of NYC afterwards, the lights of the cars driving down Fifth Avenue seemed just a little more vibrant than I remembered. I had the thought that you don’t get to be a tourist in your own city very often.
Yesterday, we had a going-away party, and it was really special to have so many people from different parts of our life in New York show up. Saying goodbye for this trip is a weird experience; nine months is long enough that it feels like a real goodbye, but at the same time, I suspect the time is going to go by faster than anyone can imagine.
Someone at the party asked me what I was hoping to get out of the trip. I said:
The usual travel goals: get an appreciation for different perspectives and an openness to different ways of life; learn how to handle random things going wrong and understand that most problems aren’t very big; etc.
Some concrete skills: improve our surfing, learn how to freedive / hold my breath for a couple of minutes, get better at packing and organization, read a lot of books.
And a feeling that we’ve seen enough of the world that we could feel comfortable settling down into one place to build a family and a community. After our stints in San Diego and Las Vegas during Covid, it was hard for me to imagine living in one place permanently. Over the last few years, New York has felt more and more like somewhere we could stay for an indefinite period, but getting really comfortable with that (or learning that we aren’t!) feels to me like one of the driving impetuses for this trip.
Our first flight to Nairobi leaves tomorrow at 5:30pm. We’ve taken our first malaria pill, packed all our stuff up into a pair of carry-ons and backpacks, and spent time with all of our closest friends and family in NYC over the past few weeks. I feel a bit like the night before I went off to college, holding a suspicion that my life was going to change in a way that I couldn’t possibly understand at the time.
Alice finished reading The Remains of the Day last week, and I realized then that in some ways I can draw a direct line from reading that book during some sleepless night during my first few months of working, and this sabbatical eight years later. Stevens’ mix of deep pride and regret in dedicating his whole life to his profession felt worryingly inevitable to me at the time. I guess for me, this trip is ultimately about, after having spent the last eight years finding meaning in work, looking for meaning in something else. Who knows what we’ll find.