They don’t put coffee out until 7:15am at my hotel and there’s no backup machine in my room so I was irritated at first at the interruption to my schedule. I woke up at 5:15 and found myself facing 2 hours without coffee. What is it normally – about 5 minutes? The time it takes me to brush my teeth and pee and feed cats. They always come first, before my coffee. Maybe that’s martyrdom. Maybe it’s kindness. By now it’s just habit.

I came out to the back deck to look at the water. What I noticed was that despite the lake occupying about 3/4 of my field of vision, what I noticed more was how it sounded. Or rather how it didn’t sound – like beltway traffic, lawnmowers, construction, industrial hum, someone’s outdoor speaker, and all the other noise that I think all subconsciously conspire to keep me from going outside at home without a specific purpose. I sat for a while and listened. I missed my coffee. And then I thought of mindfulness and of the idea of being tuned into what I was feeling. And so instead of finding irritation at not having coffee, or trying to distract myself because I really really wanted some, I leaned into its absence. Like breathing into a sore area during a stretch. I tried to make something as small as a delay to my morning coffee into a conscious experience. And I realized that’s what these trips are for. Breaking out of routines is exactly the point, and every time I do it I have an opportunity to not just experience something a little differently, but to see if this new way is worth keeping.

None of these little trips is going to radically change my life. But my life has changed radically since I started taking them – with that first one in January of 2021 to a cabin near Roanoke with the mountain bike I waited 25 years to buy. As I reflected on this while I saw and heard the water, I thought of shopping for clothes. You go to a store and see a dozen things that are interesting, maybe try on half a dozen, buy one of them and take it home. The trip didn’t change your wardrobe. Maybe it added a little something to it. Maybe it displaced something from it. But over time if you keep going you have a whole new look. I think that’s what I’ve been doing. Trying stuff on out here and seeing how much of it I want to bring home. I don’t ever want to return as some transformed version of myself, or to some transformed version of my life. But there’s always room – and need – to make myself and my life a little different, and if I’m lucky, a little better.