On Staying Home

Notes from a retired wanderer

We treat organizational change the way we treat travel - assuming that movement equals progress, that new always means better. But the most profound transformations happen when leaders stop wandering from framework to framework and start truly seeing the people and systems they already have.

I learned this when I slowed my own life down enough to listen.

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There comes a time when the call to wander grows quiet, when the restless heart finds its rhythm in familiar places. The wanderer in me hasn't disappeared—she simply finds adventure in a place called home.

The passport stamps fade and the suitcases gather dust, but the experiences remain. I’ve traced the edges of foreign neighborhoods, followed traffic lights down unfamiliar streets, filed away sights, textures and smells. This wandering, an anthropological study of how life might be lived.

Now I am writing the next chapter. The same girl with a head full of wanderlust, whose feet are planted intentionally in one place. A quiet, meandering life that is uncluttered and soft. A daily environment that feeds my soul without requiring departure.

Garden soil on my shirts replaces boarding passes. Tomatoes eaten straight from the vine become my exotic cuisine. Birds, bunnies, the sound of singing frogs and cicada. The nature around me reveals its secrets only when I slow down enough to notice.

Others may question my contentment, mistaking stillness for stagnation. They treat wanderlust as virtue and staying put as failure of imagination. There's this unspoken expectation that if you have money and time, you should be exploring the world—but travel sounds exhausting now: delayed flights, missed connections, lost luggage, questionable seatmates. I've eliminated those stressors from daily life. Why voluntarily add them back?

The morning light on my kitchen counter holds the same wonder as sunrise over foreign mountains. My backyard contains as much mystery as distant shores. Country roads offer their own form of getting lost.

Simple isn't boring. Simple is full of joy that doesn't rattle the nervous system. Depth and breadth are different kinds of wealth, and I have chosen depth.

I am not settling. I am building home with what satisfies my soul. The greatest journey now lies not in seeing new places, but in truly inhabiting the place I have chosen.

Come visit my discovered peace. Stay a while and how it feels to do life like any other Tuesday, when Tuesday is exactly where you want to be.