Interests · Wanderlust
/ ˈmō-mənts /·noun. Not the trips. The handful of seconds from each one you still carry.
Travel is how I keep my mind open. Every place I go rearranges something in me — how I see, what I assume, what I believe is possible. I’ve been lucky to wander far; a few that have never left me:
Public-domain and Creative Commons photography, via Wikimedia Commons — St. Maarten, Dr. Thomas Liptak (CC BY-SA 4.0) · St. Barths, David Broad (CC BY 3.0) · Florence, Zairon (CC BY 4.0) · Venice, Øyvind Holmstad (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Panama City, 123Hollic (CC BY-SA 4.0)
My favorite, and I don’t expect that to change. Canals and bicycles and a certain unhurried freedom; the light on the water, the way the whole city trusts you to find your own way through it. And the Van Gogh Museum, where someone who loses whole hours to painting could happily have lost the day. I could return a hundred times and never be finished.
For the way it slows time nearly to a stop — terraced green, incense and offerings, a spirituality woven into the most ordinary moments. It rearranged my sense of what a day is supposed to feel like. It is also the first place I was ever pickpocketed, which is why there are almost no photographs of a trip I would relive tomorrow, and the only place I have bought a painting too big for the plane. A local artist, a canvas I could not leave behind. It came home by boat.
Late dinners and longer conversations, art and architecture that argue with the sky. Seville and Madrid, the old stone of Toledo, the Costa del Sol, and the Rock at Gibraltar just beyond it. A country that has perfected the art of savoring a life rather than rushing through one.
Twice. The Louvre and the Mona Lisa would have been reason enough on their own. But the second time was the one. In 2023 the friends I have traveled with for a decade — a group that began with that trip to Spain and became, somewhere along the way, family — met in Paris to mark ten years. Within the first twenty-four hours, seven of them stepped into an elevator built for four. It stopped between floors and stayed there for more than three hours: no phones, no air, no one local in sight. Shanika and I worked the lobby, keeping spirits up through the door and hunting for anyone who could help, until a passerby got the fire department on the line. Inside, they laughed the entire time. It carried us into the small hours. The next morning we walked past the same elevator and someone had taped up a handwritten sign, in English: max of 4 people. We are already talking about the twentieth.
History, biblical antiquity, art, architecture, all of it at once and all of it exquisite. The Vatican and the Sistine Chapel were reason enough to go back a second time.
Vertical, electric, relentless in the best possible way — a city that feels like the future arguing with tradition. I loved its sheer ambition.
Like Tokyo: futuristic, spotless, a city that seems to have been finished yesterday. The malls were hard to stay out of.
Athens especially, where you can rest your hand on the very foundations of Western thought — history you don’t just read about, but stand inside. And the islands, where the light does things I still can’t explain. The food, too: bar none, the best I have tasted anywhere in the world. It is something they do with garlic.
Water so clear it doesn’t look real, and the rare, restoring peace of doing absolutely nothing, and doing it well.
The Afro-Cuban culture, and music that does not leave you. Real art, too, in rooms where I did not expect to find it. Great friends, two of whom happened to be doctors and fluent in Spanish, which mattered, because there was very little English. And the first time I ever stayed somewhere that came with a full-time housekeeper.
“The loudest sound never heard.”
— at the top of every climb
I could go for days — honestly, I’ve loved them all. The next flight is always half-booked in the back of my mind.
Continue exploring
Jazz, classical, gospel, hip-hop — and why each one stuck.
The painters I lose hours to, and what they taught me about nerve.
Where I give my time when no one is asking me to.
Talent Is Everywhere. Opportunity Is Not.
How hip hop sent me from making art to looking at it — and what changed when I began owning shares.
On measuring what financial education actually changes, and on who gets a door.
The question I ask before I start anything — and why profit is a poor compass.
Once a month — short, and only when there’s something worth your time.