Antigua, Guatemala – 11:23 am
I’m sitting at a small wooden table in Antigua, Guatemala.
There’s a cup of locally-grown coffee next to me that I’ve been slowly working through for the past hour, and it’s genuinely one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had in my life.
Not in a pretentious way.
Just in a “how does something this good exist and why haven’t I been drinking this my whole life” kind of way.
Outside the window — or more accurately, surrounding me on basically every side — are three volcanoes.
Agua. Fuego. Acatenango.
They just sit there, enormous and permanent, half-wrapped in clouds, completely indifferent to my to-do list.
My family is nearby.
My kid is discovering things for the first time.
The air is this perfect temperature that I don’t have a word for except right.
And somewhere between my second cup of coffee and watching my daughter’s face when she noticed the volcanoes for the first time, I had a thought I haven’t been able to shake.
We almost didn’t come.
Here’s the thing about travel — and I say this as someone who has made it a genuine priority — there are always a hundred reasons not to go.
- The timing isn’t perfect.
- Work is in a weird spot.
- There’s a launch coming up.
- The logistics feel complicated.
- Flying with a toddler sounds like a punishment designed by someone who hates you personally.
You tell yourself you’ll plan the trip next month, and next month becomes a vague concept that never fully arrives.
I’ve had this conversation with myself dozens of times. And what I’ve noticed is that the version of me who is trying to talk me out of going is never actually looking out for me. He’s looking out for the illusion of productivity. He’s protecting the feeling of control that comes from staying in your default environment, running your default routines, keeping everything predictable and safe and managed.
That version of me has never once been right.
Every single time I’ve pushed past him and actually got on the plane — every time I’ve shown up somewhere new — I’ve come back changed in some way. Sometimes dramatically. Sometimes just subtly. But always better. Always clearer. Always with something I needed that I couldn’t have gotten from my desk.
Here’s what I think travel actually does — and I want to say this carefully, because I think we talk about it wrong.
Most travel content is either logistical or hollow. Here are the best hotels. Here’s the caption about finding yourself. Which, fine. But that’s not why I travel, and I’d guess it’s not why you travel either.
Travel forcibly removes you from autopilot. That’s the thing. And it’s almost impossible to manufacture any other way.
When you’re in your home environment, surrounded by your normal triggers and routines and patterns, you are running on autopilot whether you know it or not. You wake up, you do the thing you always do, you respond to the inputs you always respond to. You’re not thinking about your life — you’re living inside the default version of it.
Travel breaks the pattern. Not because it’s magic, but because your brain literally cannot run its normal scripts. Every input is new. The sounds are different. The language is different. The food is different. The pace is different. And when your brain can’t run the autopilot program, you come back online. You start actually noticing things again. You start thinking instead of just reacting.
This is what happened this morning with the coffee.
Guatemalan coffee — grown in the volcanic highlands surrounding this exact city — has a richness and complexity that stops you. But the thing is, it’s not just the coffee. It’s drinking it here. With the volcanoes in the window and the unfamiliar sounds outside and no calendar reminder about to go off. Context changes the experience completely. The same cup of coffee in my home office would be good. Here, it’s a small ceremony. A reminder that I’m actually present somewhere.
That’s what travel keeps giving me that I can’t replicate at home, no matter how well I structure my mornings: the feeling of being fully, consciously here.
But here’s the part that matters most. The part I didn’t fully understand until I started doing it with a family.
Traveling with your kids changes something fundamental. Specifically, it changes you — in a way that solo travel doesn’t, or at least not in the same way.
When you experience something new with your children, you see it twice. You see it through your own eyes, and then you see it again through theirs — and their version is almost always better. Everything is fresh to them. Everything is remarkable. A kid who has never seen a volcano doesn’t have any frame of reference for how she’s supposed to feel about a volcano. She just stands there and feels whatever she actually feels, which turns out to be wonder.
That sounds simple. But when you’ve been alive long enough to have seen a lot of things, that capacity for unmediated wonder gets quietly dulled. You see a volcano and your brain files it away: volcano, yes, I have a category for this. But watching your daughter see one for the first time? The category disappears. You see it fresh again, through her eyes. That is a gift I don’t know how to put a price on.
There’s also something that happens in families when you travel that doesn’t happen at home. At home, everyone is locked into their role. You’re the parent doing the parent things. Your kids are in their routines. You’re managing the household, moving through the schedule, keeping everything running. It’s necessary work. But it’s also, in some ways, a managed distance.
When you travel, the roles loosen. You’re all figuring it out together. You’re all a little out of your element. And in that shared figuring-out, something opens up between you. You have conversations you wouldn’t have had otherwise. You notice each other differently. You become a team in a way the normal routine doesn’t really require.
The memories you make traveling with your family aren’t just nice memories. They are the memories. The ones that, years from now, become the stories your kids tell about their childhood. The ones that show them — not through anything you say but through what you actually do — that adventure is a value in your house. That the world is worth exploring. That life is something to be designed and lived, not just endured and optimized.
I think about this a lot because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to design a good life — which sounds grandiose but is really just a fancy way of asking: how do you build a life where you’re actually present and alive, instead of just busy?
And the honest answer I keep coming back to is that most people are optimizing for the wrong things. They’re optimizing for safety. For keeping everything predictable. For not rocking the boat. And those aren’t bad instincts — but they’re not the things that make a life feel full, either. What makes a life feel full is experiences. Connection. The moments where you’re so inside something real that there’s no room left over to be anxious about abstract future problems.
Travel is one of the most reliable ways I know to manufacture those moments. Not as an escape from your life — but as a deepening of it. As a way of showing up more fully to the time you actually have.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth that I think about more as I get older: you have less time than you think. Not in a morbid way. Just in a “the years are actually moving pretty fast and your kids are only this age once and certain windows are genuinely, quietly closing” kind of way.
Your toddler is going to be seven before you fully process that she’s no longer a toddler. The trip you keep meaning to take is going to stay in the “someday” folder until someday becomes never. Because life has a way of staying complicated, and the to-do list has a way of never fully clearing, and the reasons to wait have a way of constantly replenishing themselves.
I don’t say this to make you feel bad. I say it because I think most of us — myself included — need to hear it periodically. We need someone to point at the volcanoes and say: you could be sitting here right now. What is actually stopping you?
The coffee is getting cold.
My family is calling me from the other room. The volcanoes are still outside the window, doing what they do — permanent and enormous and completely uninterested in whether I cleared my inbox today.
I’m going to close the laptop and go be with my people. That is, when I really think about it, the whole point.
But if you’re reading this and there’s a trip somewhere in a folder marked “someday” — consider this your sign. Figure out the logistics. Book the thing. The timing will never be perfect and there will always be a reason to wait.
Go. Your future self will have a lot to say about it. And almost none of it will be regret.
