Beer, girls, and a fresh perspective
Look at that sunrise – gosh it’s gorgeous, you can literally see the “god rays” splayed across the sky lighting up Ipanema beach. The water is cold rushing below my knees and I roll my head back laughing deep within my belly. I open my eyes and in front of me are people with whom I have memories and history, we have inside jokes, we poke at each other’s insecurities, and we seek the most personally abrasive nicknames possible for each other. And for some reason I decided to fly here, to the other side of the world, and spend money I probably shouldn’t, to be standing right here, right now, with them.
The vacation to Rio was amazing; yeah, sure, for all the reasons that you think: cans of beer on the street cost $0.80, the summer sun was warm and inviting, the women stunningly gorgeous, all taking place in a city where literally 6 million people stop everything but to put on silly costumes and party for four days. But I think an equal, if not longer lasting value came hours after I had returned home to San Francisco.
Upon landing at SFO I could feel a creeping anxiety coming over me as I reached for my phone, tapped my password onto the screen and went for the Airplane Mode OFF switch, but I stopped. I realized that my anxiety was coming from the anticipated uber-shock of rentry into the atmosphere without a heat shield. I was about to be deluged by a week’s worth of pinging text messages, ding-donging voicemails, endlessly scrolling emails, and continuously loading twitter messages. I made an executive decision and decided not to re-enter quite yet, and put my phone back to sleep.
I realized that I was in a rare and unusual sense of rapture, floating in the ether, away from the oxygen of ultra-connectivity that we need to breathe in our Silicon Valley lives. I only used the computer once in Rio, for less than 5 minutes, I never once used my phone. What an amazing gift.
I used the rest of the afternoon, from about noon onward, to sip coffee and to evaluate the priorities in my life. I journaled for a bit and came away objectively understanding that I spend too much time on things that don’t last past a headache in the morning, and not enough time on the things that will drive me forward for a lifetime. That said, I’ll still end up with the headaches, I’ll just try to adjust the balance between those and my other priorities a little bit better.
Then, slowly but surely, I re-entered the atmosphere, starting with email, then a tweet or two, followed up uploading my pictures. And now look at me, I’m laying on my hotel room bed across the street from my Microsoft office building in Bellevue, Washington at 11:30 at night, poking away on my computer with a 3G broadband card flickering out the side. I’m about to send a tweet from my phone, as my mind drifts away from this post, which is less than an arms distance away.
I’m definitely re-immersed, which is great, don’t get me wrong; I’m just so happy that I took those few precious moments between vacation and reality to realign my thoughts and my focus, because I think there’s nothing more important or valuable than having a fresh perspective.
