I was standing next to the Swiss Family Tree House at Disneyland Paris listening to my daughter debate the theories of Lacan. I said why don’t you go ride a roller coaster like a normal teenager?
She just laughed at me and said Because I’m not normal, silly!
Later that same night we left the kids at the hotel with my mother and went walking next to the Seine. Past Notre Dame we encountered a group of hip young things smoking and practicing music on a banjo, a couple of guitars, a french horn, a trombone, and a tuba.
We sat and listened until some bike punks showed up and started doing jumps that took them flying at high speeds right past our heads. Byron whispered I could take ’em but in fact, he could not, so we wandered up into the Latin Quarter.
We found a table at Cafe Contrescarpe and the waiter said something to my arm before dropping a glass of wine on my foot. We all laughed and I remembered the first trip to Paris, when I sat in the same cafe, depressed by world events and the realization that I had once again chosen to take on complicated work projects that left no time for writing.
Back then I wondered if I would be satisfied with my life if I continued to commit all of my time to running a social media company, and decided the answer was no. I started to think about my whole life, from the fundamentals of our family structure to the complexities of my social scene. I realized that I felt trapped, and that is probably the feeling I dislike the most.
From that afternoon four years ago came the series of questions that took us from Portland to Seattle and then to England, so abruptly that many of my friends still do not know that I’ve left Portland.
From being bored and stuck in the Northwest, I’ve become the sort of person who travels half the year. I move easily across wildly divergent social scenes. I do the work I wish to do, which looks something like it did back then – but also includes lashings of time to write, even time to write things that I have no intention of publishing.
Sometimes saying no is the most appropriate choice.