Time is running out

"Welcome Mr Bingham."

 The man smiles slightly as he realizes he's back on the road again. The strange mix of professionalism and comfort to make you feel like you're with family when you don't know a single person in the room. He sets his things down in the airport club knowing that they will be safe while he grabs a cup a coffee.

The man sits down in the worn out and faded lounge chair with his cup of coffee and looks beyond the window in front of him. He sees a plane slowly getting ready to take off while another is landing. "It's all so simple," the man thought. Up, down, repeat. Unload, reload. Limited communication in the blue abyss of the endless sky....so simple.

What a run the man has had over the years of travel. Flying in luxury, achieving the highest status, going where the wind took him. The man sighed. Company policies were changing and the man's comfort was slowly being taken from him and the year was coming to a quick close.

Like all travelers, the man was thinking about the next year and what status awaited him. In previous years he never needed to worry because traveling 80% of your time far exceeded highest status on any airline. Now the man, like other travelers, crunched the numbers for flights in his head trying to figure out if his comfort status was within reach.

It almost felt surreal to the man. No matter how he worked the numbers, he wasn't going to make it. It was as if the home the man worked so hard to build over the years was being taken away from him. The man understood that it was only a matter of time, but change is never easy. The next year awaited the man, change was eminent.

Home

I now have been traveling about 8 months now. My perception on life have certainly changed in terms of what "home" is.

Home is familiarity

Home is familiarity. When growing up home meant my family. When in college, home meant friends. And when I moved to the city, home meant a location. But now I'm finding home truly means familiarity. This is a more generalized version of home, and as a traveler I can appreciate it more.

In the famous words of Sheldon Cooper, "In an ever-changing world it is a single point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function on a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, that spot, at the moment I first sat on it, would be (0,0,0,0)." Consistency = familiarity.

Consistency = familiarity

Now, I am not saying anyone's definition of home is wrong, I'm justing that home is being defined as a more general term for me as my years progress to allow for "consistency" in my life.

Home means familiarity for me because I no longer feel "comfortable in my skin" in my apartment, in my city, around my friends, or around my family. Home is where you are content with life. It's where you are accepting of your life, or at least some aspect of it.

For travelers home is the road. Hotels, flights, rental cars, bars, restaurants, local attractions, and most importantly, consistency. Staying at similar hotels, flights, cars, and bar and restaurant types is what brings that consistency. For me, home would be defined:

And if I find a live bar with wifi, life is perfect

Then flying united while enjoying the United clubs, resting at Marriotts and Hyatt hotels while running directly after work. For fun going out to local Jazz clubs or country bars. And if I find a live bar with wifi, life is perfect. Then collapsing at my null apartment all weekend in preparation for the next wild week.

This is the traveling life,
I came, I saw, I travel.


Note: This blog is merely defining home for me. In no way does this explain that I do not get happiness from friends and family. I love that part about my life. To be able to see family and friends is a special treat for me as a traveler. They are the reason I keep traveling, to see them all around the US.

Meeting People

One of the perks of traveling is meeting people. Sometimes you meet the most interesting people at your hotel. People are there for travel, leisure, luxury, modeling, and who knows what else. I have met a guy who was a hard core republican, another guy who travels 90% of his life, and every once in a while you met a special few girls that travel 1/3 of the year, to the same place and same hotel.

These two wonderful women met at the hotel bar, not by chance, but by the bar tenders. Every time they came to the Hyatt Magnificent Mile they would sit at the bar and drink alone. The bar tender noticed this and introduced the two ladies. Since then, they have been best friends at the Hyatt when they travel.

Can you imagine? Every single week traveling to the exact same location, to the same hotel, and the same bar tender? Crazy. Never the less, these ladies taught me something about traveling. When you're a professional traveler, you aren't on vacation, you aren't visiting, and you most definitely aren't foreign..... you are home. When you travel a lot, you have to accept that this is your life. Meaning, no matter how hectic, you have to come up with routines, normalities, and make friends. As crazy as these two women were, they taught me that "life" is not a location, people, or even experiences-- It's YOU. This thought is not in a selfish way, rather; it's a different way to look at how to become happy with the cards that life has given you.

Traveling is my life. I came, I saw, I travel.

I work in an old man's world

You enter middle school and you are the young kid. You enter high school and you are the young kid. You decide to go to a college or university, yet again young. I have entered into another one of these situations with being a trainer in enterprise software. What have I found? It's the same middle school, high school, and college. It's a major learning curve, everyone knows more than you, and worst of all it's hard to relate to anyone.

"Everyone knows more than you and worst of all it's hard to relate to anyone"

What I have in my short 6 months of training around the country is that I am in an area of teaching an old dog new tricks. The companies that I'm working with are used to working with standard enterprise software-- products that have been around since the inception of Microsoft... and the internet. The product that I teach is a completely new concept and going into these companies one of two things happen. 1) I am discredited because I am young and don't understand legacy technologies or 2) developers realize how different the software is and are overwhelmed by the learning curve ahead of them.

"I am in an area of teaching an old dog new tricks."

Personally I hope for option two. :) But to achieve this in any company that I go to is extremely difficult. I have to overcome my age, my lack of legacy technologies, and lastly, I have to know my product inside and out. Realistically the only one I can control is the third option, knowing my product.

"So I am a professional trainer on Adobe Experience Manager."

So I am a professional trainer on Adobe Experience Manager, a new concept and way of thinking about marketing on the web. A complete new stack to work with for enterprise web development. It's 100% built on java and every level of the stack is built off of an open source project. I aim to teach old dogs new tricks because technology never stops. No matter your background, I am now the expert on the most forward way of thinking about marketing on the web. I work tirelessly to ensure that my clients understand this new stack and understand how to utilize it to the fullest.