6. Come Home

The best damn thing I have ever drank was tap water.

I came home from my first trip to Asia — Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam — and the first thing I did was walk to my kitchen sink, turn on the tap, and drink straight from it. Cold. Clean. Free. Not from a plastic bottle I had to buy every single day just to stay hydrated.

I stood there at that sink and I felt it. Really felt it. The weight of everything I had just seen and the extraordinary ordinary luck of where I get to live.

Travel does that to me. Cracks me open a little.

I'm not a sightseer when I travel. I'm a watcher. I find myself looking at people going about their days and asking questions I can't answer. How do they grind it out? Or do they? Do they even need to grind — or do they just live? Do they have more time with their families because they have less of everything else? I've seen a lot of poverty in Asia. And I've sat with the uncomfortable question it raises every time — is simpler actually freer?

Here, the more you make the more you want. The more you want the more you buy. The more you buy the more you need. Consumerism. Capitalism. Who has the better, best new toy. It gets to be a lot. The North American life gets to be a lot.

I'm not outside of it. I live inside it like everyone else. But travel reminds me to see it. And seeing it is the first step to not being completely swallowed by it.

This is why I think about recalibration the way I do.

Not work-life balance — I don't love that phrase. It implies there's a perfect equation somewhere, a formula you just haven't found yet. I don't think that's true. I think it's a choice. A constant, active, imperfect choice to know what you need and go find it.

For me that looks different depending on the day.

Some days it's the ocean. I am so fortunate to have it right outside my door in Lions Bay — mountains behind me, water in front, and on the days when the everyday race gets loud inside my head, I can walk to the edge of it and just breathe. The ocean has been what I needed all along. It gives me back to myself in ten minutes flat.

Sometimes I need more than ten minutes. Sometimes I need the Okanagan — a place I've been returning to my whole life, that feels safe and known and easy in a way that lets me fully exhale. Sometimes I need to get on a plane and blow my whole frame open, go somewhere that asks me hard questions about how I'm living and what I actually need.

But I always come home. And I love coming home.

Even after our best trips. Even after the Okanagan, after Asia, after anywhere — I love the moment of coming back. Walking through my own door. The particular smell of it. The particular feeling of it.

Because home is where my values live.

Home means family. Family is everything I am oriented around — the reason I recalibrate in the first place, the reason I pay attention, the reason I care about not getting swallowed by the noise of wanting more. I want to be present for my daughters. I want them to grow up watching a mother who knows what she needs and isn't afraid to go find it. Who comes home grateful. Who drinks the tap water and means it.

I don't have it all figured out. The everyday race still gets loud. I still have days where I can't fully relax even with the birds chirping outside my window because tomorrow is already waiting.

But I know how to find my way back.

That's enough.

— Dani