I didn't realize that Stowe Boyd had another-nother blog called Ambivalence, which I arrived at today by clicking a sidebar link from /Message. There I came across a wonderful, touching post about Stowe's life as a solo, traveling man in the age of the Web, a consultant with an office in the wild, at a time when the connections that arise from connectivity are creating home-bases out there, no where in particular, between this place and the next place, with long-time friends and net-neighbors whose faces we are only now coming upon, one after the next.
In a period of a handful of days, this week, I will have as many as a dozen meetings, with savants and seekers, entrepreneurs and engineers, and companies large and small. I will see a never-seen-before product, learn about a company's recent formation, and hear some juicy bit of gossip that would have passed me by at home. I will walk many miles, ride trains, cabs, and planes, and flit around within an unforgiving schedule like a nightingale in a silver cage. I will stay out late with new friends and old, laughing and learning, and I will work alone in coffeeshops, here, there, and everywhere.
I am a modern nomad, carrying the minimum of possessions in service to the maximum of obsessions. And it's different sort of strength that comes from this wandering, from staying in different hotels instead of the same old bed, from seeing the sun rise from different windows, through different branches, reaching for the light.
They say that migrating birds can sense the magnetic fields of the Earth, and calibrate their flight with the arcs of the stars, swirling through the skies. What forces am I skating along, as I swing westward, like some 21st century hobo? I feel a humming in the blood, a deep murmuring in my meat: a call, some nearly intangible sensation of being pulled, going, like the birds stroking the air, like the stars sweeping westward.
A fascinating, honest, and beautiful read.
Tags: Stowe Boyd, Blogging, Tech, Web2.0, consulting, /Message, Ambivalence = Powered by Qumana
