Travel Man
Thoughts on traveling and staying creative... spoiler: I'm not good at it.
You may have noticed I didn’t send you an email last week (well, I did if you subscribe to my other newsletter about politics). I was actually out of town at an event for my day job. Here’s an accurate representation of how my week went…
I like the idea of travel.
One of my favorite shows that my wife and I discovered recently is Richard Ayoade’s Travel Man. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.
I’m also a big fan of illustrator Mike Lowery and his sketches about his travels to interesting places. I was super inspired by his stuff and had big plans for my week of traveling.
I was gonna keep a sketch book and document things… make fun drawings and it was gonna be a blast.
Then I remembered I don’t actually like traveling myself.
But, since I didn’t have much choice in the matter I tried to stay positive and make the best of it. Don’t get me wrong, the work event was great. I work remotely, so it is nice to see the people you work with in real life. I just don’t do a lot of traveling, and to say I’m bad at it would be an understatement.
And then to try to make it a creative endeavor was probably doomed from the start.
My first mistake was scheduling a flight that left at 6am.
I’ll just go early! The airport will be empty and it’ll be fine! I’m not sure what I was thinking there but it pretty much set the tone for the week that I would be tired the entire time - especially considering I was going to a time zone two hours behind. Good job, dummy.
I also flew out of a smaller airport with limited flights, so… connecting flight it is…
Third mistake was building up a picture in my head of where I was going that was completely wrong. I thought… “Denver! This will be great… there’s mountains all around, nature, I’m gonna see some really cool stuff and be super inspired!”
This is Denver…
Don’t get me wrong… Denver is a pretty cool city. And I’m sure Colorado is great if you go into the nature and mountains and stuff. But, yeah, not what I was expecting.
I still gave it a shot, though. I did some sketching of mostly bad drawings that will remain hidden away in my sketchbook.
I also learned some things.
One. Getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing. Seeing new places and having new experiences… all good. But it’s important to give yourself some grace and not expect to be “on” all the time when you are already stressed about every aspect of travel. Especially when it’s not something you do often.
Two. Making assumptions and having them dashed by reality isn’t good for creativity. It’s much better to keep an open mind and keep your curiosity level high. We all create a perception of things in our head, there’s probably no getting around that, but realizing we don’t know what we don’t know is a skill that most people haven’t developed.
Three. I’m bad at this… and that’s ok. Some people thrive on travel. Having new experiences and seeing new places. For others, it’s a bit of a struggle. We all find our creative passion in different ways and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it also shouldn’t be an excuse to not give it a shot every once in a while.
Watching travel shows on tv isn’t the same thing.
Thanks for reading! If you want to see more of my artwork/sketches/ramblings, follow me on X and here on Substack Notes. And if you really want to support me, I have a store!
Also, if you’re into political cartoons, I have another newsletter called Political Nomad with a new comic every Thursday.
Have a great week!
-Brad