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Transcript
- There is a specific, hollow silence that happens when you land in a new time zone and realize your favorite hobby has been put on pause for the third time this month. It’s not just about missing out; it’s the quiet grief of losing the thread of who you are when you aren’t moving. Let’s breathe into that feeling for a second. You know the one. You’ve spent weeks preparing for a trip. Maybe it’s a work conference in Tokyo, or a solo getaway to Lisbon, or even just a long weekend in Chicago. You pack your bags, you say goodbye to your routine, and then, as soon as your feet hit the ground, your hobbies evaporate. The sketchbook stays at home. The running shoes gather dust in the closet. The guitar case becomes too much luggage to check. And suddenly, you’re left with these endless hours of downtime, but you have no idea what to do with them because the things that usually fill your soul are back in your apartment, thousands of miles away. I see this all the time in my line of work. Stylists, creatives, travelers—we treat our passions like fragile artifacts that need to be kept under glass in a climate-controlled room. We think if we don’t touch them every single day, they’ll break. Or worse, they’ll forget us. But here is the truth that took me years to learn: hobbies don’t disappear when you travel. They just change shape. And I want to talk to you about how to keep them alive, even when you’re halfway across the world. My mother was a seamstress, so I grew up understanding that texture is truth. The way fabric feels against your skin tells you everything you need to know about its quality, its history, its intent. But we rarely apply that same sensory awareness to our non-work lives. When we travel, we often switch into a mode of pure consumption. We consume sights, food, experiences. We become tourists in our own lives. But if you want to maintain your hobbies, you have to shift from being a consumer to being a participant, however small. Let’s say you love painting. You can’t bring your easel and fifty gallons of oil paint onto a plane. That’s impractical. But can you bring a pocket-sized watercolor set? Can you sit in a café in Paris and just mix colors on a napkin? Not to create a masterpiece, but to keep the muscle memory alive. The act of touching the brush, mixing the pigment, seeing the color bleed—that is the ritual. The result doesn’t matter. The participation does. When you deny yourself the physical act of your hobby, you’re denying yourself a part of your identity. You’re saying, 'I am only me when I am at home.' But you are also you in the airport lounge. You are also you on the train ride. Style is just confidence with a coat on, but identity is just consistency with a suitcase. Try to find the portable version of your joy. We have this romanticized idea that our hobbies require a perfect setup. A clean desk, fresh paper, the right lighting, the right playlist. When we travel, none of those things exist. Our hotel rooms are sterile boxes. Our time is fragmented. And so we tell ourselves, 'It’s not the right environment. I can’t really do this now.' This is the lie that keeps us from integrating our passions into our mobile lives. I remember a trip to New York a few years ago. I had promised myself I would write. I had this beautiful notebook, this specific pen. But every night, after meetings, I was too exhausted to sit at the hotel desk. The noise, the unfamiliar bed, the pressure to produce—it all felt heavy. So I stopped writing entirely for two weeks. And when I got home, I looked at that blank notebook and felt this wave of guilt. I hadn’t failed because I didn’t have time. I had failed because I demanded perfection. I needed to lower the bar. I needed to accept that sometimes writing looks like scribbling notes in the margins of a boarding pass. Sometimes it looks like voice memos recorded while walking through Central Park. It doesn’t have to be elegant. It doesn’t have to be polished. It just has to happen. If you wait for the perfect conditions, you will never write, paint, cook, or garden while traveling. You will only ever do it when life is convenient. And life is rarely convenient. So, how do we actually do this? How do we find the portable ritual? It starts with stripping your hobby down to its essence. What is the core of what you love? Is it the social aspect? Is it the creativity? Is it the discipline? Once you identify the core, you can find a way to express it anywhere. If you love baking, maybe you can’t bake a sourdough loaf in a hotel kitchen, but you can study recipes. You can look at ingredient lists and imagine combinations. You can keep a digital journal of flavors you want to try. If you love running, maybe you can’t run your usual five miles, but you can walk mindfully and notice the architecture, the light, the people. You can observe the rhythm of a city instead of imposing your rhythm on it. This isn’t about giving up your passion. It’s about expanding it. It’s about realizing that your hobby is not tied to a place, but to a practice. And practices can be adapted. I started carrying a small sketchbook everywhere. At first, I felt silly drawing in airports. People were staring. But then I realized that everyone else was looking at their phones, scrolling, disconnecting. By choosing to draw, I was connecting. I was present. And slowly, those sketches became more than just doodles. They became records of my journey. They captured the mood of a place in a way that photos never could. Photos capture the surface. Sketches capture the feeling. And feelings travel with you. When we travel, we often feel guilty about doing nothing. We feel like we should be maximizing every minute, checking off landmarks, taking photos for Instagram. But downtime is where the magic happens. It’s in those quiet moments that we reconnect with ourselves. And if you’ve brought a small piece of your hobby with you, that downtime becomes productive in a deeper sense. It becomes restorative. Think about it. If you spend your entire trip consuming content—sights, sounds, news—you leave exhausted. But if you spend twenty minutes a day engaging with something you love, even loosely, you leave energized. You leave feeling like yourself. This is especially important for women who often carry the mental load of managing everyone else’s expectations. Travel can amplify that pressure. You’re the planner, the photographer, the problem-solver. Having a hobby, even a tiny, portable one, gives you a sanctuary. It’s a space where you don’t have to perform. You just have to be. Whether it’s knitting a single row of a scarf, reading a chapter of a book, or simply observing the sky and noting the clouds, these small acts anchor you. They remind you that you are not just a vessel for other people’s needs. You are a person with interests, with curiosities, with joys that belong to you alone. And those joys don’t vanish when you cross a border. They just ask you to be creative about how you hold them. Finally, let’s talk about coming home. There’s a strange disorientation that happens when you return from a trip. The clothes hang differently. The coffee tastes different. The silence of your own apartment feels louder. And often, we struggle to reintegrate our hobbies because we’ve been away from them for so long. We feel rusty. We feel behind. But here is the secret: you haven’t lost anything. You’ve just been gathering material. Those observations from your travels, those small sketches, those mental recipe ideas—they are fuel. They are waiting for you to bring them back to your main practice. When I returned from my trip to Italy, I didn’t go back to sewing immediately. I sat with my fabric swatches. I thought about the textures I’d seen in Rome. I imagined how they might feel together. And when I finally picked up my needle, my work was different. It was richer. It had depth. Because I had allowed my hobby to breathe, even in its absence. So don’t worry if your routine feels shaky when you return. Give yourself grace. Re-enter your hobbies gently. Let them guide you back into your body, back into your daily rhythm. And next time you pack for a trip, leave the heavy equipment behind. Take the small, portable version of your joy. Let it travel with you. Let it remind you that you are whole, wherever you are. Because style is just confidence with a coat on, but peace is knowing you can find your center, even in the middle of nowhere. Thank you for letting me into your evening. I hope you find a little pocket of your hobby today, no matter where you are. Until next time, take care of yourself. I’m Mandy Lara, and I’ll see you in the next episode.