For lifelong travelers, the idea of a home base is a fraught one. Obviously, we want a place to store our favorite things, host friends and fellow wanderers, and maybe even build a home life and family, despite an innate aversion to fixed expenses. But the allure, the magnetism of the world never ceases to call us. For some of us, the work becomes discovering how to balance the home we want and the away we love.
For most of my adult life, I traveled on a whim, barely planning a budget and relying on the kindness of strangers and familiars alike in optimizing my experiences. I mastered connection across cultures and finessed luxury travel on a budget. But my various attempts at homesteading, alone or with a partner, always ended up feeling like slow suffocation. I realized that this feeling was related more to my perception of physical “home” as an anchor rather than as a foundation.
This perception could stem, in part, from my early escapades that happened just before technology equalized international and long-term travel, during a time when going abroad was still considered frivolous, risky, and prohibitively expensive to many in my parents’ generation. Long-term travel for me, at least subconsciously, opposed the banality and conformity of “home.” Of settling. Of buying in. Of selling out.
And then the needle moved sufficiently in the other direction. Call it nomad-fatigue or simply getting older, but I began to appreciate the benefits of routine and to value stability independent of outside expectations. I came around to realizing that the only way to scale my work as a storyteller and connector of people on a global level was to create the foundation upon which this work—and the life and lifestyle from which it springs—can be sustained.
As such, the humid, teeming, sinking city at the tip of the United States, both bane and beacon of my existence, has once again shown up as fertile ground upon which my foundation is to be built. In truth, I have lived in and left Miami four times already. I hear you, Universe.
I do believe that home really is where your heart is. But your foundation is always where it needs to be. So if you’re passing through Miami, let’s grab a cafecito. If I’m in town, of course.
—Ernest White II, Creator
FLY BROTHER