i took the long way

Nobody took me camping as a kid. The closest I got was at sleep-away camp when I slept in a tent for a couple nights. What I remember most was the snake under the tent floor; my cousin and I thought it was a stick. And then it moved.

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit—to me the outdoors was the ecosystem of the creek in my backyard; there were frogs and crawfish to catch. The sloped banks, tangled with wild trees, bushes, brambles, and exposed roots, seemed to swallow the light and transform the creek into a shadowed, untamed place that felt completely separate from the neatly tended backyard beside it.

My father worked. A lot. It had its impact on me. When I was 11 I was an assistant to a wedding and bar/bat mitzvah photographer. And when I was 13 I had to get a special permit from the state to work at the nearby family-owned drugstore as a stock boy. And then I worked at a record store through most of high school.

Then I got to the University of Arizona in Tucson.
The Sonoran Desert.

A world away from the Midwest. Surrounded by mountains and cacti, I started mountain biking. I started rappelling—first down the sides of campus buildings (and getting chased by campus police), until someone had a car and we could get to the actual mountains that ring Tucson. Something opened up. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s where my real education began.

My BFA in Media Arts came by chance. It was junior year and the pressure of choosing a major loomed. Someone told me there was a degree called Media Arts.

“What is it”, I asked? “Well, it’s.....”

Film production.
I love watching movies.
Music production.
I love listening to music.
Theater production and lighting.
I love live shows.
Photography.
I like taking pictures.
TV production.
I love watching TV.

And that’s how I chose my major. I spent my early-to-mid 20s working in entertainment arts: a talent agent, an A/V production tech, an auction house photographer, and an event production manager. And that was that. Career number one was complete.

Then I spent a year volunteering in Israel, and after I returned something shifted.

I wanted more education, but you don’t pick a graduate degree out of a hat. So when I found out such a degree existed, I felt I’d found my calling. And in an intense and transformative 18 months, I earned a Master of Science in Recreation, Park and Tourism Administration, specializing in Adventure Leadership and Outdoor Recreation. Including 6 months in the field gaining experience in backpacking, sea kayaking, climbing, mountaineering, and ropes course facilitation.

This is where the through-line snaps into focus. Recreation, at its Latin root, originally meant to refresh, restore, revive; to make new again—literally to re-create oneself. The academic field I chose is built on the conviction that leisure isn’t the opposite of productivity—it’s the conduit for human flourishing. That the space between work and rest isn’t empty or laziness. It’s where a person actually forms, renews, and reinvents themselves.

I studied the philosophy of leisure. I studied group dynamics and psychology. I studied flow state. I studied eudaimonia versus hedonism—alongside more technical skills like risk management, map and compass navigation, thermodynamic regulation, and expedition planning. I became a certified Wilderness First Responder, Wilderness Education Association Certified Outdoor Leader, and SARTECH II (Search & Rescue).

And for a decade I got paid to be outside. Teaching and training teenagers and adults (at different times) how to recreate safely in the outdoors. As is done, I counted bag nights: how many nights a year spent in a sleeping bag. And then I hung up my boots, at least professionally, and career number two came to a close.

During that decade is when Slowiness™ began taking root. Hiking or paddling miles a day through awe-inspiring wilderness, for days or weeks at a time, where my body was the machine, changed the set point that American society compels people to abide by: wherever you are in life and whatever you have—it’s never enough.

In 2007, my father died at 66. He was a workaholic. He worked until his body quit. I knew from my college days that I wasn’t going to live my life that way. He didn’t exercise, smoked cigars, ate terribly, drank, and barely slept. As he used to say, ‘I broke the mold’ which was because I vowed to use my body in a vastly different way.

I became a vegetarian in college and never went back. Every version of the life I chose has been physical—hiking with 80-pound packs, years of nomading focused on high altitude trekking, or walking twenty miles through a city just to see it properly. My father was sedentary and frantic at the same time. That’s not Slowiness. Slowiness is what makes room for the physical life—and the physical life, it turns out, is the one that lasts. There’s no truer maxim that “your health is your wealth”.

What I didn’t understand yet was why I’d already been doing life differently. I thought it was rebellion; a conscious choice to refuse the conventional model. It was considerably more complicated than that.

By 2011 I’d left my last traditional job that I’d had for 6 years as a project manager for a construction defect claim consulting firm; and thus ended my third career.

What followed was what I’d call my pseudo-enlightenment phase—exploring new-to-me ideas and practices; with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy and beginning men’s work—the latter finally ending a nearly 20-year ‘man void’ with no real male friendships during that time. Immersing myself in men’s work—men supporting each other in deep, emotional connection—has been an extremely crucial part of my life since then.

I began to understand what had actually been driving me. The choices that looked like societal defiance from the outside were, underneath, something a scared kid had built to keep himself safe from failure, rejection, and being seen.

Naming that was slow work. It’s still in progress.

In early 2015 two things happened within two weeks of each other: my marriage ended (including finding out I was cheated on for nearly two years), and my dog died. My father’s life insurance—sitting in an account since 2007 when he died—made what came next possible. By summer I sold the one and only house I’ve ever owned in suburban Portland, and everything in it. Packed a carry-on bag. Left.

The cultural script for midlife says you should be apexing your career, saving for retirement, trading your 40s for a someday that arrives when your knees don’t. Instead I was trekking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal at 5,416m (~18,000ft).

I managed to visit 65+ countries: trekking in Patagonia, Nepal, Peru, and India; pet-sitting on remote Costa Rican beaches or taking care of a llama and a dozen goats in the San Pasqual Valley on a ranch east of San Diego; swimming with bottle-nosed dolphins in the Amazon in Brasil; doing Kung Fu training in rural Thailand; walking entire cities—Dakar, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta—twenty miles at a stretch just to see what was at the other end. And so many more bucket list items checked off, with even more added to it. And interspersed amongst the adventures were plenty of slow weeks in places where nobody knew my resume, or cared; monasteries in Nepal and India; luxurious villas taking care of delightful dogs and cats; or getting connected to a wonderful family in Sucre, Bolivia.

I absorbed a lot. Sat on it for years. None of it was wasted.

The pandemic eventually crushed nomad life. Moving to Portugal finished the job. After a few years in other corners of the country, I settled in a beach town called Carcavelos, just west of Lisbon, where the Atlantic ends and the café tables begin. I’m not leaving.

Slowiness™

I coined the word long before I ever became a nomad.
It formed during my outdoor years—maybe earlier—but it needed time to root.

It’s not about going slow.
I walk fast, cook fast, drive fast.
Slowiness operates at a different level: life architecture.

It’s the refusal to wear busyness as a badge of honor.
The deliberate choice to live at your own pace rather than the culture’s.
Not everything is on fire and needs attention right now.
Choosing enough over the endless chase for more.

Living in Portugal confirmed what I already suspected: the European model of time-richness—long lunches, unhurried evenings, leisure as something real rather than something you collapse into, and federally mandated vacation time—isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s common sense.

My MS in Recreation taught me and confirmed exactly this, decades earlier. And now there’s a synthesis—not just naming the philosophy, but building a life around it, and beginning to articulate it for people who feel the pull toward something slower but don’t yet have the language, or the path towards practice.

I’m starting the Slowiness movement.
I’m writing the book.

You might find older projects online under other names—Bogus Belief Busters, the Mantor, Nowmad. Same person, earlier language, before I had the word for it.