After three weeks in Gran Canaria, I went to Venice.
I call it a vacation, which is funny, considering I’m already on sabbatical. But even within a life untethered from work, there are still shifts in posture. Venice asked me to arrive without responsibility, without contribution, without being useful to anyone.
Just to look.
Three nights. Another language. And this time, no pretending I wasn’t a tourist.
Venice doesn’t let you forget where you are. Water replaces roads. Staircases rise and fall between bridges like punctuation marks. You’re always going up, down, crossing, turning. The city asks something physical of you just to move through it. And then there are the buildings.
Old buildings –the kind I love most.
They stand there unapologetically, worn and elegant, reminding you that centuries ago people lived full lives within those walls. They argued, laughed, loved, worried, and eventually disappeared. The buildings stayed.
It’s humbling.
We like to think we’re permanent. We plan as if time is generous. But standing in Venice, it’s obvious: land and stone outlast us. By a lot. If Earth’s entire history were compressed into a single day, we wouldn’t even get a second. Barely a nanosecond.
And yet, here we are, leaving marks anyway.
I wandered without urgency. Up stairs. Down stairs. Across bridges that have carried more footsteps than I could ever imagine. I found myself hunting movie locations Bond’s Casino Royale smiling at the absurdity of chasing a fictional spy through a city that needs no embellishment.
For a few days, I let myself be exactly what I was.
A tourist.
Not a fixer. Not a helper. Not someone in transition. Just a man walking through a place older than his anxieties, letting it put things back into scale.
Venice didn’t heal me. It didn’t challenge me.
It reminded me. Time is finite.
Beauty persists.
And it’s okay sometimes necessary to simply witness.