A NEWSLETTER FOR THE PURPOSEFUL TRAVELER, WHERE THE JOURNEY WITHIN MEETS THE JOURNEY WITHOUT.
Happiness Essential: Health Edition
Happy Sunday!
A few days into my trip to Paris this summer, I walked into the Dior store on the Champs-Élysées.
I stopped in front of one suit and stayed there for a long while, studying the stitching, the weight of the fabric, the way the buttonholes were made, how one seam met the next.
My mom trained in couture in Paris while she and my dad lived there, way before I was born. As a teenager, I wore clothes she made for me from Chanel and Dior patterns, while every other kid I knew wore clothes made from Simplicity and Butterick ones.
When we went shopping together, she would sometimes stand in front of a dress or blouse for what seemed like forever. She rarely bought it. I never understood what she was doing, and I never thought to ask.
Standing in Dior all those years later, in the city where she learned to sew and design clothes, I finally understood.
She was reading the work.
My mom was studying the construction, the fabric, the choices another person had made with tremendous care. What looked to me like standing around in a store had been something entirely different to her.
What made the moment even more surprising was that Dior had already appeared earlier that week.
During the screenwriting workshop that brought me to Paris, Kim Krizan, the Oscar-nominated writer of Before Sunrise, showed us a scene from Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, in which a woman stands before the Dior gown she has crossed an ocean to see.
It was a full circle moment for me.
A screenplay that has been with me for a very long time, about a high-powered advertising executive in 1990 San Francisco who eventually questions what success has cost her, contains a strangely similar moment.
In my story, it is a suit, not a gown.
I had written that scene long, long before this trip to Paris, or the idea of coming here for a writing workshop, was even a seed of a thought.
Travel can do that. You leave home expecting to discover something new and find yourself recognizing something that has been with you for years. You are simply seeing it through a different lens.
That is one expression of wellbeing, or as I prefer to think of it, Wholebeing. As we explore Health this month, I have been thinking about what happens when mind, body, and spirit are present enough to notice what is in front of you and what it awakens inside you. That aha moment when something you have known for years suddenly means something different.
A seam. A scene from a film. A memory that suddenly makes sense.
My mom passed away more than three years ago. Standing there in Dior, I felt closer to her.
In that moment, she was right next to me.
The next time something holds your attention longer than expected, stay with it a moment longer before moving on.
There may be a reason.
