Working From Somewhere Else

I brought my laptop to Helen with absolutely no intention of turning this little getaway into a work trip.

And yet .. here I am.

Laptop open. Glasses off. River underneath me. Mountains in front of me. The lights starting to come on around town.

But this doesn’t really feel like work.

For most of my life, I’ve had to build my days around things I didn’t choose. Treatments. Appointments. My body. Responsibilities. Then I went and built businesses and markets and products and somehow became very good at filling every remaining square inch with something else that needed to be done.

So maybe this is what I’m trying to learn now:

I don’t have to stop creating to rest.
I just have to stop making everything a race.

I can write beside a river.

I can work on my story with wet hair and my yellow glasses tossed on the computer.

I can close the laptop whenever I damn well please.

I can sit here long enough to watch daylight disappear behind the mountains.

And maybe the life I’ve fought so hard to keep living doesn’t always have to be about fighting.

Sometimes I get to just live it.

Tonight, that’s enough.

Tooter Sue 🌙
Helen, Georgia | September 2026