The Place I Filed Away

There is a place I filed away for almost a decade.

For me it was Guatemala. The highlands, specifically — Lake Atitlán at dawn, volcanoes on three sides, coffee that tastes like the ground it came from. I'd see a photograph and file it. I'd hear someone mention it and file it. I'd be in the middle of a meeting and the thought would arrive — I should be there — and I'd file it, because filing it was the responsible thing to do.

I want to write about the filing, because the filing is the part most men understand and almost nobody talks about.

It wasn't that the trip was impractical. That's the lie a man tells himself, and it doesn't survive examination. The truth is I was doing everything right. I was building a business. I was trying to be a good husband. I was trying to be a present father. Those are not excuses. Those are the most important things a man does, and I was doing them.

But Guatemala kept surfacing. And every time it surfaced, I filed it away again.

What I came to believe — and what I think most men believe, even when they can't say it out loud — is that there is something greater than the script. Not greater than the marriage. Not greater than the children. Not greater than the work. Greater than the default settings of all of it. A conviction that being a good man and being a normalized man are not the same thing.

The pull is the evidence of that conviction. It's not asking you to abandon your life. It's asking you to verify what you already believe about it.

That's what The First Pull — the field note I just wrote — is for.

What Took Me a Decade to See

When I finally went to Guatemala, I expected the trip to be the change. That's the frame most men carry into a real trip. Vacation has trained us to expect the trip to be something — a reset, a reward, an escape. I went expecting the same.

That's not what happened. The trip didn't change my life. The trip relocated something in me, and the relocation changed how I showed up to everything, and everything responded.

I came back and noticed I was waking up earlier. Not because I'd resolved to. I noticed I was reading at night instead of watching television. I noticed I had stopped eating at eleven o'clock and started eating at seven. I noticed I was walking the dog every morning — her name is Cookie — and the walk became its own small religion. I noticed my marriage felt different from the inside, though my wife and I had not changed our schedule. I noticed my relationship with my boys felt deeper.

None of these were resolutions. None required willpower. They arrived as consequences.

What I'd been chasing for a decade — discipline, energy, presence, the better version of myself trying to assemble by force — turned out not to be a discipline problem. It was a frame problem. The pull I'd been filing wasn't a distraction from my responsibilities. The pull was the missing ingredient that made the responsibilities make sense.

That's the inversion. The responsibilities are still there. They become the honor.

The Four Pillars, Briefly

Once I could see it, I could name it. There are four phases to the motion, and most men are stuck somewhere along the way.

Believe is the unnamed conviction — the pull itself. Most men spend years here. Some spend their whole lives here. A feeling that never becomes a movement eventually becomes a regret.

Explore is conviction meeting terrain. Real terrain. Vacation is a pause from your life; exploration is a confrontation with it. You don't verify the pull at a resort. You verify it where the defaults can't reach you.

Experience is what happens when you're somewhere long enough that the routines and the roles release their grip. Somewhere around day three or day five, the belief stops being an idea and arrives as a felt thing.

Voice is what you bring back. The earned conviction a man carries home from the terrain. Quieter than before he left, more certain than before he left, and finally able to live the belief he had been filing away.

These four make a system. Without Believe, Explore is just travel. Without Experience, the trip is just a vacation. Without Voice, none of it survives the return. The Field Note develops each of these properly. The blog post is the summary; the Field Note is the work.

The Card

There's an exercise in the Field Note I want to mention here, because it's the most useful part for the man who isn't sure where he is in the four pillars.

Get a real card. Index card, back of a business card, the inside cover of a notebook. Write three places that have lived rent-free in your head for more than a year. One word next to each — why it pulls you. Then circle the one that scares you most. Carry the card for seven days. Don't book anything. Don't tell anyone.

At the end of seven days, look at the circled one. It will either still be there or it will have quieted. If it has quieted, that wasn't yours. If it's still there — louder, more insistent — that's the one.

The card isn't the trip. The card is the diagnostic. You're testing which pull is conviction and which is curiosity. Conviction stays. That's the only difference that matters.

What This Is, and What It Isn't

NO&YO is not a travel company. We make apparel for men whose lives have to keep working while they figure this out. We write a Journal that arrives Friday mornings. We publish ten-day adventure itineraries for six countries, including the Guatemala I filed away for a decade.

But the work underneath all of that — the reason any of it exists — is what The First Pull is about. If the writing here lands, that's the next step. Seventeen pages. Free. No pitch.

Read The First Pull →

Get Lost on Purpose.®

— Yanni

Fort Lauderdale