What Travel Helps Us Remember
I picked up a new book to read and within a few chapters of the book- what the happiest retirees know by Wes Moss he quoted an alarming statistic he cribbed from a Gallup poll a few years back.
“What the Gallup numbers reveal is something many of us have felt quietly, but seldom say aloud: work, for most people, is not the sanctuary it pretends to be.”
As I read that passage, I found myself thinking of the many colleagues, patients, leaders, and young physicians I’ve known over the years. Some arrived every day with fire in their spirit—those rare 20% whose work felt like calling. I’ve met them: the nurse who stayed late to comfort a frightened patient, the pharmacist who looked past numbers to see the human story, the physician who found joy in mentoring rather than metrics.
But for the majority, work was simply the thing that allowed life to happen.
A means, not a meaning.
And then there were the others—the ones quietly suffocating under toxic leadership, impossible expectations, or the slow erosion of dignity. Talented, kind, capable people swallowed by systems that did not see them. For them, work became a place of depletion rather than purpose.
Now, in this next chapter of retirement, it is liberating to step outside that structure. To realize that purpose was never tied to the badge, the inbox, the meetings, or the title. It was tied to the impact we made, the people we lifted, the stories we shaped, and the legacy that remains long after the shift ends.
Retirement does not silence purpose.
It simply removes the walls around it.
There are moments in travel when the world becomes a mirror—reflecting not only landscapes but long-buried truths. On this journey, somewhere between airport terminals, open skies, and the rhythm of my camera shutter, I came across that Gallup statistic again:
Only one in five Americans feel engaged in their work.
Three in five drift through it.
One in five are crushed by it.
Reading this while unbound from schedules and calendars hit differently.
Because for decades many of us believed that work was the centerpiece of our purpose. That identity lived inside job titles, performance reviews, and the approval of structures that seldom paused to see our humanity.
But the truth I’m learning—step by step across continents—is this:
Purpose is not a location. It is not an office. It is not a role.
Purpose is a way of being.
As I walked the rocky coastline of Dubrovnik…
As I wandered through the quiet alleys of Vilnius scented with morning bread…
As I stood in the golden light of London’s South Bank or climbed the hills of Patmos…
I realized that distance clarifies what routine obscures.
Travel reveals the difference between living and merely enduring.
In my former life as a medical director, I saw all three categories Gallup describes:
the delighted few,
the steady middle,
and the exhausted many.
All trying—often against the tide—to find meaning in systems that drained more than they restored.
Now, moving freely between cities and seasons, I see more clearly:
• Work gave me service. Travel gives me perspective.
• Work gave me responsibility. Travel gives me breath.
• Work shaped my days. Travel is reshaping my life.
And somewhere on this journey, a quiet truth rose in my spirit—one I now claim as my own:
“Purpose is not earned by our labor; it is revealed by our living.”
And so, as I write from yet another corner of the world—today perhaps a café in Athens, tomorrow a quiet street in Paris, or a bustling market in Singapore—I’m learning that fulfillment was never confined to employment.
It was waiting for spaciousness.
For curiosity.
For rediscovery.
For this.
We don’t retire from purpose; we simply retire from whatever once dimmed it.
This travel series isn’t just about the places I’m seeing.
It is about the pieces of myself I am recovering along the way.
This journey is teaching me that the world is wide, life is fleeting, and meaning often waits just beyond the borders of familiarity—ready for those courageous enough to step into the unknown.
SimplyO
Simply O 