A genuinely beautiful American life, and why I still leave it

People assume that someone who keeps disappearing to Eastern Europe must be running from something. The opposite is true. I have a life in Atlanta, a house I’m fond of, and the Chattahoochee a short drive away, that I am, frankly, glad to come home to.

A Different Perspective

The house that gets compared to a Miami drug lord's mansion

That isn’t my line. It’s what a friend said the first time he visited, and I’ve never found a more accurate description, so I’ve stopped arguing. It’s a large, slightly absurd, very comfortable house in Alpharetta, and I’ll show you around it on the channel, because pretending it doesn’t exist would be its own kind of performance.

I built it after thirty-five years of real work, American Express, Equifax, IHG, and others. Enterprise technology, at actual scale, for actual clients. I’m not going to recite a résumé at you. It’s enough to say the life is real, and so is the work that paid for it. The reason I’ll show you any of it is simple. When a man tells you to slow down, you’re entitled to know whether he ever sped up in the first place.

Start here: The Philosophy

The habit nobody at home quite understands

Most of the people I know in Atlanta don’t fully understand the Romania habit. They find it endearing. There is a recurring scene where I announce I’m going back to a city on the Danube for a couple of weeks, and I get the look you’d give a relative with a harmless, slightly eccentric hobby. It is not the wrong look. That moment, accomplished people watching one of their own drift happily eastward every year, is, I’ve come to think, one of the more honest things about me.

What I found there

Why I still leave

It took me a very long time to understand that I admire a slow, deliberate life more than I do a conventionally beautiful one. I did the usual things: worked hard, made good choices and money, and acquired the trappings of a good life. It wasn’t enough.

I was standing next to a swollen Danube on a busy riverfront in Galați when I realized this is what I wanted to feel. The slow river, the rolling hills on the opposite bank, the people strolling, talking, feeling life – this is what my life was missing.

That is when I decided I had to keep coming back. It’s been over two decades and it still feels like my soul reconnects to life when I go back.

No rush forever

THE RIVER IS IN NO HURRY.
NEITHER ARE WE.