When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
My junior year of college, I studied abroad with one of my best friends. It was one of the best experiences of my life, but also very difficult. Not because of Kayla or homesickness or missing my then-boyfriend—but because I didn't truly understand one of the core aspects of my identity: my introversion.
Read MoreI've been on ten flights in the past year—a mixture of international and continental, large airlines and budget airlines, small planes and airbuses. Around the fifth flight, I began to notice patterns in the people sitting around me, and so, like the good writer I am, I started to people watch. And I realized, though the specifics changed, many of the fellow travelers I saw on these flights could be cookie-cutter replicas of one another. These are the five types of flyers I noticed most frequently:
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