I flew to California on Monday for work. I started my day at 5 AM in Florida, flew seven hours, then spent five more hours walking through a warehouse. I had been going for fifteen hours straight which left me sapped out of energy by the early California evening. So I excused myself from group dinner invitations, checked into the hotel and went to bed.

I awoke Tuesday morning at 2:30 AM California time which is 5:30 AM in Florida, my usual waking up time. Sleeping-in has a paradoxical effect on me — it makes me groggy for the rest of the day. On days when I sleep-in, I spend nursing a low-grade headache. With the clock showing 2:30 AM I knew sleeping-in would be a disaster for the busy day ahead of me. So I decided to commit. I got out of bed, fiddled with the little coffee machine, and sat down with my book.

The book was Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I read around 80 pages between 3 AM and 6 AM. In Caste, the author makes a strong case to identify the role that long standing caste systems play in American and Indian societies, and the role it played in Nazi Germany. I was naturally hooked to the topic as I had grown up in India under the Caste system. It was a heavy book and I was grateful that the quietness of the early hour opened the space for the chaotic humanity the book exposed.

I was in bed early that evening and I woke up early on Wednesday again. I repeated this early morning reading schedule for the entire duration of my visit. Those three quiet hours of reading every day were too precious to give up! I never left the Florida time-zone.

Thursday, somewhere 30,000 feet over Tallahassee, Florida in a Boeing 757, I finished the 400 page book.

I am not a speed reader by any measure. I am prone to day-dream while reading. So I was surprised to complete a large book with a heavy topic in half a week! I had picked up several hours of reading during the long flights, and additionally 3 hours of daily reading during this visit. This reminded me of Casey Neistat who said air travel is the closest thing to time travel.

James L. Gibson says in his book Ecological Approach to Visual Perception that an environment provides us good and bad options for movement. These he called Affordances.

Business travel three timezones away provided the affordances to read uninterrupted (I have deputized reading to be a form of intellectual movement). My Florida home does not provide three uninterrupted hours to read on weekdays. I read in the morning for ninety minutes before life pulls me away. Feed the cats, make coffee, make the bed, get dressed, pour cereal, turn on the computer and start the workday.

There is nothing I want more than the routine of a harmonious life at home in Florida. Reading in the morning, albeit shorter, is not the same without one of our cats sleeping on my lap. There are obvious drawbacks to traveling all the time. I will tolerate with staying in hotel rooms, eating hotel food and drinking hotel coffee in short and temporary bursts. What I notice is the disdain of business travel has shifted for the better. The affordances of transit — cramped airplanes, noisy airports and hurried schedules — used to be a bother but have now morphed into gateways to a temporary world where uninterrupted reading can happen.

Business travel is starting to look like a portal to uninterrupted reading time. On a trip I don’t have to make the bed, do dishes, feed the cats and take out the trash. I go to work during the day, and when I am not working, I can read!

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I write this newsletter once a week but I post short articles daily on my blog. Here is what I posted last week: