I Know This Lobby
Four years ago I sat in this hotel fairly often.
It was the tail end of COVID — that strange, tentative season when the world was starting to remember how to be open again, when companies were cautiously bringing people back and nobody was quite sure what normal was going to look like on the other side of everything we had just been through.
I had moved to this small New Jersey city and lived in an aparthotel for four months. Four months of waking up in a place that was not quite home, doing work that felt enormous and consequential and full of forward motion. We were onboarding and training hundreds of associates. Executing a site strategy. Building something from the ground up while the rest of the world was still finding its footing.
It felt like being exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was built to do, at a moment that mattered.
Now I am back. Sitting in the same space, doing work that is in many ways similar. And it feels different. Not bad — just different. Like a photograph of a place you remember that is slightly off from what you hold in your mind. The bones are the same. The energy is not.
What Changed and What Didn’t
I know this area now. I know where things are, how to navigate it, which way to turn when I walk out the door. Back then everything was new — the city, the hotel, the work, the particular kind of exhaustion and exhilaration that comes with building something in real time while the world is reawakening around you.
That newness had its own energy. The kind that comes from not knowing yet. From figuring things out as you go. From the specific aliveness of a challenge that is still unresolved.
Now I walk in and someone says — oh, you seem to know where you’re going. How is that?
And the honest answer is simply: I just do. I have been here before. I know this particular hallway, this particular lobby, these particular turns. The knowing is real. It is also, in some way I am still trying to name, the thing that has replaced the feeling.
The Question I Keep Turning Over
I have been sitting with something since I arrived and I do not have a clean answer for it yet. I am not sure I am supposed to.
Do we become jaded to things the way scars scab over and stop feeling the way they once did? Are we less moved after we have reached an accomplishment — not because it meant less, but because we have already metabolized it and moved on? Or is it something more fundamental than that — something about the nature of chasing, about how the pursuit always carries a particular kind of electricity that the arrival does not quite replicate?
I do not think the answer is cynicism. I do not feel cynical about this work or this place or this return. I think it might be something quieter and more honest than that. The first time you do something significant you are also becoming someone. You are proving something to yourself that has not yet been proven. The stakes feel different because the outcome is genuinely unknown and the version of you standing in the middle of it is still being formed by the experience in real time.
The second time you arrive somewhere you already know you can do it. Which is an enormous gift. And also, perhaps, a different kind of feeling than the one that came with not yet knowing.
The Faces That Brought It Back
What I did not expect was how much it would mean to see some of the familiar faces.
People from that season four years ago. People who were there when the work was new and the world was reawakening and we were all figuring it out together in that particular high-stakes way that bonds people in ways that ordinary work does not.
Seeing them did something. Brought a warmth back into the space that the lobby alone could not provide. Reminded me that the energy I remembered was not just about the place or the work — it was about the people. About what gets built between human beings when they are doing something hard and meaningful together and showing up for each other in the middle of it.
I am hoping to find some of that again here. To build it, or create it, or simply be open to it arriving the way good things tend to arrive — not when you are looking directly at them, but when you are present enough to notice.
What This Kind of Return Teaches You
I did not come back here expecting it to feel the same. I think part of me hoped it might, a little. The way you sometimes revisit a place from your past hoping to feel something you felt there once.
What I found instead was something more useful than nostalgia. A kind of clarity that only comes from having lived something, left it, and returned. The ability to see both versions at once — who I was the first time I walked these halls and who I am now walking them again. What I knew then, what I know now, and what the distance between those two things has built in me.
The first time I was here I was building something and becoming someone simultaneously. The two things were inseparable. Now the becoming is less visible — it is happening in quieter ways, in layers that do not announce themselves the way a new challenge in a new city once did.
But it is still happening. I am still in the middle of it.
That is the thing about returning to a place you have been before. It does not just show you how much the place has changed. It shows you how much you have. And sometimes the most clarifying thing is standing somewhere familiar enough to see the distance you have actually traveled.
I know where I am going. I have been here before.
And somehow, that is both the gift and the beginning of the next thing.
Have you ever returned to a place that held a significant chapter of your life and felt the difference between then and now? I would love to hear what that was like for you in the comments.