The Ticket In
A walk in Miami 🌴
I’ve lived in a lot of cities as an adult.
DC was first. 2003. I was twenty-four, out of Texas for the first time, and I had no plan beyond not there anymore.
I found triathlon. More so the people around it, than the sport itself. Early morning trainings where nobody talked about their job for the most part. You suffered through the same interval of 10 x 100 freestyle at 5:30 AM, and sometimes the only thing you knew about the person next to you was that they showed up. That was enough.
I had work friends too. My job was social by design: happy hours, group texts, people who knew your weekend plans because you’d made them together on a Thursday. I didn’t think about why it worked. I didn’t have to.
I guess in your twenties community finds you. You just have to not say no.
Austin was a return. College friends still lived there. I had roots, or the memory of them.
But what surprised me was the dogs.
It was the first time I’d had dogs. Suddenly I had a neighborhood. People whose names I didn’t know but whose dogs I could spot from a block away. Morning walks that became standing conversations. A parallel social world built entirely on the fact that we all needed the same patch of grass at the same time.
Not deep. But consistent. And I didn’t notice what it gave me until I left.
Portland was endurance again.
That city breathes it. Active life is woven into the culture in a way I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Triathlon pulled me into a broader set of people who built their lives around hard physical things. Coffee shop regulars who also raced. Trail runners at the same Saturday loop. A quiet nod from someone who recognized you trying on shoes at the running store.
Portland didn’t require me to build anything (even though I did). I kept showing up to what I already loved. The people were there.
New York was different.
No endurance community waiting for me. I moved there to start a co-working business with Lisa, my ex-wife, and to start our family. Community came through the business, through Lisa’s world, and through the slow work of making friends as a grown man in a city of eight million.
The connections that mattered most came from a direction I wouldn’t have guessed. Men trying to be better. Men trying to grow (aka heal). Conversations that only happen when the veil drops and you say out loud that you don’t have it figured out. That scared me. It also kept me upright.
Then COVID hit and everything went virtual. You can maintain a relationship on a screen. It’s harder to build one.
Miami hasn’t provided ‘the’ community opportunity that seemed so easy in my previous stops.
I’ve been here long enough to know the neighborhoods. I have a gym. Routes I ride without thinking about direction. A routine that generally moves smoothly through a week.
But routine and community are different animals.
One keeps you moving. The other makes you feel like you’re somewhere that knows your name.
I leaned into my small work community at Wix. Found a few friends. Tried to start a men’s group; a semblance of a version of that had meant so much in New York. Never got beyond a handful of half interested guys.
For a while, I waited. For Miami to do what the other cities did. For a doorway to appear. For a group to form around me.
I thought community just happened to you.
I’ve started looking for more ways to make it happen for me. Recently, a friend dropped an idea: something called The Board Walks.
Before you show up, you bring a topic. A question you’ve been sitting with. Something you can’t stop turning over. A nagging question you want to drag into the light and see what other people do with it.
That’s your ticket. Not a fitness goal. Not a neighborhood. Not a mutual follow.
A thought.
You walk. You talk. You listen to someone else carry their question alongside yours. Somewhere in the motion and the exchange, something loosens.
I read about it and felt something I hadn’t felt in a while about this city. Possibility.
Robert Waldinger has been running the longest study on adult happiness ever conducted. Eighty-plus years of data out of Harvard. The finding he keeps returning to is almost too simple to publish:
It’s the quality of connection that shapes how we feel about our lives. Not the frequency.
Not how many people you know. The depth. Whether the person next to you is oriented toward something real. Whether the conversation actually goes somewhere.
Porges would call it co-regulation. Two nervous systems finding safety in each other’s presence. Your heart rate shifts. Your breathing slows. Your body decides, without your input, that it can stop scanning the room.
A walk with a question in your pocket does that. It changes how you listen.
I’m hosting The Board Walks in Miami starting in April.
I don’t know what it will become. I don’t know who shows up or what questions they carry. I suspect the first one will be awkward.
That used to make me hesitate.
But I’ve lived in enough cities to see the pattern. I showed up to a thing before I knew what it would become. The early swim. The walk with the dogs. The uncomfortable circle of men who didn’t really know each other yet.
I didn’t always notice the reaching. But it was always there.
Miami is the city that’s making me notice.
You bring the question. You show up. You see what grows.
