“What started as a business trip ended as a conversation with my future.”
Some trips you take for the agenda. Others end up rewriting it. My recent week in Houston was supposed to be the first kind, and somewhere between a meeting room, a barbecue counter, and a quiet drive past a few houses I had no business falling in love with, it became the second.
My VP invited me down to spend time at our Houston office, with two clear goals: get a closer look at a different location, and dig into the airsea side of our operations in a way you simply cannot do from a distance. What I did not expect was how much the trip would make me consider some important things about my life.
The Work: Building Something That Lasts
Walking into the Houston office, I came in with a learner’s posture. Airsea is its own world — its own rhythms, pressures, and expertise — and the only honest way to understand it is to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the people who live in it every day. That is exactly what we did.
The collaboration was immediate and rich. Over the course of the week, we did not just trade information; we laid the foundation for a couple of projects I genuinely believe will matter for Livingston long after the trip is a memory. The first is a Buffer Pool concept — a way to build resilience and predictability into how we manage demand and capacity, so we are not constantly reacting to the latest spike. Second is something we have been tasked with for a while: systematizing what we are calling a “ONE Livingston” release method. The idea is simple, but the execution is where it lives or dies. If we can get our release operations speaking the same language across locations, we move from a collection of strong teams to a single, coordinated organization. That is the win.
There is something about being in the room — the same room — that accelerates trust. I left every working session sharper than I walked in, and I hope the people I worked with would say the same.
The City: Brisket, Burgers, and a Little Bit of Soul
Work was the reason I came, but Houston had its own ideas about what I should take home. I made it a point to step outside the office and actually meet the city, and the city showed up.
First stop on the unofficial tour: Pinkerton’s Barbecue. If you know, you know. The kind of place where the line is part of the experience and the brisket does not need to be explained, only respected. Texas earns its reputation one slow-smoked hour at a time, and I was happy to pay attention.
Then there was Trill Burgers — the spot founded by Houston’s own Bun B. It is one thing to eat a great burger; it is another to eat one in a place that is so unmistakably of its city. Trill is more than a menu. It is a cultural artifact, and biting into it told me something about Houston that no welcome to Houston as could: this is a city that knows who it is.
The Detour: Three Hours to My Brother
Midway through the week, I made the three-hour drive out toward Fort Hood to see my brother Jeff and his wife, Nat. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in when you spend time with family you do not get to see often enough. Conversations stretch. Meals run long. Nothing is performative. You are just a brother again, not a title or a calendar.
That visit shifted something in me. I had flown in thinking about the office. Drove back thinking about proximity — what it costs, what it gives, and what I might be quietly tired of going without.
Friends, the Nightlife, and a Tour That Was Not on the Agenda
I closed the week with a very good friend of mine, O’Neil. We did the things you should do in a city like Houston — caught some of the nightlife, swung at a few targets at Top Golf, talked the kind of talk that only old friends can. But the most unexpectedly meaningful part of the week was something far less flashy: we toured homes.
It started casual. “Let’s just look.” It did not stay casual. Driving through neighborhoods, walking through floor plans, picturing morning routines and weekend cookouts — that is when a trip stops being a trip and starts becoming a question.
What I’m Sitting With Now
I came home productive. The work was real, the relationships are stronger, and the projects we started have legs. But I would be lying if I said that was the headline.
The headline is this: for the first time, I am genuinely sitting with the idea of Houston as home. Not as a fantasy. As a possibility. There is alignment there that is hard to ignore — the operational opportunity, the chance to be present for the goals my VP has put in front of me, and a city that has clearly built a place for me to plug into. Layer on the family piece — being close to my brother, and the very real conversation my parents and I have had over the years about them eventually relocating — and the picture sharpens fast.
None of this is a decision. It is a conversation. With my work. My family. With my faith, which has been the loudest voice in every season of meaningful change I have walked through. I have learned to pay attention when a door does not just open, but stays open long enough for me to walk back through it more than once.
This trip did that. It opened a door. And given the right opportunity and the right alignment with work, I think this might be the right time in my life to seriously consider walking through it.
Houston, we may need to talk.
