This is the third year I’ve come with my current company to the Silverado Resort in Napa for our annual go-to-market kickoff. Each year, it’s been a lot of socializing, learning, overstimulation, and I’ve left drained and exhausted. I can’t remember once when I actually was on my own and did much thinking or meditation on anything. You’d think that if I were in such a peaceful and beautiful place that I would have made time for myself, but year after year, I’ve forgotten.

This year, I have a comfortable one-bedroom suite that is about a ten-minute walk to the mansion and ballroom area where all the events happen. While walking back from a team dinner and some socializing at the bar, I stopped to look up at the night sky and realized that the moon was extremely brilliant and clear, plus the entire sky was like a huge canopy of twinkling white lights. It was a clear night, and all the stars were vivid, bright, and extremely visible. I could even see Orion’s Belt clearly — I do not know constellations at all, but this is the only one I know (it’s pretty simple to keep track of since it’s just three perfectly aligned stars).

It’s crazy to think how sucked into our day to days we get that we rarely stop to look up at the stars. In New York, we aren’t this privileged to have an unpolluted night sky; being able to see a single star is virtually impossible there. But in Napa and even San Francisco, the stars are so clear and vivid unless it’s a cloudy night. I was probably looking up for only about five minutes, but it felt really good nonetheless to finally take this view in and really appreciate it for the first time in these trips.