Americana.
The Wonder Wheel.

The trouble with getting what you want is that nobody tells you what comes attached.

After several years between Switzerland and America, I was asked to move to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, as an international vice president. It was the sort of opportunity I had been chasing. Naturally, I said yes.

But I left behind a team of four or five people in Switzerland with whom I had built something extraordinary. We worked until eleven at night, invented the next idea, made a tiny organization look much bigger than it was. Retail, magazines, partnerships: we seemed to be everywhere because we worked our asses off. The business had become part of a larger group. The team survived without me. That didn't make leaving easy.

The American job took me around the world. Macau, Brazil, Europe, everywhere. Business class, airport lounges, membership cards, hotel rooms, and a remarkable amount of cold coffee. From the outside it was glamorous. From the inside, it involved a lot of waiting to board.

I lived near Washington Crossing, close to New Hope, Pennsylvania. The Delaware, the trees, the history: it was beautiful. Then my car broke down and I spent a week discovering how little a global vice president could accomplish without a car in rural America. I could manage business on several continents. Buying groceries was another matter.

I moved to Manhattan. I still loved the city, but it couldn't solve everything. The financial crisis came. For the first time I had to let people go. There are decisions in business that remain numbers on paper until you have to look someone in the eye.

I had friends everywhere and acquaintances in every time zone. I crossed the Atlantic to see my daughter Julia, and stayed close to her mother and my family. Yet I had also burned bridges, through work, absence and complicated relationships. I knew people almost everywhere. I was not sure where I belonged.

On February 8, 2010, my birthday, I went to Brighton Beach. It was a beautiful, bitterly cold morning. I stood looking at the Atlantic, with the old Wonder Wheel nearby, a machine from another era.

There were millions of people in New York. I had never felt so alone.

The city that had first made me feel I belonged anywhere had taught me something else: belonging and arriving are not the same thing.

The Flying Dutchman needed an anchor. I had no idea where to find one.