I spent most of my life looking for a place that felt like home.
Not a house. Not a city. Just somewhere that felt like — mine. A place where something in me stopped bracing.
I never found it.
Vermont came close. I lived there for a while. Beautiful place, good people, the kind of landscape that makes you want to stay. I still felt like an outsider. Not unwelcome — just not quite right. Like I was visiting a life that belonged to someone else.
I tried telling myself I was nomadic. That some people just don't need roots. That wanderlust was enough.
But that wasn't quite right either. Because I didn't want to keep moving. I wanted to arrive somewhere and feel settled. I just couldn't find where that was.
Then a few years ago I stumbled on a transatlantic crossing deal on Costco Travel.
I'm not kidding. Costco.
I booked it mostly on impulse — Southampton to New York City, seven days at sea on the Queen Mary 2. I didn't have a theory about it. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I just looked at the price, thought why not, and clicked.
Somewhere out in the middle of the Atlantic — no land behind me, no land ahead, nothing in any direction but water — something settled.
Not relaxation. Not vacation-brain. Something older and quieter than that.
For the first time in fifty-plus years, I felt home.
Which made no sense. There's no there out there. No address. No community. No place to actually live. Just water and grey sky and the ship's wake dissolving behind me.
And yet.
I didn't understand it. So I got curious.
I came across something called astrocartography — the idea that based on where and when you were born, different places on earth carry different energy for you. Your birth chart mapped onto geography. Planetary lines running through cities, coastlines, open ocean.
I was fascinated. Not because I needed it to be true. Because I needed an explanation for something that already was.
So I looked into it seriously.
What I found: my Moon line — the place in astrocartography where your emotional life surfaces, where something underneath gets to breathe — runs directly through the Atlantic. Not near it. Through it.
The feeling came first. The framework came after. And when the map showed up, it described something I'd already lived.
I'm still working out how much of astrocartography I actually believe. But that's almost beside the point. What I know is that some places ask something different of you. Some places quiet the noise in a way other places don't. And for me, whatever the reason — planetary, psychological, some combination of both — that place has no zip code. It's water in every direction.
Here's why I'm telling you this.
If you're somewhere in the middle of a transition — and I mean a real one, not a job change, but one of those shifts where something fundamental about who you are is ending — you might already know where you feel most like yourself.
You might have known for a while.
You just haven't trusted it yet. Because it doesn't make sense on paper. Because there's no plan that points there. Because it's the last place you expected.
The Costco deal wasn't a vacation. It turned out to be the most clarifying seven days I'd had in years. Not because of anything I planned or prepared. Because the crossing itself created something — a container, a between-space, a remove from ordinary life that let something in me finally surface.
That's what I've come to understand about transitions. The passage isn't the obstacle between where you are and where you're going. The passage is the work. And some of us need to get genuinely, physically far from our ordinary lives before we can hear what's actually true.
That's what Slow Crossings is built around. Not itineraries. Not bucket lists. The idea that for people navigating a real ending — of a career, an identity, a way of being in the world — intentional travel can be a container for something that ordinary life doesn't have room for.
If something in this landed, there's more at seancarneycoaching.com. Or just start with the question I keep returning to out here on the water:
Where do you feel most like yourself?
Not where you're supposed to be. Not where the plan says.
Where does something in you actually settle?
Fifty-plus years.
And it was water in every direction.
Go figure.