Landed in Milan early, jet-lagged, bag still in my hand. My friend, whom I hadn’t seen in years, met me with a hug, then insisted I needed a proper espresso.
Then he laid out the plan.
Not a plan for sightseeing. Not a plan for meetings. A plan for eating, two days of it, mapped out meal by meal, like it was the most natural itinerary in the world.
Back home, food fits around the calendar. Breakfast in a container or plastic bottle. A working lunch, if at all. A dinner squeezed in before the next call. Here, it was reversed. The meals weren’t breaks from the day. They were the day, and everything else fit around them.
I kept thinking about that on the flight home. We tell our teams to protect focus time, guard against distraction, and build in recovery. But we still treat the things that actually restore us, connection, food, and presence, as the things we’ll get to if there’s time left over.
What if we aren’t supposed to hope for time left over? What if the meal is the point?
