Chapter 9: Return Velocity
The Cost of Acceleration
Castlerea
We spent about two weeks in Ireland. August 2014.
The reason we went was the Penn State vs UCF football game at Croke Park in Dublin. That was what got everyone aligned. Without that, I’m not sure we ever organize a full two-week family trip like that. But we got there well before the game.
We landed in Dublin and checked into our Airbnb home base, but otherwise immediately started moving. It wasn’t a tightly planned itinerary. More like a loop through the country, figuring things out as we went. My parents, my aunt and her daughter (and her kids), all of us together. Belfast, the Cliffs of Moher, long drives through small towns and countryside that felt both completely foreign and strangely familiar at the same time. It was the first time we had ever really done anything like that as a family, especially outside the United States.
At one point we visited Newgrange.
I don’t think I fully appreciated it at the time, but standing there, you are looking at something over five thousand years old. Older than the pyramids. Built by people who lived on that same land long before any of the identities or borders we think about today existed. It added a different dimension to the trip. Not just family history, but human history. Time at a scale that is hard to process coming from the American experience, where everything feels relatively recent.
And then eventually, everything pointed toward one place.
Castlerea, County Roscommon.
That was where my grandmother’s family, the Lavins, were from. A place we had heard about growing up but never really knew. Ireland had always existed in the background of our identity, but not in a lived, physical way. And the truth is, it wasn’t for my father either.
He was the first son, born late to parents already in their 40s, raised alongside two sisters with serious health challenges. By the time he came along, my grandmother was already in a different phase of life. She would go back to Ireland, often alone, but never brought him. There was always something there. Maybe not bitterness exactly, but something unresolved.
And now here we were.
When we arrived in Castlerea, it did not feel like visiting a place. It felt like arriving somewhere. The owner of the local hotel literally handed my father the keys to the building. We had a full family reunion at the local bar restaurant. Cousins, extended relatives, people we had never met who somehow knew exactly who we were. We saw the property where my grandmother grew up, still in family hands. Then there was a moment I will never forget. My father asked a man tending his lawn for directions. The man looked up and said, you are the Americans, I am your cousin. It landed instantly. There was no need for context or background.
That was when it became clear what we were standing inside of. Everyone there was connected in this direct and tangible way. The Lavin name had been in that town for generations, likely centuries. I remember learning that Lavin loosely translates to something like “prince” or “hand,” depending on the interpretation, and here we were in Castlerea, often translated as “king’s castle” or some variation. Whether or not any of that is perfectly precise does not really matter. What mattered was the feeling.
Coming from the American experience, that contrast was hard to ignore. We have mobility and reinvention. We move, change, start over. What we do not have is that kind of rootedness, where the land, the people, and your name exist as part of the same continuous thread stretching back hundreds or maybe even thousands of years. It planted something in me. A quiet but persistent feeling that there was more to explore, more to understand, more to experience beyond the narrow geography of the life I had been building. Not just travel. Something deeper. A sense that at some point I would need to come back to this idea.
The Return
But it was still just two weeks. Eventually you leave. You say goodbye, pack up, get on the plane, and it becomes a memory.
Monday morning. Ferry into Manhattan. Same skyline, same current pulling everyone forward, same routines waiting exactly where you left them. Bagel Friday reminders at the office. My desk still covered in CPG products. Boxes, cans, samples stacked everywhere. A chaotic system that made perfect sense to me and no one else. A meme taped to my monitor that said “Ha Ha Business,” quietly mocking the whole thing while I kept participating in it.
Life picked up exactly where it left off.
Fall Motion
That fall was a blur. Penn State bachelor party, MetLife tailgates, the Hudson Hop and Harvest Festival, a weekend at my cousin’s lake house with my brother and parents. Hiking, kayaking, being outside. Then back to the ferry, back to Broad Street, back to work.
In October, my now wife and I returned to the same apple orchard where I had proposed the year before. Same place, but now with our wedding just months away. Everything was moving toward something concrete.
The weekends kept stacking. Another Penn State trip at a friend’s cabin. Bow target practice in the woods, cheesesteaks, beer, football. Halloween in Midtown, wife and I as Jon Snow and Ygritte. A trip to Richmond to visit a college friend. Then back again.
We hosted Friendsgiving at our place in Hoboken.
December came quickly. Ugly Sweater Day at work. So exciting. Thanks, work family. Corporate rituals continuing as expected. Then December 13. One of the more absurd days looking back. Our friends and we rented a full-length party bus, like a Greyhound, and spent the entire day driving around Manhattan drinking. Santa suits, elf outfits, someone in a full body polar bear costume. We would pull up to random bars, take them over, then pile back onto a bus that somehow blocked traffic across the city. Completely ridiculous. Completely normal at the time.
Then Christmas in Vermont. Skiing, family, reset. New Year’s back in Hoboken, renting out half a bar near the PATH.
And just like that, it was 2015.
Three Months Out
Three months from our wedding and the tone shifted. There was more urgency and less room for drifting. I was optimistic, reading books like Abundance, thinking about growth and possibility.
In February I flew to Lake Tahoe for my bachelor party. Skiing all day, partying all night. One of those perfect stretches of time with close friends before everything changes.
Then right back home again. Back to the ferry, cutting through frozen chunks in the Hudson. That detail always stayed with me. The resistance of it.
We were picking out wedding suits and finalizing everything. Hoboken St. Patrick’s Day in early March brought the usual full day chaos.
There was also one of those surreal side stories that somehow becomes part of your life. The previous summer Karen found a diamond ring on the ground in Hoboken. We brought it to the police. It belonged to an assistant of Buddy Valastro.. the Cake Boss. As a thank you, he made our wedding cake for free.
The Aperture Opens Wider
Then the wedding. Radnor, Pennsylvania. All of our family and friends in one place. A clear dividing line in time. It was beautiful. One of the best days of our lives.
The next day… we were on a plane to Hawaii. A few days in Honolulu, then Maui.
It expanded everything. Paris cracked something open. Aruba showed what was possible from a lifestyle perspective. Ireland made it deeper and more personal. Hawaii made it obvious. The world was far bigger than anything we had grown up with, and it was accessible.
We were 26, 27 years old. It felt like everything was ahead of us.
Spring Acceleration
We came back and moved into a new apartment in Hoboken. Life filled in quickly. Family visits, weddings, Penn State trips, Mets games, long afternoons in Manhattan, Ikea runs. Building something more permanent.
Work accelerated too. More responsibility, more output, more momentum.
Then things shifted.
