Traveling again.  Moving through time zones across the country.  I am in Baltimore at the historical Lord Baltimore hotel, which is currently under renovation. My room is one of the first to be renovated.  It is beautifully appointed, but they didn’t account for the single digit temperatures when they were dealing with the old single pane windows.  The bathroom is an ice box.

I am awake at 7:30 am but it really feels like 4:30, which it is where I usually sleep. Ian, my son, wakes up at this time every day for his job, which is directed by east coast time.  It is hard enough to be on EST when you are physically there, painfully challenging to live that way while on Pacific time. I am here in Baltimore to see Richard Cone, my friend who is a PhD Biophysicist at Johns Hopkins University.  He has been helping me to understand the science behind how lubricants work best. He has taught me more about what I am trying to do than anyone I know. We are having breakfast and then I hope to see his lab.

After that, I am driving in the rental Mercedes to the category review appointment at Rite Aid. I was supposed to fly in to Harrisburg, but the flight was cancelled, so instead, I was forced to take the cheapest car I could get, which happened to be a Mercedes, and drive there. I am getting accustomed to luxury. I notice how it makes me a bit edgy.  It occurred to me that the nicer your stuff, the more concerned you are about something happening.  You can’t relax as well, you have this fear of loss built into everything you do. So for me, that is the question, can you have luxury stuff and still move through life with the same ease? I can’t yet.

I don’t think about these meetings as sales appointments. I think about them as an opportunity to share a true story about love.  I don’t think I am kidding myself either.  Economic growth is not a driver that I have much intimacy with.  Fundamentally, I don’t know if I even fully understand the mechanisms of growth in the convoluted ways we measure it.  Economic growth has wreaked as much havoc as it has goodness.  For me, I am inspired by expanding the scope of love and health.

I know that the products that we are making are the truest approximation of optimal genital health you can find anywhere. I know it because that is what Richard Cone has studied for 30 years or more. And I know that the only change that will make a palpable difference in the world is for people to feel more love.

Yesterday, as I was moving from plane to plane, passing thousands of people in airports and on rental car shuttle buses, I looked at each one, wondering who they loved. Who loved them? This is the only question that follows each of us to bed at night and its response is what we feel when we wake up. What if all day long, the only thing that we committed to was healing the rifts that keep love away? What if all day long, the only production that consumed us was about love.  What would happen if money didn’t rule the day?

Maybe I am still dreaming- it is legitimately 4:30 AM my time.