The Cardigan

I bought a bright blue and rainbow striped cardigan online recently. I like it. Some of my friends like it. I have had strangers on the street stop me to say they like it.

My wife hates it. She says I am reaching an age where cardigans are appropriate but that tight fitting t-shirts are not. I have yet to fully understand her position. I keep wearing it anyway.

It got me thinking about travel.

Specifically, about the version of yourself you become when you’re somewhere new. At home there are expectations — how you dress, how you behave, what suits a man of a certain age in a certain suburb. The cardigan has become a minor domestic battleground.

But abroad? Nobody knows you. Nobody has an opinion about what you should be wearing. The same cardigan that generates domestic friction would be entirely unremarkable on a street in Tokyo or Lisbon or Buenos Aires.

Travel gives you permission to be a slightly freer version of yourself. Not a different person — just one less constrained by the habits, expectations or cardigans of home.

Some of my best travel memories involve trying something I wouldn’t normally try. A dish I couldn’t identify. A route with no map. A cardigan-level risk.

That’s not irresponsibility. That’s the point.

I’m keeping the cardigan.

Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder

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