For the first time in years, I have a day off in a hotel in a country not my own. For the first time in years, I am sick in a foreign country, and hunt familiar cures. My colleagues bring me coconuts and local concoctions, which I appreciate. It’s been a while since that happened, too.

These are not the adventures we seek, though they do seem to be some of the ones I write about. Outside my window in Chennai military jets do barrel rolls and launch flares, celebrating Ghandi’s birthday and preparing for the upcoming air show. The spirals and tight maneuvers are as impressive as ever, a reminder of what humans can build, and what the edge of possible looks like. “They’re basically space” my partner used to say, watching the Blue Angels in California, and I agree. Would that we used them less for war. Still, I am grateful for this view, once gain granted something I have never expected to see. Cities of accident, I called them long ago, and while they are not particularly accidents, this time, they are definitely not places I had on any kind of list.

Below them people play in the pool while birds wheel above, the best part of this view. Chennai feels dense with animals. Small chipmunks scamper across the pool deck when people are absent, and the birds perch on the edge constantly. Pigeons float up to a ledge just beneath my window, and a hawk lingers in the wind. Further off I can see stadiums, towers, and new construction. I can see a half-built and abandoned apartment building and smaller concrete houses that, with their unfinished walls, show marks of aging expected from this humid climate.

After a day of rest in Singapore last weekend, where the surroundings were more commercial and the hotel room far smaller, I am feeling better. Sometimes the breaks we need are enforced rather than planned. The gift of these days, then, is both in my lack of other plans due to the focused nature of work travel, and the weakness of illness that saps my body of it’s normal activity requirements. For the first time since my last illness I take more than one nap a day and feel no regrets for missing something. For the first time in ages I do not mind what the world is doing, instead content to hold my own body and mind together.

And yet I talk to people. The world is changing, they tell me. “My plane from Delhi to Singapore was full of VC’s heading home,” says a colleague, “All the money in one place all the opportunity in the other.” We live in these small capsules of learning, of shared experience, aggregating our conversations and readings into a world view. “Delhi is a great food city now,” another colleague says. From Chennai I can not say, but there is a sense of an entire section of the world becoming visible. This is my second time in India, both for this job. Neither has given me a deep view, nor covered the kinds of things I would on my own initiative. That is work travel. It breaks us from our patterns, puts us into situations we would never otherwise approach, and shows us people in their normal context, working hard. In most contexts we are all working hard.

I’m grateful for the window into Indian office life, into Singaporean and Indonesian factories. I’m grateful for the time on ferries between countries not my own, on domestic flights in other nations, and on windowsills like this one, looking out at the world.

Even if the cost is high.