Fault lines, fairy tales and the energy that changes the game

What gives a dream momentum?

Once upon a time, I went to Los Angeles for the World Cup and a little vitamin D.

That was the practical version of the story.

The less practical version is that I needed energy.

Energy is the invisible commodity behind almost everything. We spend it, protect it, conserve it and occasionally hand far too much of it to people and situations that offer very little in return.

We talk about time management, productivity and personal boundaries, but underneath much of it is the same question:

What is draining us, and what brings us back to life?

In the last edition of this journal, Choosing to Go, I wrote from the slightly blue side of Georgia that Los Angeles and Vietnam were next.

I thought I was simply naming two destinations.

In retrospect, I was describing a transfer of energy. Choosing to go was only the beginning. Los Angeles would become the place that helped fuel what came next.

For a city so frequently preoccupied with what powers it, Los Angeles has a remarkable ability to recharge me.

Perhaps it is the light. The water. The weather that can make even an ordinary day feel slightly cinematic. Perhaps it is the iconic hotels, the creative history or the sense that certain rooms still carry the residue of conversations, stories and ambitions that came before.

Los Angeles does not promise that every dream will come true.

It simply makes dreaming feel credible again.

And sometimes that is enough.

When Energy Changes the Game

I had returned for the World Cup, specifically the USA – Türkiye match.

I wanted to experience it rather than merely watch it. To stand inside the stadium, hear the crowd shift and feel thousands of people respond to the same opening at the same time.

The match did not need to become the defining game of the tournament to do its job.

Being there mattered.

I went for the match. The energy around it became the story.

People are sometimes surprised that I am interested in soccer – or football, before the Europeans correct me.

But I understand what sits beneath it: the years of preparation for a moment that may last only seconds, the pressure of performing in public, and the discipline required to make a mistake and recover before the next opportunity disappears.

I understand the difference between entering a game hoping not to lose and entering it believing you might change the result.

The expected outcome is not necessarily the inevitable one.

That is why the underdogs stay with us. A country appearing on the world stage with little history behind it. A team everyone expects to disappear early. Cape Verde. Norway. The United States.

Players competing against deeper squads, bigger systems and more familiar names, yet refusing to behave as though the outcome has already been decided.

Heart does not guarantee victory.

But it changes the way you play.

It makes you press forward rather than retreat. Attack rather than spend the entire match defending. Lose possession, recover and counterattack. Look for the next opening rather than surrendering to the last missed chance.

Throughout the tournament, I kept returning to the momentum meter on the screen.

Not because I expected it to predict the winner, but because of what it tried to make visible before the scoreboard changed:

Pressure building. Confidence rising. Energy shifting.

The subtle moment when one side begins creating possibility before the result reflects it.

It made me wonder what a personal momentum meter might reveal.

Would it register the periods when we are technically still moving but using most of our energy simply to stay upright?

Would it capture the person who restores our belief, the place that replenishes something in us or the conversation that changes our posture before it changes anything measurable?

Would it show the moment we stop defending and begin looking for the opening again?

The ground shifts quietly before anyone measures it.

That is true on a fault line, and it is true in a life.

The scoreboard records the result. The stories are why we keep watching.

A World Cup eventually crowns one winner, and familiar football powers often find their way back into the final rounds.

But the tournament is never remembered only for the champion.

We remember the team nobody expected to advance. The missed penalty. The comeback. The player who got back up. The country that made millions of people believe, even briefly, that the improbable was still possible.

There is a story behind every score.

And often, there is momentum long before there is proof.

That may be why the World Cup felt like the right backdrop for this trip. Politics, commercial machinery and national rivalry aside, it remains an extraordinary gathering of people, countries, stories and belief.

The game is shared. The emotion is immediate. The outcome remains uncertain.

One subscriber wrote to me after reading an early draft. What stayed with her was not the score. It was the love and the fairy tales.

The momentum meter could measure pressure. It could not measure tenderness.

Perhaps that is what remains long after the final whistle.

Possibility belongs to everyone until it does not.

The People Who Move the Meter

Los Angeles began shifting my own energy almost immediately.

This return felt less like revisiting a former home and more like being received by it.

People opened their homes. Rearranged their schedules. Crossed a city famous for its traffic simply to sit across a table from me.

In Los Angeles, showing up is rarely casual.

It is often a logistical operation.

There were meals, conversations and people willing to make room without requiring anything in exchange.

Sometimes you do not know how much you need that until you are already receiving it.

There are people who remind you of who you are, what you have done and what you may still be capable of building.

They do not manufacture confidence for you.

They return you to the evidence.

The risks taken. The work completed. The difficult chapters survived.

They can see the wider arc when you are standing far too close to the current page. And sometimes they say the thing you did not know you needed to hear.

Vida Kitchen Summer Experience
Some people cross the traffic, open the door and quietly return energy to the room.

Living outside the United States for more than a decade, I have sometimes felt the need to qualify where I come from before allowing myself to celebrate it.

Politics aside. Division aside. Climate aside.

The contradictions are real.

This time, Los Angeles felt a little like a hug.

It felt less like a place I had once lived and more like a place that remembered me.

Sometimes the shift is not about becoming someone new.

It is about reconnecting with a version of yourself that has been harder to access elsewhere.

Fault Lines & Fairy Tales

Then came the fairy tale.

I decided that one night at the Beverly Hills Hotel would be part of the experience.

I could not justify staying there for the entire trip, nor did I need to.

Sometimes a sampling is enough.

There is something about briefly stepping into an iconic place. The history. The people who have passed through. The deals that may have been made, careers shaped, stories told, reputations rescued or scandals quietly absorbed into the walls.

You take it in.

Not because you are pretending to be someone else. And not because you are attempting to “fake it until you make it.”

There is a difference between pretending you belong and remembering that you can belong anywhere.

I have always been drawn to worlds that make imagination feel possible.

Perhaps that is why working at Disney once felt so natural. It was built on storytelling, spectacle and the idea that ordinary life could be suspended long enough for people to believe in something more magical.

Twenty years later, I found myself sitting at the Polo Lounge with my former Disney boss, someone who remains in my life and still understands parts of my story without requiring the full explanation.

A former Disney employee and her former Disney boss, inside another kind of magic kingdom, discussing life and possibility over comfort food.

Because that is the wonderfully ridiculous reality of the Polo Lounge.

It is a room associated with Hollywood history, powerful people and iconic deals, yet everyone is eating grilled cheese and chicken parmigiana.

And then dessert arrives.

Hollywood mythology, comfort food and a very glamorous interpretation of Funfetti.

The Funfetti amused me more than it probably should have.

Here we were, in this storied room, being served what was essentially a childhood birthday cake dressed for Beverly Hills.

Aspirational and familiar. Sophisticated and childlike. Grand and comforting.

Very Los Angeles.

And, perhaps, very me.

I tend to live in fairy tales.

Not because I confuse them with reality, but because imagination gives me something reality often drains away:

Hope.

A sense of possibility.

The willingness to dream bigger than the evidence currently allows.

One night at the Beverly Hills Hotel cannot solve your problems or guarantee that your next idea will work. It does not remove the traffic, obligations or endless number of people and situations capable of drawing down your internal battery.

But it can create distance from them.

It can remind you that life is also allowed to be beautiful, playful and slightly improbable. That escaping the ordinary is not necessarily about running away from reality.

Sometimes it is about returning to it with a different level of energy.

The bill was measurable.

The return was not.

How do you calculate the value of renewed hope? A clearer sense of purpose? A conversation that reconnects you with your own history? The creative energy that begins producing ideas before you have even unpacked?

That was the ROI.

Not the room.

What it unlocked.

Maybe It Was a Sign

In the middle of dinner, KLM cancelled my flight home.

Maybe I should have taken it as a sign.

For one more night, the fairy tale apparently refused to end.

There was something almost comical about receiving a flight cancellation while sitting inside one of the world’s most famous hotels.

Reality had found me, but it was being forced to wait beside the Funfetti.

Eventually, I came home.

And that was when the shift became visible.

No Jet Lag. Jet Set.

I had expected the long journey back to leave me depleted.

Instead, I returned switched on.

The World Cup became a World Cup of Travel.

I began pulling from years of photographs and experiences, matching Brazil with Norway, Colombia with Switzerland, Rioja with Malbec.

The tournament became a journey through places, landscapes, food, wine and travel decisions. When the archive did not give me exactly what I needed, even my Duolingo avatars found their way onto the pitch.

It was playful. Experimental. Occasionally absurd.

And it kept generating more.

One idea pinged into another.

The matches brought me back through countries, stories and moments I had almost forgotten. They became a way to introduce people to destinations they might not know and to look at familiar places through a different lens.

No jet lag. Jet set. One experience became the energy for another.

Then came The Hats We Wear, the first visible step in repositioning According to Morrow and bringing more rigor and intention to the writing behind it.

The work is still happening quietly.

The subscriber numbers, reach and opportunities may not yet tell the whole story. But I can see the ideas connecting. I can feel the writing becoming clearer. I can see the intersection of people, places and purpose becoming more deliberate.

That is momentum too.

Not every shift arrives with an announcement.

Sometimes it looks like reopening an archive. Trying a new format. Publishing something imperfect. Learning from what does not work. Adjusting and attacking again.

The trip did not merely make me feel better.

It changed what I felt able and willing to create.

That may be the most important distinction.

Personal energy is not something we preserve simply so we can remain permanently rested.

We recharge so we can put that energy into motion.

To make the call. Write the essay. Take the risk. Try the idea. Admit when something does not work and approach it differently.

To move forward rather than spend all our strength defending the current position.

Optimism is not the belief that everything will work out exactly as planned.

It is the decision that possibility remains worth pursuing.

Between the stadium, the tables people made room for me at and one improbable night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles returned me to possibility.

The World Cup reminded me that the expected outcome is not always inevitable.

The people reminded me that sometimes we need someone else to reflect back the evidence.

And the fairy tale reminded me to dream.

Not every dream comes true simply because we believe in it. Belief does not remove the work. It does not protect us from disappointment, wrong turns or cancelled flights.

But it supplies the energy to keep trying.

Choosing to Go was about movement before certainty.

Los Angeles reminded me that movement can change the energy we carry.

Vietnam will reveal what happens when that energy meets the next challenge.

I do not know exactly where every idea will lead.

That is not unusual.

Most stories begin before anyone knows the ending.

Perhaps that is the real purpose of the fairy tale.

You do not remain inside it forever. You borrow its light, imagination and sense of possibility. Then you return to the real world and make something with it.

Los Angeles did not give me a happily ever after.

It gave me the energy to keep writing what comes next.

The ground may still be shifting.

So am I.

And this time, that feels like momentum.

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