Distance Has a Way of Clarifying What Matters

There is something peculiar that happens when you leave Eureka Springs for a while. It never announces itself in dramatic fashion. There are no trumpets. No grand epiphany waiting for you at the front porch. Instead, it arrives quietly, almost politely, somewhere between another interstate exit, another business trip and another meeting that could have just as easily been an email. It begins as a whisper that asks a question you didn't even realize had been lingering beneath the surface all along.

"What is it, exactly, that I miss?"

At first, the answers seem obvious. I miss the winding roads. I miss the rolling hillsides catching the first light of morning. I miss coffee on a porch overlooking the holler that somehow manages to make silence feel alive. I miss saying hello to the artists and musicians that you've come to know by name and whose faces have become part of the rhythm of your life. I miss watching visitors wander downtown with that unmistakable expression of pleasant confusion, whimsy and awe, as they experience a town that refuses to behave like the rest of America.

But distance has a curious habit of stripping away the obvious until only the essential remains.

The older I become, the more I realize that "absence is one of life's greatest editors." It removes distractions with ruthless efficiency. Things that once felt urgent suddenly become irrelevant. Problems that consumed entire afternoons lose their grip somewhere around the state line. Opinions that seemed terribly important on Tuesday become almost laughable by Thursday. Distance has a way of exposing what was noise and what was beautiful music.

And personally, aside from my close-knit Eureka Family, I truly feel as though that may be one of the greatest gifts Eureka Springs has ever given me.

It is a strange thing to say about a town that is, in many ways, delightfully inconvenient. Our streets curve where they should probably go straight. (Note: It is my duty as a gay resident to tell you that we have no straight streets.) Parking remains an Olympic sport during festival weekends. GPS occasionally gives up halfway through a journey and simply wishes you good luck. There are staircases that seem to lead nowhere until suddenly they lead exactly where you needed to be. Sidewalk conversations often last longer than the errands that inspired them.

Here, efficiency has never been the point.

For years, I believed that my love for Eureka Springs was because of its natural beauty. And to be fair, beauty certainly has something to do with it. You would have to possess a remarkably hardened heart not to pause at the overlook above downtown just as evening settles over the hills. The Victorian rooftops begin to glow beneath the fading sky while church steeples rise from the trees as though they have been patiently waiting for another century to pass. Fog gathers in the valleys with almost theatrical precision, reminding everyone fortunate enough to witness it that Mother Nature has always been Eureka's Most Famous Artist.

Yet beauty alone cannot explain why people return.

America is full of beautiful places. We can all make a list. Towering mountains. Endless beaches. Desert sunsets that look as though someone spilled watercolor paint across the horizon. Spectacular places exist in every direction.

What makes Eureka different has very little to do with scenery and it's taken leaving and returning over and over again for me to understand this.

These days, my work regularly carries me miles away. I spend time in boardrooms where conversations revolve around strategy, budgets, organizational structures, compliance, labor negotiations, turnover metrics, succession planning, and every imaginable challenge that accompanies leading human resources. There is satisfaction in meaningful work. I genuinely enjoy solving difficult problems and helping my organization become healthier is work worth doing. I remain grateful for every opportunity to contribute.

But there are moments, usually late in the evening after another eleven-hour day, when I find myself staring out the window and realizing something unexpected.

"Cities are becoming harder to remember."

Their skylines blur together. Their restaurants begin serving interchangeable experiences wrapped in different logos. Airports become familiar only because they are all beginning to resemble one another. Beige hotel rooms have mastered the remarkable ability to make every city feel exactly the same. If you've stayed in enough of them, you eventually stop remembering where you are and start remembering only what floor your room is on.

Then someone asks where home is; and without hesitation, I answer, "Eureka Springs in Northwest Arkansas."

It is remarkable how saying those words changes a conversation.

Often, I get, "Oh, I'm sorry," which is utterly offensive and sometimes the person just smiles knowingly because they've visited before. Other times someone will tilt their head and ask, "Arkansas? Really?" I usually grin because I know what comes next. I explain that it is tucked into the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas. I mention the winding streets, the historic downtown, the absence of traffic lights, and the fact that the town somehow feels both frozen in time and completely alive.

What I rarely tell them is what I actually mean.

Home isn't simply where I receive my mail.

Home is the place that continues shaping me even when I am nowhere near it.

...and it was THAT realization that has surprised me the most!

For much of my professional life, movement was the measure of success. New opportunities meant new cities. Bigger responsibilities required bigger relocations. Careers often reward mobility, encouraging us to chase the next title, the next challenge, the next destination that promises to be better than the last. There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition. In many ways, it has opened doors I never imagined possible.

Yet ambition can quietly convince us that the next place will finally provide what the current place cannot.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn't.

When Jeff and I made the decision years ago to leave Dallas, Texas and build a life in Eureka Springs, plenty of people questioned us. They weren't trying to be cruel. From the outside, it simply didn't make sense. We were leaving one of America's fastest-growing metropolitan areas for a tiny mountain town in the Ozarks that many people could barely locate on a map.

Friends wondered whether we would become bored. Others assumed it was some sort of temporary experiment or even our mid-life crisis.

I understood their questions because I am certain that in another chapter of my life, I, too, would have asked them myself once.

What neither of us understood then was that we weren't moving toward smaller lives.

We were moving toward deeper ones.

There is an enormous difference.

Big cities often teach us how to accelerate. Small towns, at their best, teach us how to notice.

They remind us that life isn't measured solely by production, but also by perception. They encourage conversations that are unhurried, relationships that develop organically, and moments that would almost certainly disappear if we were always looking ahead to whatever comes next.

Distance has taught me that those moments were never interruptions.

They were the whole point.

Perhaps that explains why returning to Eureka never feels like arriving somewhere new. It feels more like remembering who I was before the world became so noisy. The mountains have a remarkable way of placing life's priorities back into their proper proportions. They have witnessed generations come and go without ever feeling the need to rush. These beautiful Ozarks are patient teachers.

Every return home to my beloved Eureka Springs becomes less about geography or distance and more about perspective.

"It is only when we have been away long enough that we begin to recognize what has quietly been shaping us all along."❤️