Zurich: Conferences as Creative Pilgrimage

Editor’s Note: This photo essay sits within the Cultivated library on creativity, attention, and the rituals of professional life. Conferences are often framed as work obligations; this piece reframes them as creative pilgrimages — spaces where thinking, making, and personal cultivation quietly happen between talks, cities, and rivers.

Zurich: Conferences as Creative Pilgrimage

At the beginning of June, I boarded a British Airways flight to Zurich.
I was heading to deliver a keynote.

Conferences are a strange hybrid of work and escape. They are professionally serious and personally liberating at the same time. A temporary removal from the routines of business. A chance to walk, notice, listen, and think.

They are as much about becoming as they are about delivering.

The Geography of Curiosity

I tend to choose conferences partly by geography.
Some countries invite revisits.
Others invite first encounters.

Zurich was new for me.
Immaculate. Ordered. Expensive. And quietly beautiful.

Travel widens the map of the mind. Even short trips redraw the mental geography we carry back into our work.

Sound, Sight, and the Practice of Noticing

This time, I travelled with microphones as well as cameras.
The Zoom H4n captured footsteps, bells, and the city’s quiet rhythms. Soundscapes are a form of noticing — attention made audible.

On Saturday morning, cathedral bells echoed across the city.
I sat by the river and recorded them, letting the sound wash over me.
Time, presence, attention.

Photography followed.
The Ricoh GR came out, pocket-sized and deliberate.
It encourages constraints, and constraints encourage seeing.

The River as a Thinking Tool

Zurich’s river is a gift.
I sat with a coffee, watching the water move past, and felt the talk loosen inside my mind.

The breakthrough came not in front of slides, but beside the river.

I’d followed my own process — simplify, structure, rehearse — but something felt off. Removing myself from the talk was the solution.

Nature, motion, and distance rearranged the thinking. The slide order changed. The talk clicked.

Water has a way of editing ideas.

Beer, Bells, and the Social Side of Thought

I have a habit of tasting local beers and sitting quietly in new places.
Observation is a creative act.

The conference itself went well — questions, conversations, kind words. I still get nervous. Nerves are evidence of care. They dissolve the moment the talk begins.

Afterwards, conversations flowed at a riverside bar. Conferences are partly about the talk, but mostly about the people. Ideas move between talks and tables, not just slides.

On the walk back, I spotted a Porsche — unnecessary detail, entirely necessary photograph.

Why Conferences Matter (Beyond Work)

Conferences are not just delivery milestones.
They are creative retreats disguised as professional obligations.

They give me:

• Time to walk
• Time to notice
• Time to listen
• Time to think
• Time to recalibrate

I miss my family when I travel. But the solitude, the cities, the sounds, and the small rituals replenish something essential. They make me better at the work and better inside it.

I don’t do many brand-new talks. Preparation is intense. But each talk is treated as a keynote — not because of status, but because of intention. Every talk is an opportunity to refine thinking, simplify messages, and grow.

If you do that consistently, keynotes eventually follow.
But more importantly, so does growth.

A Closing Thought

Travel, like creativity, is not the destination.
It is the deliberate act of leaving familiar ground.

Zurich reminded me that work and wandering are not opposites. Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is walk along a river, listen to bells, and drink a beer while ideas rearrange themselves.