I always felt that being born in one country, a citizen of another, with roots established in yet another, automatically baptized me as a nomad, or at least as having nomadic tendencies. Those tendencies lay dormant, with the exception of some pre-digital foreign education, for most of my career until 2005 when I took an early-retirement package from counting corporate ceiling tiles.

Being independent, I had a dream of becoming an entrepreneur and making my own rules like where I worked from. So I began my post-career career, and with the exception of my first contract where the company didn’t have a “work-from-home policy”, I eventually found my free-spirited self, working digitally in foreign countries from my hotel room, coffee shops, airports, airplanes, basically anywhere but an office. Grant it, I had temporary offices along the way, like in Guatemala, El Salvador, Ireland, New York, Portugal, Paris, and Trinidad, but any inkling of an office without the word temporary in it made me itchy to get out.

For five years, I mostly worked from home with long periods of travel and loved every minute of any hybrid office. Then, for the next four years I didn’t even mind traveling to a government office a couple of times a week where I could balance with eating with family and doing chores on my breaks; but after that, when my contract started feeling permanent, I started feeling less nomadic and more part of the bricks and mortar. I wanted to work on contracts with, not for, organizations that embraced working remotely, that trusted me. As an immigrant, I had inherited my parents’ nomadic wings but also their work ethic so I knew how to get the job done anywhere.

Then I found a progressive government contract where as an entrepreneur, a consultant working mostly from home with lots of travel, I worked from wherever I could sit with Wi-Fi, even Africa. But along the road of smart phones I had replaced colleagues with devices and knew that couldn’t be healthy; besides, I started missing watercooler chats so I had subconsciously switched from coffee shops to community workspaces with other entrepreneurs. I had also shifted from sole proprietor to employer and proudly provided the same work environment that I had always wanted as an employee – the work-from-wherever-you-want-to model.

I was fully committed to being independent while spending time with my mom. But, I had hired an employee that had worked for IBM for 17 years; she longed for somewhere to hang her hat, so we found a space where we could work separately yet still be a team and a family.